Thanks to 2020, most marketing teams have learned it’s time to change their tactics. Even companies that weren’t big about utilizing digital tools before the pandemic are now embracing them as the best means of finding new business.
While there’s certainly a wide range of software analytics available to your team for gleaning potential buyers on your website, it’s also important for you to understand the kind of content you should be producing in order to generate more inbound leads. This is where the use of buyer personas can be particularly effective: these fictive representations of consumer segments of your market will help you make your products and services more relatable.
The question is, how do you create them? Turns out, it’s a combination of data analytics and good, old-fashioned inductive reasoning.
First, get a sense of who’s already engaging with your material. Google Analytics is one example of how to learn who’s clicking on specific webpages and how long they’re visiting. You can couple that data with social media reporting about who’s liking and commenting on your posts, blogs, photos, and videos.
This next part requires you to be a little more creative. The generic information you’ve collected—like a person’s gender, marital status, age range, and personal interests—can be used to make educated hypotheses about the values that seem important to your audience. From there, you’ll want to think about what problems they could face that would threaten those values. Where these two overlap is the focus of your content. For example, you could infer that someone who loves to travel would therefore understand the value of time management, so anything that saves them time can be seen as a beneficial product or service that you’ll want to tell them about.
Will you always be correct in your assumptions? Of course not. People change their minds, have different interests, and don’t face the same problems all at once. But these personas can get you closer to understanding the needs of your potential customers and how to get more of them to take notice of your brand—and, ultimately, prompt more interactions, conversations, and new business with you.
