Ensure that you personalize your marketing for multiple personas.
A standard mistake that many corporations make is using a “one-size-fits-all” approach to its marketing efforts. Said one other way, the corporate comes up with one marketing strategy, uses mass marketing techniques and the identical messaging to everyone that sees its promoting. Yes, that is an easy approach, and saves you time and efforts required to customize your messaging to specific sub-audiences. But if you happen to wish to maximize your return on marketing spend, that additional upfront investment in constructing customer personas (sub-audiences) and a customer journey flow (from upper funnel to lower funnel) can pay back in spades. So, don’t be a penny sensible within the short run and pound silly for the long term. The more you personalize your messaging to the precise goal, and where they’re within the buying process, the more it’ll provide help to put your marketing efforts on steroids. This post will provide help to learn methods to do exactly that.
What’s a Customer Persona?
A customer persona is the sub-audience of users which are buying your services or products. If you happen to are a consumer business, possibly that’s men vs. women buyers, or older vs. younger buyers, or which goal products they’re most inquisitive about (e.g., coffee drinkers vs. tea drinkers). If you happen to are a B2B business, possibly that’s customers from one industry or one other, or buyers at different levels of the organization (e.g., executives vs. lower level managers) or different size of corporations (e.g., enterprise vs. small business). Each certainly one of these sub-audiences, should receive marketing messages from you which are directly relevant to them.
What’s the Customer Journey?
The client journey is the trail by which a customer researches, considers and ultimately purchases services or products. A customer that’s researching to determine what it needs is usually upper funnel, a customer that knows what it wants and is considering various vendors or solutions is middle funnel, and a customer that’s price shopping and able to pull the trigger is lower funnel. Why does that matter? Your marketing messaging ought to be tailored to where they’re of their customer journey.
Someone that’s upper funnel must know why they need an answer in the primary place, someone that’s middle funnel must know your product is best than others out there, and someone that’s lower funnel could also be stimulated by a promotional offer to save lots of 10% in the event that they purchase by the top of the month.
And the marketing tools you utilize to speak with them shall be different—from mass marketing tactics (e.g., TV, radio, print, serps) for upper funnel right down to one-on-one marketing tactics (e.g., emails, phone calls) for the lower funnel. So knowing your customer journey and which media are best to speak together with your targets is a critical component to personalizing your marketing messaging.
This text I wrote on mastering your marketing funnel and media mix may provide help to with this process.
What does Personalizing Marketing Actually Mean?
Personalizing your marketing means you wish different marketing creatives for every sub-audience. Let’s say you have got three core personas and three stages of the marketing funnel, that will be a complete of nine different creatives that must be created (not only one). And in those creatives, use images and replica that truly will resonate with that sub-audience. So, if talking to men, use male models in your creatives. If talking to older people, put older people in your creatives. If pushing a selected industry use case, speak to that industry expertise in your creatives. If talking to executives, promote the strategic advantages of your product, vs. the more tactical functionalities that will be higher promoted to lower level employees. You get the purpose—don’t spray and pray. Be laser focused together with your targeting and messaging, and good things should occur to accelerating your sales.
What Can You Expect to Occur from Personalization?
With every layer of personalization, you’ll be able to expect to extend your conversion rate, and ultimately your sales. So, for instance, let’s say the one-size-fits-all approach permits you to convert 10% of your leads. Layering on the client personas may will let you convert 20% of your leads. And further layering on the client journey messaging may will let you convert 30% of your leads. The higher you sharpen your pencil, the upper your resulting revenues shall be. Any good marketing agency can provide help to here.
Tracking Is Critical
Establishing the client personas, journey and creatives is just a part of the exercise. The opposite part is tracking the outcomes from each of those sub-audiences. So, when establishing your campaigns, tracking URLs or other conversion metrics, ensure the suitable tagging and tracking is in place, in order that your CRM can easily see how the various personas are acting at driving sales. You could learn that every persona behaves equally the identical, and deserves equal attention. Or, you could learn certain personas are outperforming others, and wishes your oversized attention and budget, redirecting efforts away out of your other underperforming personas. So, in all cases, the devil is in the small print, and that you must be tracking and optimizing the whole lot.
Closing Thoughts
The concepts presented on this post are “table stakes” within the marketing world, and it amazes me what number of early stage corporations have absolutely no clue here. If you happen to will not be doing it, you might be potentially wasting quite a lot of your marketing dollars. Or at a minimum, not driving an ROI as high as you ultimately ought to be. So, either hire a powerful marketing team, or engage a powerful marketing agency, for your corporation. They might help lay the groundwork here, and ultimately tee you up for max marketing success. Good luck!!
—
George Deeb is a Partner at Red Rocket Ventures and creator of 101 Startup Lessons-An Entrepreneur’s Handbook.
