Marketing and Buyer Personas for Funnel Design

Buyer personas are a crucial component of successful inbound marketing, particularly for the sales and marketing departments. After all, the marketing team needs to know to whom they are marketing, and the sales team needs to know to whom they are selling.

If you're embarking on a new business venture and/or marketing strategy, one of the best ways to attract and maintain a strong customer base is by creating specific marketing personas for your target clients. In a nutshell, think of the type of person who can benefit most from your product or service, and then determine how best to market yourself to those demographics.

Buyer Persona Questions to Answer:

1. What is their demographic information?

2. What is their job and level of seniority?

3. What does a day in their life look like?

4. What are their pain points? What do you help them solve?

5. What do they value most? What are their goals?

6. Where do they go for information?

7. What experience are they looking for when seeking out your products or services?

8. What are their most common objections to your product or service?

It should be noted that there are a few things to avoid when developing marketing personas. First of all, you don't need to get too detailed with the personality profiles you're building. For example, if you are selling widgets to environmentally conscious working mothers, breaking this demographic down into specific income brackets or job descriptions is likely to needlessly niche your target market down too far, potentially alienating potential customers in the process. (An exception to this rule might be marketing a particularly expensive widget that only higher-income parents could afford, but goods that are marketed to a mass audience should always keep their marketing personas fairly broad in scope and scale whenever possible.)

Consider what a hypothetical customer type might like to see. Avoiding canned answers from marketing groups and studies is a good thing in this regard, as this data can be far less accurate than you might have hoped. For best results, if you have an existing business, gather information directly from current customers or through the use of analytic platforms which give you demographics. If you don't have access to current customer info, use online sources to uncover buyer personas. To use the above example of widgets for environmentally conscious working moms, search the web for message boards or look at social media communities that focus on one or more aspects of this demographic.

You will use these buyer personas to build a complete picture of what someone in their situation will be most interested in when they visit your site and you will align those interests with content about your product or service appropriate to each stage of the sales funnel. Repeat and refine these strategies as your business and your customer base evolves, and you should have a winning formula!