Four Ways to Use Your Audience Personas for Sales & Marketing

If someone asked you to describe your typical customer, what would you say? This fun exercise has a long history in marketing, and is usually known as building audience personas. If you don’t gravitate naturally toward marketing, you might feel like you don’t have the time to do something so abstract when you could be focusing on sales. But sometimes, it’s exactly these kinds of strategies that can help you overhaul your marketing program and tangibly increase your ROI across the board.
First, if you’re not sure what audience personas are, you can read our post on them here. The importance of audience personas comes down to one thing: how can you do anything in marketing without having figured out who you’re marketing to? When was the last time your gave that some thought? Having worked out your audience personas will help you in almost every situation.
Here are four things you can do with your audience personas, just to get you started.

1. Organic SEO & content marketing – When you’re creating content for your site, whether it’s for static pages or for your blog, you should be actively thinking about your audience personas and how each of them will relate to the content you’re creating.
   How to use them: One great way to come up with blog topics for organic SEO is to ask yourself, “what long tail search phrase would my audience persona type into Google search,” and then writing on that topic. Or think about the questions that audience asks your customer service, ot the challenges they face.

2. Paid advertising – Defining your personas enables you to narrow down the key aspects of your audience to use for targeting your ads.
   How to use them: Try setting up separate ad campaigns for each of your audience personas. That way, you can look at the numbers separately and fine tune each campaign to optimize click-throughs for that particular customer type.

3. Landing pages – If you’ve got different types of customers, shouldn’t your landing pages be optimized to speak to these different personas?
   How to use them: Create a landing page for each of your audience persona, making each page appeal uniquely to that particular demographic. The pages could differ drastically in look, feel, tone, imagery, and offer based on these different audience segments.

4. Compare them to your analytics data – Your audience personas are who you’re trying to reach when you’re marketing your product. But how well do these map onto the real people who are visiting your website? Google analytics and the analytics on social media platforms can reveal a lot about the types of visitors on your website and the actions they take.
   How to use them: Periodically, you should compare your audience personas to your analytics to check if the people you think are your audience are in fact your visitors, and whether they’re acting in a way you expect them to. If you notice a discrepancy there, you’ll have to decide whether you want to adjust your pages to appeal to your audience personas, or update your audience personas to match the people who are already visiting your website.

These four uses alone are enough to justify creating some audience personas, and these uses are just the tip of the iceberg! If you need some help putting audience personas together for your business, get in touch with our team!
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