Put Your Customer Personas to Work with Marketing Automation

Successful marketing is people-focused. 

Sure, you want to make a sale, but ultimately, you want to serve people by helping them solve a problem—their problem. When companies hammer out marketing without first considering their customers’ unique perspectives and needs, their efforts fall flat and the opportunity for real engagement is lost. 

Customer personas can help you avoid that.

By taking the time to create rich, highly-detailed customer personas, you’ll employ one of the most valuable assets in the world, empathy, and avoid one of the biggest mistakes made in marketing: not knowing your audience. 

Instead of guessing at who your audience is and what they want, you’ll discover who your audience actually is and what they want based on facts, not just a version you’ve created in your head. Once you’ve got that nailed down, you can then streamline and automate your processes to engage that target audience.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to create customer personas and put them to work through marketing automation.

First, collect your customer data by taking a multi-pronged approach using:

• Interviews
• Focus groups
• Surveys
• Website analytics (demographic data, interests, references, activity)
• Online behavior monitoring (behavioral and demographic data)
• Social media engagement
• Data from contact forms
• Feedback from salespeople or your customer service department
• Information from competitor websites

Then, map out fictional representations of your ideal customers, including these important elements: 

• Who: Who are your customers? What makes them unique from one another (job title, lifestyle traits, age, purchase history, etc.)?  

• What: What are they trying to accomplish? What are their fears, goals, desires, frustrations, needs, etc.? 

• When: When are they making buying decisions (season, time of day, business quarter, etc.)?

• Where: Where are they buying (online, in-store, through an app, etc.)?

• Why: Why are they buying? Why is your company/solution unique to their needs? 

Finally, create multiple customer personas to segment your base.

Personas should inform everything from customer acquisition and retention to product development, content creation, and follow-up communication.

By considering basic demographics, behaviors, goals, pain points, and buying patterns, you can create multiple personas to represent each segment of your customer base.

All of your marketing efforts from here on out can be divided by these personas to achieve maximum reach. 

Knowing your audience is half the battle.

You’ve got your personas, and you’re primed for meaningful engagement. But how can you turn your customers’ pain points into sales?

With marketing automation, putting your customer personas to their highest possible use is simple. Here are just a few ideas to get you started.

• Personalize your content.

Forget mass emails, generic blogs, and lifeless landing pages. Use customer personas to create tailored messaging that automatically adapts to customers’ interests and needs. With marketing automation, it’s easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

• Automate repetitive tasks.

Who wouldn’t benefit from streamlined processes? Rather than manually setting up custom fields, response emails, and nurture or sales campaigns, segment these tasks by personas and automate them. Once they’re in place, you’ll be able to provide personalized marketing without any extra work on your end. 

• Engage your target audience.

You want your marketing strategy to hit the bullseye. Personas help you hit your target with relatable and personalized messaging that doesn’t fall short. What’s more, you can analyze how well your efforts are working so you can keep tweaking and refining until you find the right direction.

Seeing the end-to-end picture with marketing automation allows you to quickly and effectively change course if something isn’t working. 

By creating customer personas and then using them across your marketing efforts, you’re going to see more conversions because you’ll be speaking to the things that matter most to individual customers.

Marketing automation is a no-brainer for companies wanting to expand their reach. You’ll improve customer engagement and satisfaction while generating more revenue. It’s a total win-win for your customers and your company’s bottom line. 

To learn more about Marketing Automation and how easy it is to set up, reach out to WE•DO today, and we’ll show you the ropes.