Welcome back to our series on learning inbound marketing. In the last post we talked about setting SMART goals to increasing website visits, MQLs, and ultimately SQLs.

Next up on our learning tour is buyer personas.

Buyer persona is a term you will hear over and over again in the world of inbound marketing and for good reason. These semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer will be used to create all your inbound campaigns, content…basically everything. Without a fine-tuned persona you are basically shooting in the dark! 

Why You Need Buyer Personas

Personas aren’t just an important part of your B2B inbound marketing , they are everything to it. To put it simply, personas will dictate every inbound marketing activity you do moving forward. This includes things such as:

• Keyword strategy
• Blog posts
• Premium content offers
• CTAs
• Landing pages
• Thank you pages
• Lead nurturing emails
• Workflows
• New services
• New products.

You may think, ‘I know my customers. I don’t need to take the time to create a fictional representation of them.’ And on one count you’re probably right.  You do know your customers…to a point.  You and every other organization that is competing for their business. By creating a well thought-out persona you will have a much-needed leg up on that competition.

What Do Buyer Personas Tell You?

When done right, buyer personas give you a complete profile of your prospective customer’s:

• Common behaviors
• Pain points (both personally and professionally)
• Universal goals
• Wishes and dreams
• General demographic
• Biographic information

Benefits of Having a Buyer Persona?

• Personas help with every single stage of the inbound marketing methodology.  You don’t want to attract just ANYONE to your site, you want to attract the RIGHT people to your site.  These are the people for whom all your content should be written and products created.
• They will also help you figure out where your ideal customer is hanging out online.  Why should you care? Because where they hang out, you should hang out and once you know where they are spending time, then you can fine tune your marketing efforts to that area. For example, if your research shows that your persona loves spending time on LinkedIn, then you probably don’t want to focus all your efforts on Twitter.
• Not enough? Well, try this. Personas may drive your company to create new products and services.  After you’ve done all the research you may find a niche where your customer is not being served, that your company can fill!

With the insights provided by your personas you can create better, more effective, and highly targeted content that will boost your overall inbound marketing, help you get better results and provide something other B2B, B2C and Nonprofits are missing;  B2H, the business to human factor.

Make sure to check out the next post in the learning inbound marketing series, How to Create B2B Buyer Personas.