You have a robust business — and that’s a good thing. However, it can make it somewhat more difficult to define and target your buyer personas.
Buyer personas are your target audience. You decide on what qualities a particular buyer might have and what demographic he or she would fall into. Many businesses have at least three buyer personas — but it can be more depending on the organization.
For instance, if you are manufacturer you might sell direct-to-consumer, but you might also sell to a wholesale channel. In this case, you have two marketing streams: business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B).
Or if you have multiple products, one product might be focused on a certain target market, like the office of the CIO, while another is focused on the office of the CFO. Both may share qualities, but ultimately have a different persona.
And then when we get into personas, there is also the buyer’s journey to think about — how a customer moves from never having heard of your business before, to ready to buy. This alone can have at least three stages.
Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t worry – we’re here to help.
The first step is defining your buyer personas and the particular journey that you want them to take.
Assuming that you have done this, the second step then is to figure out how to translate that into your digital marketing.
Let’s use an example of The Teapot Company. They design teapots that they sell direct-to-customer; teapots that they sell wholesale to retailers; and they also custom design teapots for businesses.
Now, they could advertise this all on one social media channel, under their company name, but it might be more challenging. The target audiences are different. The consumers who will buy a teapot from them are different from their wholesale accounts and will respond to different content and marketing. The businesses who want custom-designed teapots are another market entirely.
At best, advertising under one social media channel would be confusing. At worst, it could end up costing a lot more than they are getting in return.
The more profitable approach for The Teapot Company to take might be to pick a segment or market and capture them first — preferably, the segment that brings in the most revenue in the fastest method.
In this case, it might be wholesalers since they have larger orders, that bring in more profit.
With a firm strategy in hand, The Teapot Company could target wholesalers on B2B-specific channels and meet a certain revenue goal. Once they have met that goal, they could roll the profits into marketing for another channel — potentially the direct-to-consumer channel. This might take more time to grow and more orders to make up a revenue goal, but the budget for growth would already be generated by the wholesale account.
The answer comes down to strategy — if you try to target everyone at once, generally, you will target no one.
Try this for yourself:
- Perform an overall assessment of your marketing budget — where are the majority of your marketing dollars going and what is the cost per acquisition?
- Define which market of your business is the most lucrative, or has the most potential for fast, sustainable growth.
- Look at the digital marketing activities you are currently using to promote your most lucrative channel. Now look at the least lucrative.
Can you see the possibilities opening up?
By starting with a goal-driven strategy, you’ll be able to achieve sustained, fast-acting growth and ROI. This will, in turn, allow you to grow the parts of your business that have the potential for big revenue, but require more upfront cost to generate.
Pulsion Marketing has expertise in defining buyer personas, the buyer’s journey, and creating a digital marketing strategy for the long term.
Contact us today for a free consultation to make your business even more profitable. Call 1-888-701-4441 or visit www.digiforcemarketing.ca.