Inbound marketing is a lot like an omelette. It’s made up of several ingredients that have to be combined in just the right way to get the desired results. You cannot make an omelette by simply throwing cheese, mushrooms, and bacon bits into a pan with some eggs, and you’re not going to create a cohesive inbound campaign by combining its various elements in a haphazard manner. One only has to take a look at the ingredients in each to understand why proper preparation is so important.
Unfortunately, many marketers still get this wrong. They know that their marketing activities need to be aligned with their buyer personas, but they lack a philosophy that puts their personas at the centre of all they do. Without a commitment to persona alignment, it’s impossible to ensure the kind of message relevancy that results in higher engagement rates and improved ROI.
To ensure that your inbound efforts are guided by your personas, there are three crucial steps you have to get right:
But, before you begin work on these, consider the important difference between these two incompatible approaches: traditional marketing, which is based on the premise that you have to create a demand for a product before you can sell it; and inbound marketing, which guides a buyer to a purchase decision by appealing to their interests and concerns. Unlike the traditional approach, inbound marketing is not product centered; it’s buyer centered. And your approach to personas and their buyer journeys should be buyer-centred too.
The awareness stage of the buyer journey does not refer to a buyer’s awareness of your product but to their awareness of a problem. When your customers go to Google for the solutions to their challenges, they are not looking for your product. They are looking for answers. Your task is to figure out what the questions are.
Here, it helps to think of your personas as real people – that is real human beings with dreams, desires, concerns and challenges. They are wandering around out there in a maelstrom of marketing messages with their hands over their ears, and if you want to cut through the clutter your messages will have to speak directly to their concerns.
Before you can develop your buyer personas, you need to understand your customers, and I mean really understand them. In addition to their professional roles, skills, and channel preference, you need to know their attitudes, beliefs, and motivations. To gain such an in-depth understanding of your audience, you can use social media, website forms and customer interviews.
Interviews are particularly useful when it comes to determining a customer’s goals, behaviour, and motivation. Just bear in mind that people are not always aware of the reasons for their behaviour. Learn to ask “why?” to get at what it is that really drives them. And when you use social media like LinkedIn for research keep these questions in mind. Good strategy relies as much on a knowledge of motivation as it does on the identification of the behaviour itself.
Once you have a fully fleshed out persona and buyer journey, you can start to develop a strategy that will deliver the right messages, at the right times, through the right channels. To do this make sure that content, social, and email strategies take into account the different stages of a buyer journey.
The goal of your overall messaging strategy should be to anticipate what a persona will want to know next, and then put that information where they can easily find it. This give consumers a digital thread that they can follow all the way to a purchase decision.
To learn more about how personas can be used to deliver greater marketing ROI, download our Guide on How to use Buyer Personas to Define your Target Market.