You’ve heard this before, but it’s worth reiterating: buyer personas are essential to your inbound marketing efforts in Toronto and everywhere else. Let’s put it this way:

You know those silhouette headshots of people used as blank avatar profile photos if you haven’t uploaded an actual picture yet? Imagine pitching a sale to one of those. You can’t see their face, you don’t know what they want or how you can help them – you don’t even know if they’re interested in whatever it is you’re marketing.

That’s what you’re doing when you do inbound marketing without buyer personas.

Strong Foundations

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your target market – you can have a few of these characters set up, representing the most common demographics of who you’re after in terms of clients. An entire buyer persona has a photo, demographic data, business objectives, common objections, and other very important information such as how your offering can help them.

Buyer personas are basically everything you want to know about your target market collected into various characters, which then form the foundations of your marketing. Without them, you’re shooting in dark or pitching to a blank avatar.

How Do You Create a Persona?

Well, you don’t make them up from thin air. A lot of marketing experts provide tons of useful resources on the subject, but to give you a backgrounder, the intricate details crafted into personas require research, surveys, and eventually, experience dealing with leads and clients.

If you’re only starting your local inbound marketing campaigns, research and surveys would do.

Consider the following questions when crafting effective buyer personas for your inbound marketing:

• What are my target market’s common demographics? How many would skew male or female? What are their ages?
• How can I help them? What goals does my product or service help them achieve?
• What can stop them from purchasing my product or service? Common objections? Points of friction? How can I pitch more effectively to them?

Your buyer personas need to address these main concerns and more.

Reinforcing Your Marketing’s Foundations

As mentioned earlier, buyer personas form the foundations of your inbound marketing, and these are among the first few concerns you need to iron out when you create campaigns. That doesn’t mean, however, that the personas you create when you began will remain the same forever.

You need to constantly and consistently update your buyer personas depending on the information you gain during your inbound marketing campaigns. Times change, and regardless of your research and how many surveys you did when you crafted your first buyer personas, trends, practices, and other factors will inevitably change aspects of your personas.

You need to adjust accordingly or risk your inbound marketing campaigns becoming obsolete. Remember, inbound marketing is about target marketing, and you should always refine how clear your crosshairs are aiming at your bull’s eye.

So, What Now?

So you’ve done your due diligence, pouring over research, conducting surveys, interviewing potential clients, and crafting awesome buyer personas for your inbound marketing. How do you use them?

Let’s take a look at a concrete example. Imagine you’re pondering a blog post and you already know your topic. Now you need to align your blog post to your inbound marketing – consider your target persona:

• What objections am I addressing?
• What business goals of my personas should I talk about in the blog post?
• Should I be talking to milennials? Baby boomers? What does my persona say about age range?

Now, do you get it? Buyer personnas encompass every aspect of inbound marketing too.