You wouldn’t expect to shoot a free throw blindfolded during a game of basketball, right? Or to assemble a complex mechanism without being able to see each part in detail?

You’ll have an equally difficult time marketing your manufacturing company without a clear idea of who you are marketing to. How can you focus your marketing efforts?

Enter: buyer personas. 

As Adele Revella, author of the top-selling book “Buyer Personas” says, buyer personas are meant for “every marketer who questions the wisdom of making stuff up.”

If your company is looking for a way to jumpstart your marketing strategies, buyer personas are the way to go. They help keep your marketing efforts targeted and relevant, which is increasingly important in the age of the internet where there is increased competition.

The Truth About Buyer Personas

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 63 percent of consumers say they would think more positively about a brand if it gave them content that was more valuable, interesting or relevant. 

 

But not everyone finds the same information valuable, interesting or relevant. Buyer personas help you tap into the needs and desires of your target audience with amazing precision. 

 

Rather than making broad generalizations and trying to reach a large audience who may or may not be interested in what you produce, buyer personas help you focus on creating impactful marketing content that targets the right groups at the right time. You spend your marketing budget more wisely and will likely get better results in return.

 

Here’s some more information about what buyer personas are, why they matter, how to create them, how to analyze their effectiveness, and more. You can bookmark this page and refer back to it as needed.

What Personas Are

So what exactly is a buyer persona? Social Media Today explains that a buyer persona is a profile that depicts your target customer based on research. This profile encompasses who your ideal customers are and what their relevant habits look like.

 

Buyer personas help you focus your time and efforts on targeting qualified prospects. They can also help you develop and streamline your work throughout the entire manufacturing team, from marketing to sales to service. By identifying specific buyer personas, you can attract more ideal customers and be more likely to retain them over time.

 

Gaining a deep understanding of your potential buyers by creating targeted personas can help narrow your company’s focus and affect all departments, including product development, marketing, and sales. Here are some helpful resources:

Why Personas Matter

Ready for some startling news? According to Neil Patel, named by Forbes Magazine as one of the top 10 marketers of today, 71 percent of companies that surpass their revenue and lead goals use buyer personas.

 

They can have a huge impact on your marketing campaigns. In fact, email campaigns that use this strategy have twice the open rate and five times the click-through rate than those that don’t.

 

These personas matter because they can help the company grow, as HubSpot says, and part of that growth is a result of happier customers who find and are drawn to your company like a magnet because they feel you “speak” to them and their values directly. 

 

Here’s some more information related to that:

How to Create Personas

To be effective, buyer personas have to be incredibly specific and genuine to reach your target audience. You need to find out who your products truly help solve relevant pain points for and what those details look like.


You can develop your company’s buyer personas—both positive and negative ones—through market research, surveys, interviews, and other methods of contact with past and present customers and subscribers. 

 

Here are some more relevant links:

How to Analyze a Persona’s Effectiveness

Creating personas isn’t enough, though. You need to implement them into your content marketing efforts and then most importantly, evaluate their effectiveness and update them on a regular basis.

 

Over time, you’ll craft personas that reach your target audience with more detailed accuracy. But this takes consistent analyzing and adjusting to really get it right. You’ll reach the right crowd, one that will want to purchase the products you create, but only by ensuring you share a message that really resonates with them at the right time and at the right place.

 

You can track your success, identify areas improvement, and increase your conversion rates once you take the time to monitor how your personas are performing.

 

Here are some related links you can check out:

Creating personas, mastering account-based marketing and reaching your target audience with the right message don’t have to feel like secrets shrouded in mystery. They should all fit together as efficiently as pieces on an assembly line.

 

At Digital Marketing Direction, we can help your manufacturing firm navigate online marketing with inbound strategies and innovative ideas to help grow your audience, leads and sales.

 

You can check out testimonials and other information on our website, and get in touch when you are ready to talk about creating targeted buyer personas for your company.

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