How To Assess Your Inbound Marketing Plan

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Inbound marketing has become one of the most efficient ways for marketers to sell online. It is based on developing high-quality content to relevant to the prospective buyers who you can turn into buyers. This kind of marketing allows the user to determine whether the inbound marketing plan is productive or not. Marketing metrics is a part of attraction marketing and your inbound marketing plan is a part of marketing metrics.

For most business firms actual and quantifiable results are more beneficial for better business decision. By using real-time metrics it is easy to identify the best content and customize the conversion tactics for more sales. The following are factors to be considered when measuring the effectiveness of your inbound marketing plan.

The Desired Goals And Objectives

One way to measure the performance of your campaign is listing the organizational goals. Assessing available opportunities as compared to the current number of customers, allows you to ensure both marketing and sales efforts are productive. Some of the real-time metrics that can be used for this step include; the number of conversion produced, where your prospects are in your sales funnel and lastly the number of buyers in your marketing niche. By stacking the results from such a test against the organizational goals will help you know the results of your marketing campaign.

Read More: 5 Examples Of Goals For Business Development.

Competitive Benchmarking

At times comparing your inbound marketing techniques to your competitors will allow you to identify the best strategies. By selecting the tactics that your competitors are succeeding at and eliminating those that fail your competitors will help you stay ahead. The first people to use inbound marketing in their industry have the chance to create a benchmark for their competitors. For better access to the progress of your competition, online tools like Google analytics or website grader will give you more information. Some platforms like Hubspot allow the user to see traffic density and the domains linked to your site. Such data will allow you to select the best inbound campaigns.

Social Media

Social media offer a way to get maximum attention to your website. Researching carefully about the target market allows you to know what social media platform get to the best of your customers and prospects. After deciding the best social media platform, you should approach it strategically. You can start by developing a plan on how to release some posts or discussing some topics depending on the content calendar. The idea is to compare the number of conversions each post brings. If one type of content brings more conversions then you should focus on it and eliminate the ones with fewer reads. The concept behind this is to drive conversions to the website from social media community.

Financial Spending

For any inbound marketing campaign, there must be a budget that comes with it. The budget should be based on the organizational goals to be achieved and the time frame. This provides a chance to compare between the marketing campaigns that are currently running. If you have a part of the campaign that has more expenses with fewer leads yet there are other options that are more productive, it will be better to switch and focus on the productive ones. For those campaigns that use more money like free advertising and free samples, you can re-strategize and utilize inbound marketing that has more measurable ROI features.

Develop Your Nurturing Process

Though for most buyers if your products are amazing they will buy immediately but for some a relationship is important. Lead nurturing allows you to focus on the target market and depending on the buyer’s journey it is easy to make your sales funnel a metric. By carefully designing the sales funnel to provide the prospect with motivation to buy and include clear calls to action, this will provide a position of measurement and comparison. If there are certain goals to be achieved linking conversion rates with the number of new customers will give you a clear picture of the growth curve.

Conclusion

Every company has a unique business structure, meaning they have different inbound marketing approaches. The success of a marketing campaign will depend on the contributions of the company sales team, this means you should clearly state your inbound marketing plan and goals to be achieved for better measurements.

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

drip email marketing

Drip Email Marketing vs. Lead Nurturing Campaigns; When To Use Each

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Many marketing tools seem similar and are often mistaken for one another. Two tactics that are often confused are drip email marketing and lead nurturing campaign. It’s true that there are similarities in the way they work. However, they are two distinct tactics that serve different purposes. You should have both in your marketer’s toolbox to use when appropriate, especially with attraction marketing. Let’s learn a bit about each tactic and when they should be used.

Email Drip Marketing

Emails are a huge part of modern marketing. One email marketing option is email drip marketing. Named after drip coffee makers, this marketing tactic sends out emails at specific timed intervals. Time is the only factor used to indicate when an email is sent. Nothing else.

When should you use email drip marketing?

  • Educating prospects on all the products and services in your company’s portfolio.
  • Keeping your brand in front of your customers while they are contemplating a purchase.
  • Announcing new products or services for your business.
  • Showcasing best sellers in your portfolio.

A well-crafted drip email campaign can educate and inform your audience. However, done too frequently, or used only to pitch products or services, your audience may perceive these emails as spam.

[Read About Interactive Email Marketing Trends Here]

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

A lead nurturing campaign is not based on timed emails. It is based on the lead’s behavior. When a lead performs a specific behavior, it triggers an email with targeted information to be sent to your audience. These emails are designed to guide the lead through the buying process.

This type of campaign depends on gathered information about the lead’s behavior. Specific behaviors that can trigger an email include:

  • Which whitepapers grab the lead’s attention
  • How many times they visit a specific page on your website
  • Which webinar they attend
  • Which of blog post category they spend the most time in

The goal of the emails sent during a lead nurturing campaign is to deliver useful information at critical points in the sales cycle.

A marketing automation system is ideal for lead nurturing. You can build full campaigns within the system that automates almost everything in the process. The power of marketing automation systems is their ability to capture key data. This then triggers the specific emails that nurture leads.

