This article will discuss why your business should be using buyer personas in its digital content marketing strategy. Read on to find out four key ways buyer personas can super-charge your content marketing.
What are buyer personas?
A Buyer Persona is a fictional representation of a company’s ideal customer based on market research and customer data.
Buyer personas will allow your business to;
“Think differently, think customer.”
Contemporary businesses must intensively ‘customerise’ their digital marketing content by building content using consumer valued attributes. In a modern business landscape, developing unique digital content for individual customers is essential to the success of your digital content marketing strategy.
Buyer personas provide a tool for this intensive ‘customerisation’ of your company’s digital marketing strategy.
Why are buyer personas important to your business?
1. Buyer personas Facilitate the creation of effective digital content marketing.
To create effective content marketing, marketers must understand why customers choose a product in the first place. Marketers must understand why customers moved from the status-quo to seek the company’s solution. The content your business develops should be targeted towards a particular persona and contain the information that they would value. If your customers do not find your content beneficial, they will not consume it.
Personas will enhance your marketing team’s understanding of consumers’ emotional and cognitive drivers and, therefore, facilitate effective content marketing.
2. Buyer personas engage customers at the initial evaluation phase of the consumer decision journey.
Personas allow your business to create targeted and tailored marketing content that immediately engages customers at the initial evaluation phase of the consumer decision journey. Engaging customers at the initial evaluation phase is critical. Today, consumer decision journeys have become highly complex due to the increased volume of content available to consumers and the rise of digital communications. Marketers must catch customers attention at the initial evaluation phase amidst the “too much choice effect”, which makes the decision journey challenging.
3. Buyer personas enhance brand loyalty.
The use of personas in the design and marketing process can enhance communication across functional departments and help businesses form a cohesive brand identity. Brand identity is essential in establishing brand loyalty.
Personas can be used as a tool to gain insight into the self-definitional needs of customers. In the process of establishing consumer-brand relationships, consumers rely on companies to fulfil their self-definitional needs.
Consumers are loyal to brands that fulfil at least one of their self-definitional needs. Loyal customers with solid and committed relationships with the brand often become ‘brand champions’ and enthusiastic promoters. Therefore, the use of personas generates brand engagement and loyalty, which yields cognitive, behavioural and emotional interaction with the brand through using data.
4. Buyer personas enable user-centric Product design.
Buyer personas allow for the inclusion of under-represented perspectives to enhance the design process. Personas are the basis for extracting essential insights. Therefore, Personas effectively eliminate miscommunications as they provide a clear and cohesive description of the target audience to everyone involved in the development process. Personas maintain the design team’s focus on critical aspects of the target customer as the essential information is clearly displayed. Buyer personas, therefore, enable consumer-centric design.
Designers and marketers often use themselves as a proxy for the expected reception of a product or service. Personas can predict a more accurate outcome as marketers design products with real target customers behind their ideas.
To Conclude
Buyer Personas are an effective tool that your company can use to super-charge their digital content marketing strategy. Buyer personas facilitate effective digital content marketing, engage customers with brands in their decision journey, enhance brand loyalty and enable user-centric product design.
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Sources
Salminen, J., Jansen, B., An, J., Kwak, H. and Jung, S., 2018. Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics. Persona Studies, 4(2), p.47.
Revella, A., (2015). Buyer Personas. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Miaskiewicz, T. and Kozar, K., 2011. Personas and user-centered design: How can personas benefit product design processes?. Design Studies, 32(5), pp.417-430.
An, J., Kwak, H., Jung, S. & Salminen, J., 2018. Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas from Online Social Media Data. ACM Transactions on the Web, 12(4), pp. 1-26.
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