4 Reasons to Consider Revising Your Buyer Personas in 2015
Even if you’re new to the world of inbound marketing, you’re likely familiar with the term “buyer persona”; it’s that aggregate of information about your most ideal buyers that helps you produce content and engagement that appeals to them. When you have a buyer persona in place, your marketing efforts are much more nuanced, relevant and effective. Unfortunately, like most things, you buyer personas can become irrelevant to your marketing efforts as both your customers and your brand evolve over time.
As 2015 quickly approaches, we got to thinking about certain reasons you may want to revise your company buyer personas. Based on everything we know about marketing, social media and the changing landscape of branding efforts, making revisions to your buyer personas might be one of the smartest moves you can make in the coming year.
Here are a 4 reasons to consider revising your buyer personas in 2015.
1. Content Will Be More Important Than Ever
If you thought producing great content was important to your marketing efforts in years past, you’ll likely be surprised by content’s monumental status in 2015.
In 2015, customer education will be king, says Venchito Tampon, Content Marketer and Link Building Specialist with Digital Phillipines: “Educating the target audience will now become the top selling point of many brands from whatever industry they are in.”
Because the gap between the online world and the real world is swiftly narrowing, offering the most relevant content to your potential customers will be the difference between winning their attention and losing them to a competitor, perhaps one who can provide them with more relevant content and branding efforts. Don’t underestimate the fierceness of competition in the modern customer’s plane of vision; buyer personas will help you gain an angle by providing you with a more complete picture of your ideal buyer.
With content occupying such an important spot in your marketing efforts, it’s critical to have buyer personas in place that reflect the most recent, most accurate online data for the activities of your ideal customer. With this information on hand, you can create content that is most likely to appeal to them and get them more deeply involved with your brand.
2. The Importance of Personalization Will Continue to Increase
Like content, the importance of personalization in your branding efforts will skyrocket in the coming year, making it vital that your company adapts. Making your content more personalized and ensuring that the audience it reaches not only finds it relevant but will feel compelled to click on it are necessary tasks if you want to stay visible in your marketing efforts.
Personalization of email marketing campaigns, content and social media engagement efforts can pay great dividends for your company in terms of connecting with ideal customers; personalized emails can improve click-through rates by up to 14%.
Revising your buyer personas will ensure that you have the information you need to make your marketing efforts as personalized as possible, leading to better results for your content, your emails and your social engagement.
3. The Customer Has Changed
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the average online customer’s buying experience has changed dramatically in the past few years. Similarly, the buyer personas that you rely on to guide your content and online engagement efforts should also change.
The way that customers acquire information about products or services is very different than it used to be; customers are doing their own independent research on companies and brands long before they’re ready to make a purchase. Standing out to your ideal customers amid the vast sea of options at their fingertips means doing the research, compiling the data and knowing the specifics on what can motivate that ideal customer to make a purchase. Revising your buyer personas will help present this important information in a compact and succinct format.
4. Data Is More Important Than Ever
The importance of accurate buyer personas relate closely to the rise of data and quantifiable measurements of customer activity. As SEO, sales and marketing become more intertwined, it’s increasingly important to pay attention to what the reported data tells you about you customers, their buying habits, their reaction to your website and the influence of your branding efforts.
Using data in the efforts to revise your buyer personas can yield a variety of useful information, such as how long it takes your customers to research before eventually buying, which content drives the most interaction and gets the most shares, and how much time it takes a customer to begin showing legitimate loyalty to your brand.
As the usefulness of data increases, so will the ease of creating more accurate buyer personas.
There are plenty of other reasons to consider updating your buyer personas for 2015; what are some of yours?