Understanding your audience is an essential part of your marketing strategy. If you don’t take the time to understand your audience, you could be missing valuable opportunities to:
- Create relevant content
- Know the best way to target them
- Understand their pain points
So, how do you get a good understanding of your audience?
The answer lies in creating audience personas. In this blog, we aim to help you understand the value of creating personas to support your overall marketing strategy.
Quick facts:
Using personas when considering design, made websites 2 to 5 times more effective for targeted users.
HubSpot 47% of companies who exceeded sales and revenue goals consistently maintain their personas.
Cintell Why audience personas are needed to improve your marketing strategy:
1. They act as a framework for targeting your marketing material
Think about it, creating content without a good understanding of your audience, or the content that will resonate with them isn’t likely to work well. Creating an audience persona will help you to get a clearer understanding of these areas and be more successful in creating content that is engaging for your followers.
The content you create should aim to influence conversations with your customers. This way, your audience has a better chance of connecting with you and obtaining the information they need to make a purchase.
In marketing, you might hear the buzzword ‘pain point’ thrown around. What this refers to is the issues your customers face in their daily work/ personal life. For example, they might be short on time. We recommend considering these factors when creating your audience persona. This will allow you to position your company as a potential solution to the problems identified and ultimately facilitate the connection between you and your customers.
2. Audience personas can help to facilitate the buying process
Creating audience personas can help facilitate the buying process. Yes, you heard that right.
If you consider the sales funnel, you can use your audience persona to understand where best to target your audience and make them aware of your business. This way, you can ease your customer into beginning the journey with your brand, which will hopefully result in an enquiry.
Audience personas aren’t just for content creation. They should be shared throughout the business. Think about it, you’ve just attracted the customer using the information you’ve learnt from the audience persona, will your sales/ customer service team be more successful in converting this customer with or without the same information? They can be beneficial in helping your sales team build rapport with potential customers, which should facilitate the engagement and purchase stage of their journey.
3. They are essential for successful communications that will support long-term sustainable growth
Once you’ve created your audience personas, they are by no means a finished product. The idea is that as your knowledge of your customer evolves, you will update your persona. This will make it more effective.
You can use your personas to develop any PR and communications strategies. It’s important that you test any content ideas against these personas to understand whether it will resonate with them. You can show that you understand your customers goals and pain points this way, which will highlight your customer value proposition.
Fact: 82% of companies using personas have improved their value proposition
Naturally, showing this understanding should influence your audience to show you as a useful, trusted resource which will support your long-term brand building.
4. They will save you time and money
Audience personas help you to gain a deep enough understanding of your customers so that you can confidently produce content that you know will resonate with them. Therefore, this will help you to save time and money as you shouldn’t need to spend as much time experimenting with what works for your audience.
This is also true for redefining campaigns and product development. This can often be a daunting task for businesses. But, with the help of audience personas you can be more confident that you are moving in the right direction.
Recap…
To recap, audience personas are crucial for any business, to better understand your audience. Hopefully this blog has provided you with some insight into the value this exercise can bring.
