What Campaigns Should You Create with Your Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are a crucial part of internet marketing for senior retirement communities. Having clearly defined buyer personas provides alignment between marketing and sales, and helps you get the right type of traffic, leads & customers.

But once you sit down to craft your personas, you may find yourself staring blankly at a white screen for some time, wondering where on earth you’re supposed to begin.

I’ve previously talked about gathering data to develop your buyer personas — but sometimes that just isn’t feasible. Sometimes you need to create an “interim” persona that will work until you have the ability to go out and talk with people about their jobs.

If you need to create interim personas, we’ve created a Buyer Persona Worksheet to help you out.

How to create content with your personas

All of your marketing campaigns should be done with your identified personas in mind. After all, now that you know who you are writing for, and what their needs, pains and desires are, wouldn’t it make sense to write your content around these buyer needs?

Tailor your content to each persona:

• listen to their questions (on social media, email responses and comments)
• write content around their challenges
• use their language
• consider their buying process
• consider your goal(s)
• have a landing page for each persona

What campaigns should you create?

Content is like a Swiss army knife: it’s very efficient and serves a lot of different uses. And there is a content “tool” for every occasion.

Here are some ideas of marketing campaigns to create with your buyer personas:

1. Attract traffic to your website
   — Use the right keywords for that persona
   — Social media: Where does this persona go to get information? Which social media platforms do they use? What times of day (and days of week) are they most active?
   — How frequently do they post?
   — Write content that appeals to each different persona.
2. Generate leads
   — Use calls-to-action
   — Match your landing page to specific persona
   — Use email setgmentation to create different emails for different personas
   — Use different offers for different personas, too.
3. Create new customers
   — Nurture your prospects with emails that speak to their specific needs and interests, as indicated by their persona.
   — Further segment your email list based on prospect contact properties
   — Use a lead intelligence system, even if it’s a paper system
   — Try to re-activate leads that are older than 90 days.
4. Use personas during the sales process
   — Align sales staff with personas; create a poster or other visual so they can see instantly what your personas are.
   — Teach Sales about the persona’s challenges and pain points
   — Identify which persona you are talking to
   — Create content for sales – email templates, sound bites for each offer, demo script (all based around personas, of course!)
   — Help them understand that different personas have different sales processes.

Once you have developed your marketing or buyer personas, use them regularly in all the content you create. And don’t forget to share these personas widely in your company, so that everyone is on the same page and can recognize the various personas when they meet them.

Creating personas seems rather daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll find it fun to create them and even more fun to introduce them to your sales staff and management.

Need to create some “interim” personas or just want to brush up on the process? Get our Buyer Persona Worksheet.

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