No one conducts and plans marketing activities for the sake of marketing. Marketing activities serve to ensure that predefined corporate goals are achieved. The most common and well-known goals are to acquire new customers or retain existing ones, improve image, increase sales, increase reach and awareness, and reduce costs. Achieving these goals is virtually impossible today if you don't have a realistic view of your counterpart - in the case of companies: Customers and potential customers. 

How are you supposed to win new customers if you don't know who your customer is? How can you improve the image of your company to external people if you don't know what is important to them and what they like? How do you sell more if you don't know who is interested in your company's products or services? 

The answer: if you don't know your target group, you either won't be able to answer these questions - and thus achieve marketing goals - at all, or only with great difficulty. If you don't know your target group and the buyer personas within that target group, you're missing out on sales.

Why are Personas this important? 

Why do buyer personas and target groups play such an important role in achieving corporate or marketing goals? Ultimately, marketing aims to arouse an interest in people that leads to an action. Such an action should be in line with the company's goals, meaning a company sets as a goal that a desired action is, for example, a purchase or on social media, an interaction such as a like. 

If you don't know who you're designing, planning and implementing marketing and advertising efforts for, you're leaving conversions and therefore revenue lying around. That may sound drastic, but let's put it this way: Whether a story in content marketing is relevant, for example, depends on who it was made or written for. Because what is relevant for Stefanie may not be relevant for Robert. And in order to know what is relevant for Stefanie, you have to know Stefanie. And if my company appeals to Robert on a permanent basis, however, I may just not achieve my goals.

Buyer personas are the foundation of any marketing communication. By identifying and creating personas within the target audience, users can be better understood and content better customized. The experience on a website can also be improved by knowing who should experience and learn about something. With buyer personas, you create a target picture and thus facts against which marketing measures can be aligned. Personas have ideas, expectations, wishes and needs - if you know these, you can orient yourself as a company to them - when creating content in content marketing, for product and also for service decisions.

A fictitious example to illustrate this: Katharina is 38, a mother of two and has just moved to a new city. She is looking for a new electricity provider and doesn't have much time, but green electricity would be important to her and she likes to get information online. She relies on recommendations from acquaintances and friends, but prefers to contact companies by phone. Her budget is limited and she wants to find the best price-performance ratio. 

So, now we know Katharina a bit - what can you learn as a company? 

For Katharina, all information should be presented in such a way that she can quickly see which tariff offers which services and benefits for her. But this information should also provide the option for her to call if she has further questions. Getting information online means that for Katharina, this info should be quickly and easily available on website and/or social media. A reference to references or "what others are saying" can also make it easier for Katharina to make her decision. If this fictitious electricity provider has the option of offering a "family rate" that may be cheaper or offer even more for the price, this could certainly be a good starting point for Katharina. 

However, if the fictitious electricity provider has no information about what is important to Katharina, he may not be able to offer her a personal exchange or a family tariff. 

So knowing one's counterpart a little more than knowing what price range he or she will accept opens up more possibilities for design. Of course, this example is not based on any data and it is made up in the context of this post, but the message should be clear.

What needs to be done differently?

It is essential for companies to define their own target group. Only if you know who you're doing something for can you really pick them up. Hubspot, for example, offers a good article with instructions on target group analysis.

The target group is the starting point for defining and describing buyer personas. These are even more detailed than target groups and thus content and offers can be tailored even better. We have an article on this in our blog - you can find it here. 

With personas, it's important to design them flexibly and also expand them step by step. Because needs and attitudes can change or expand over time, and to ensure that the content is still relevant tomorrow, you have to continuously check for whom relevance means what exactly. You can then align content in content marketing with these personas and/or even think about how you can vary or adapt products or services.

An information base is needed 

It is fundamentally important that you do not just make up buyer personas. A solid information and data basis is crucial so that you get a real view of reality and thus also a realistic view of the customer. The "simplest" method for collecting information is, for example, surveys, which you can also conduct as a company via your own social media channel. The scope of the responses probably does not make the results valid from a scientific point of view, but they are always important. Getting a response from people who already interact with the company may already have experience with the products or services and can therefore provide helpful insights. 

When collecting information and data, it is important for companies to answer the question for themselves of what they want to do with the information they have gained - an information or data strategy is what is meant by this. After all, simply collecting data without knowing what to do with it does not necessarily fall into the "efficient" category.

Summary 

Tell me who you are and I'll tell you what you want - if you have an accurate picture of your customers and potential customers, you have the chance to personalize your content and even products and services. But with buyer personas, companies can not only sell more, they can also improve and expand their own standing in competition with the competition. Because sometimes the slightly better service or the price-performance ratio in combination with transparency is decisive for a purchase decision. Those who offer this, tailored to the recipient, can gain a clear advantage.

For this article we found some inspiration we want to share - everyone, who wants to learn more about Conversions and Buyer Personas can take a look at the article of Konversionskraft or get some more information in the articles of SharpSpring, MarketingAutomation or Uptain.

More articles from us can be found in our blog - right here.