So You Have Your Buyer Personas—Now What?

Congratulations! You have finished your journey of creating buyer personas. Now you are done, right? Wrong. Just because you now have your personas written out, it doesn’t mean the work is done.

Only 44 percent of B2B marketers use buyer personas, yet 48 percent of buyers are more likely to consider solution providers that personalize their marketing to address their specific business issues.

Now that you have your beautiful, well-researched buyer personas, it is time to get grinding. But how, you ask? There are many different ways you can use your newly developed buyer personas. Let’s walk through some of the best places to start.

Share With Your Team

Personas aren’t just for the marketing team. They are for your whole organization. Once your personas are finalized, share them across your entire company.

Knowing your personas’ likes, dislikes, attitudes, and habits will make everyone’s job easier. Your sales team will know how best to speak to each different persona. Your designer will know how to appeal to each individual persona. Even your finance person will know how much each persona will likely spend over time.

Treat your personas like real people at company meetings and bring them up on calls and emails. Soon, your whole company will be utilizing your personas.

Identify Your Prospects

To best market to your prospects, you need to know which of your personas they fall into. The best way to identify prospects is to ask them an extra question on your form. If you are a sports warehouse, you might use “I am a…” with the drop-downs “player,” “parent,” or “coach.”

With this information, you know now which bucket this prospect falls into and can now market accordingly.

Stock Your Editorial Calendar  

From your buyer-persona creation process, you probably came up with many different ideas for content based on your buyer personas’ pain points.

Take a moment to sit down, prioritize your content, and plan a good mix of content to speak to each of your personas.

You may also want to take a look at previously written content and repurpose it to better speak to your newly formed buyer personas.

Make sure you are hitting every stage of the buyer’s journey for each of your main target personas. You want to have the content you need to nurture your prospects down their appropriate funnel.

Nurture Your Personas Based on Their Needs

Once you have mapped out your content, it is important to spend some time on lead nurturing strategy. Does one buyer persona have a shorter buying period than the others? Does a persona not like email but would rather be retargeted on Facebook?

Take some time with each persona and decide what is going to be the best journey to lead that persona toward purchasing your product. Use all the research you gathered while creating your personas and put it to work.

If you have a piece of content that would be useful to multiple personas, create separate lead nurturing campaigns that focus on each persona’s pain points instead of just lumping them all together into one drip campaign. This helps no one.

Create Persona-Specific Experiences

We are officially in the 21st century, which means we can make customized web experiences for our prospects. Take full advantage of dynamic content and create a persona-specific journey on your website.

Allow the Prospect to Self-Identify

When your audience lands on your webpage, let them choose what information they are looking for. Below, HubSpot allows you to click if you are a small-business owner or a marketer, with different offers for each persona.

Smart Content

Once you know your lead’s persona, you can start using dynamic content to customize that persona’s experience on your website even more. You can offer that persona different content offers at the end of blog posts, display different messaging on site pages, and so much more.

Find Your Best Channel

The old saying still holds true: “Go where your customers are.” After your persona research, if you learned that the majority of your personas hang out on LinkedIn and very rarely check Twitter, start spending some more time on LinkedIn content and promotion. You don’t have to stop using Twitter completely but start doubling down on where you know your audience is.

If you know Parent Patty is on Facebook and Coach CJ is on Twitter, promote the content for Patty heavily on Facebook and the content for CJ on Twitter. You have developed buyer personas to know whom you are trying to target, and now that you know, it is time to start using your time wisely.

You have created personas, so half the battle is over, but don’t be like 44 percent of marketers out there—use your personas and start seeing the investment pay off.

How else have you used your buyer personas in your marketing efforts?