Why personas will transform your marketing strategy

24 Apr 2019

This blog will explore the reasons why persona documents are such a great tool for revamping your strategy, and we’ll also provide some key tips to help ensure your success…

The power of a personal approach
As new content is created every day, buyers are becomingly increasingly selective about who they choose to engage with. To stand out from the crowd, your sales and marketing teams need to identify and solve specific pain points for each decision-maker, and then create content that appeals to these pain points. This requires a targeted and coordinated approach.

A prospect who reads your blog and thinks, ‘this company can really help me’, will pull out of a purchase if your sales team gives them a generic pitch that fails to address any of their pain points. At the same time, a one-size-fits-all approach to content and inbound marketing won’t be engaging enough to convert leads.

Creating buyer personas is a fantastic way to ensure you’re maximising the potential of your business. Whilst the process is at first resource intensive, the juice is certainly worth the squeeze - using personas can drive a 111% increase in email open rate, and a 171% increase in marketing generated revenue [ii].

A unified team
64.7% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals have updated their personas within the last 6 months [iii].
Persona documents work best when everyone in the sales and marketing team fully engages with them. To make this happen, give the persona a truly personal feel by adding a picture and a name. Your team will then be able to visualise and relate to the prospect, as opposed to simply seeing lists of data.

Over time, persona documents will become outdated if the information isn’t regularly refreshed. Prevent this from happening by revisiting them every six months. There is no need to start again from scratch. Just cross-reference the existing document with new trends in the industry and the latest market activity – most importantly, make sure the industry and job role are all still accurate. Once you’re happy with your personas, circulate them to everyone on your team so they can immerse themselves in the documents, ensuring they are able to locate and access them for quick and easy reference.

Use personas to achieve real results in 2019
With persona documents, you can align your sales and marketing teams with a single vision of who you want to target, and how you can do this most effectively. The results? Deeper, longer-lasting relationships with prospects and customers, more B2B leads, and ultimately, increased ROI from your marketing activity. In the long term, these documents will also improve your multichannel strategy by focusing your marketing messages and refining the approach of your sales teams.

To learn what you really need to know about persona documents, download our tip sheet.