What is Your Buyer Persona & Journey?
Buyer persona is an example of your target market defined by one non-fictional buyer. This persona includes the demographics, problems, and behaviors of your ideal audience. But this is not randomly decided or made up from assumptions about your business. Instead, this persona is developed from information and data about your clients and industry. This way you have exact reasoning behind the buyer persona of your business. Once defined, it’s important for it to be shared through all departments.
On the other hand, the buyer journey consists of the stages that a customer goes through leading up to a purchase. These stages include awareness, consideration, and decision.
At the awareness stage, the buyer acknowledges and knows they have a problem. In the consideration stage, they start looking for solutions to their problem. Finally, the decision stage is when the buyer has practical solutions to their problem and does more research to decide.
Mapping the Journey
It’s also important to market to your buyer persona based on the specific stage they’re in. Buyers in different spots of the journey are not receptive to the same kind of content. Therefore, it’s essential that your business start content mapping for each stage of the journey. Content mapping aligns your persona with each stage of the buyer’s journey. This gives you the tools to create content that’s specific to their questions and needs along the way. Base your content on the qualities and knowledge shown from the buyer’s persona and journey. Mapping better allows you to create content that is more fitting and resonates with the specific stage your buyer is going through.
The buyers will be more engaged in your business as they are better informed and targeted. Your awareness of both your buyer persona and journey helps take advantage of potential customers by giving them appropriate content at the right time. This leads to more conversions.
The Result of Buyer Persona & Journey
If content is not based on buyer persona and journey, the content is ineffective. This makes the buyers less informed and extends the length of time it takes for them to become a lead or customer, if at all. Therefore, this lowers your return on investment and wastes time and resources on unsuccessful content development.
The buyer’s persona and journey are strong reference points in an inbound marketing campaign. The incorrect use of buyer persona is a common reason for limitations in marketing. Failure to have a connection back to the buyer persona throughout marketing leads to unsuccessful strategies. When your buyer persona or journey is not correctly found then everything else involved becomes skewed.
Keep in mind your solution to their problem. Content should always circle back to solving the problem. Your content also needs to align with the specific stages of the buyer journey. Having this buyer’s journey into consideration will better bring the right content to your buyers at the right time.