How to Use Buyer Personas

The creation of your buyer personas is only the first step in your marketing strategy. Bringing your buyer personas to life is an ongoing endeavor. 

After creating them, regularly reference your personas to ensure you become intimately familiar with these fictional yet realistic representations of your customers. Be sure to:

• Apply them constantly across your marketing initiatives to keep your personas at the heart of your strategy. 
• Use them as your trusty guides for crafting tailored content, offers, and messaging. 
• Keep your personas front and center as you plan and execute campaigns. 

This effort to continuously leverage your well-developed personas will help forge a deep connection with what truly resonates for your audiences.

Don't let those personas just collect digital dust— they need to become an integral part of your ongoing marketing strategy.

In this post, we'll explore ways to truly activate your buyer personas to drive more impact across your marketing efforts. We'll cover:

• Bringing your personas to life beyond just creating them
• Regularly reviewing personas to inform campaign planning
• Using personas to guide content creation and messaging
• Tailoring offers and promotions based on persona needs
• Creating persona-specific landing pages and emails
• Activating personas across channels like social media
• Measuring marketing performance by persona

If you don’t have buyer personas yet, find our step-by-step guide to creating them for your business.

Determine exactly how personas will be used to guide your strategy, product and service development, and appropriate messaging.

In the development of your personas, you determined which products and services they are most likely to purchase and why. Use that information and what you know about your personas to identify further pain points. What future products and services can address your persona’s other pain points? What initiatives could enhance their experience with a current product or service?

Buyer personas can open up the door for communication with your audience. To create and maintain your digital marketing ecosystem, you must consider the interests of your personas. 

It’s important to note that each product, service, or piece of content should only target one buyer persona. If it doesn’t, you are taking a shot in the dark and wasting a potential touchpoint. 

Like we discussed earlier, you must shift your tone to appeal to your audience in that demographic. The mode in which you deliver your message is also crucial. Use your social media audience analysis, your website examination, and your customer segmentation to determine where specific audiences are finding your content.

Email marketing may seem like its time has come and gone, but it continues to be one of the most powerful marketing tools. Email marketing is strongest when you send consumers the emails they actually want to receive.

If you have a B2C company, say you want to let your customers know about a sale on kids’ clothing on your website. Use your personas to identify which audiences you should target. You might not target your 18 and under audience or your 60 and older audience. Instead, focus on parents in their mid-twenties to mid-forties with young children. Consider the type of language that audience would want to hear in this email. What are their pain points? What is going to draw them in?

Over 59.9% of the global population is on social media. Having a solid social media presence is powerful and can spread your message to a larger audience.

In your persona development, you determined which platforms each persona uses most. Use that information to target specific audiences on different channels.

When it comes to social media, younger audiences are more likely to interact with your business on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. On the other hand, people ages 25 to 34 are more likely to interact with you on Facebook. 

When crafting social media posts, have one persona in mind. Who is this post supposed to appeal to?

Having an operable, accurate, and attractive website will help you convert prospective customers. Consider the persona who would visit each web page and where you want them to go next. 

Housing a blog on your website is a great way to boost your search engine optimization (SEO),  attract audiences, and confirm your knowledge to prospective customers. Picture a persona which each blog post you write. Speaking to a specific persona and their pain points is a strong method to increase your website traffic. Make the most out of these blogs by sharing them through email and on social media to create awareness.

Determine which personas would visit your website on a mobile device versus a computer or laptop. 92.3% of people use their mobile devices to access the internet. Your website should always be mobile optimized to make it accessible for all users. 

It’s crucial to create each piece of marketing content with a purpose. Specific target audiences allow you to know who you’re speaking to and what they care about, so you can create content that appeals to your customers.

Once you have a solid marketing strategy and know how you want to use your personas, connect with various teams to solidify their understanding. Train all employees who engage customers on how to appropriately apply buyer persona insights within their roles.

As your business grows and changes, so will your audience. Over time, continuously gather new data to add nuance to your buyer personas and evolve them as market conditions change. 

You will find as you gather information that your audience no longer fits your personas, whether it be the platforms they use, the products and services they love, or rapidly changing trends. Staying in-the-know about your audience is essential to connect with them positively.

Ready to put your buyer personas to the test? Get in touch with our team to see how we can turn your personas into customers.