The Science of Building Buyer Personas (Infographic) Reaching out to too wide of an audience dilutes your advertising message and diminishes its effectiveness.
By Eric Siu •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
There's no arguing with the fact that the Internet has made it possible to reach a wider audience than ever before. But just because you can reach more target prospects doesn't mean that you should.
Reaching out to too wide of an audience dilutes your advertising message and diminishes its effectiveness by requiring it to be unnecessarily broad. If, for example, you go after all buyers who share certain target demographics (like, say, age, gender and geographic location), there's a good chance your ads will fall on deaf ears in some cases. After all, one middle-aged housewife in Peoria could have vastly different interests and concerns than another similarly-aged woman in the same area.
If you blast your message out to vast demographic groups at large, you're wasting time and money by targeting people who aren't -- and never were -- true prospects. The secret to better targeting comes from the creation and deployment of good buyer personas.
Related: An Effective Digital Marketing Strategy Starts With Knowing Your Customers and Your Goals
Buyer personas are fictitious representations of your target buyers, incorporating not just demographic data, but psychographic and behavioral insight as well. On average, using these tools makes websites two to five times more effective by allowing businesses to create catered marketing experiences that speak directly to a user's needs.
To see just how effective these resources can be, take the example of Skytap, a cloud automation-solutions provider. After integrating buyer personas into its marketing campaigns, the company was able to increase sales leads by 124 percent, online leads by 97 percent, organic search traffic by 55 percent and North American site traffic by 210 percent. That's some pretty powerful stuff!
To learn more about buyer personas, as well as what it takes to put them into practice, take a look at the following SIngle Grain infographic, "Target Acquired: The Science of Building Buyer Personas:"
Click to Enlarge+
Are you using buyer personas to help target your company's promotions? Share your best tips for integrating them into your marketing campaigns in the comments section below.
