When it comes to most things in life, I’ll take quality over quantity any day. That includes business prospects.
For most businesses today, the website should be a pillar in their marketing strategy and aprimary sales channel. In the day and age of inbound marketing – creating quality content that pulls people toward your company and product – heavy web traffic that includes a high number of unique visitors to your website might look good, but if those visits aren’t from quality leads – people who might actually buy what you’re selling – it’s nothing more than traffic for traffic’s sake.
To get quality leads, you have to know exactly who your ideal client is. By developing buyer
personas for ideal clients, you can better attract quality leads.
Here’s how HubSpot, the world’s leading inbound marketing and sales platform company, defines buyer personas: Buyer personas are holistic ideals of what your customers are really like, inside and out. Personas encompass the goals, challenges, pain points, common objections to products and services, as well as personal and demographic information shared among all members of that particular customer type. Your personas are the people around whom your whole business is built.
Buyer personas are a crucial component of successful inbound marketing and providing valuable information that buyers will find useful. Truly understanding buyers – everything from their demographic information (e.g., Are they married? Into what age range do they generally fit? Are they ambitious fast trackers?) to the pain points your product or service can directly address – takes more than intuition. It takes research.
Although your experience with a particular industry should largely inform your personas, your assumptions about what decision makers in particular industries need from you don’t always jibe with what they actually need. In my experience, companies can also become enamored with their innovation and not see the forest for the trees.
You have to understand the market. It takes experience. It may even take some interviews with those decision makers you are trying to reach. It sounds like marketing 101, but many organizations plow ahead with good, innovative products and services that are potential game changers. Unfortunately, the market to which they’re selling them either isn’t ready for them or doesn’t see it the same way. So, if you’re speaking in a language that no one understands or is listening to, your efforts are in vain.
So what do you need to know about them? Here are a few key pieces of information.
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Job level/title, seniority
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Demographics
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What does a day in their life look like?
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Pain points – with what can you help them?
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What do they value?
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Where do they get their information?
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What experience are they looking for with your services?
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What are their most common objections to your services?
In our experience, there is also more than one “category” of buyer persona per industry. For example, although the CEO is the ultimate decision maker – and a persona you should develop and target – other executives in an organization who aren’t in the C-suite may well have decision-making power, too, so you need to be developing personas for and targeting them as well.
Once you’ve developed your personas, your marketing strategy – from content creation to media relations – should be built around this information. It’s like you’ve gotten into the prospect’s head. Now, it’s time to leverage that inside knowledge.
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Jason Snyder is a senior vice president for WordWrite Communications.