They Complement Each Other Very Well

Drip email campaigns and lead nurturing campaigns, if well designed, will do their jobs well. They both help leads engage with your brand and give leads the information needed to make an informed decision about your products and services.

They are each powerful tools in the marketer’s toolbox on their own, but working together, they are even more powerful. Coordinated campaigns can help close deals faster and keep your brand ahead of the pack.

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Lead Generation Strategy

The Right Lead Nurturing Strategy Can Help You Stay Top of Mind

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Just as you put thoughtfully planned initiatives in place to help with new lead generation, you must also think about how you will then nurture these prospects through the sales cycle once you obtain the lead. Successful attraction marketing is having leads. A smart, strategic email and direct mail program can help you maintain a consistent connection with prospects and grow the relationships you have available to you—remaining ‘on their list’ and top of mind when they are ready to act.

Lead Nurturing Basics

It’s a proven fact: marketing needs to assist sales in order to achieve the most effective conversion results. So when you create a program that keeps prospects in touch with your thinking beyond just a salesperson’s outreach, you provide an opportunity to push the prospect through their journey faster. Utilize various outbound communications as key touch-points that complement the sales teams efforts, yet showcase your company’s thinking on a different level. Provide information contacts may be seeking out—not what you want to tell them—to build trust as they make their way to a purchase decision.

Key Considerations

The goal is to offer interesting, relevant and varied content that is not primarily self-serving in nature. Begin by creating a detailed plan for messaging and scheduling of communications. Think about common questions prospects may have, and how you can provide those answers while conveying your competitive advantages, promoting educational content you have to offer, and building trust in your abilities.

A study by DemandGen found that leads that are nurtured with targeted content produce an increase in sales opportunities of more than 20%. To ensure even greater success, target content to coincide with the behavior and mindset of your audiences at different points in their journey—naturally guiding them through the sales funnel by providing the right information at the right time in the buying process.

[Read About The Importance Of Lead Generation Content Marketing]

Fine Tuning

Set a solid foundation for your program by maintaining an up-to-date database with as much information on each prospect as possible. Determine the activity level, timing and quantity of communications that makes sense for each. Be organized, yet allow for adjustments as your program evolves. Track and score behavior and deliver content accordingly, allowing the sales team to receive better quality leads along the way to reach their goals. And remember: conversion is the ultimate objective. Always hold something back—never tell the whole story in your email—make them want to click through to your site or landing page to learn more.

How Marketing Automation Can Help

According to ChadwickMartinBailey, 56% of U.S. email users unsubscribe from a business or nonprofit email subscription because of content that is no longer relevant. Automation makes it easier to schedule emails, segment contacts, manage your content, trigger responsive emails based on actions, and track the lifecycle of prospects in your marketing funnel. By addressing their specific needs, contacts stay engaged; yet you are ultimately in control because you set the parameters for informing, interacting with and nurturing each lead. It provides you the ability to better target your contacts in a personalized way—assisting the buying decision based on their behavior—and leading to increased conversion rates. Consider investing in one of many standard marketing automation software systems to simplify your Top of Mind program initiatives.

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How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

How To Nurture Your Leads With Email Marketing

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Despite some claims that email is dead, it is still a highly effective way for marketers to connect with consumers. It is an integral part of inbound marketing as well as attraction marketing, and is a great way to send nurture leads throughout the buying process. Here are a few email best practices that will help nurture your leads.

Segmentation

The segmentation of your contacts database will help define your audience into categories. If you are unfamiliar with buyer personas, read about them here, as they will be extremely useful in segmenting your contacts. Segmenting be done in terms of geographic location, company type, role within that company, behavior, marketing intelligence, or any other category that could be valuable to your company. Use segmenting to your advantage by targeting those different groups with useful content based on their specific needs.

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How To Use Targeted CTAs To Increase Lead Conversion

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Lead conversion can prove a tricky mistress, but inbound software has changed the way marketers interact with their prospective clients. They now reach customers through clever virtual workflows and smart targeting. Specifically, targeted CTAs can help convert the visitors to leads 42% more often than standard CTAs. A good CTA is a part of attraction marketing. Let’s look at how to use targeted CTAs to increase lead conversion.

What is a “Smart” CTA?

Targeted or smart CTAs convert visitors to leads by tailoring the content to a specific user. They’re based on segmented lists and what stage of the customer lifecycle they’re in. Basically, based on the data your lead generation software is provided, a smart CTA changes dynamically enabling your pages and calls-to-action to be more effective and targeted.

Read More: 3 Helpful Tips To Improve Your CTAs To Generate More Leads

Slice Up Your Contacts: Use Segmented Lists

If you’re not already using segmented lists, you may as well be throwing darts at an indiscriminate and undefined dart board. In other words, if your contacts occupy one single list or a small handful, then you’re really not leveraging your lead conversion software to the max.

Start by creating filters that help define your buyer personas. For example, you may want to create a filter to put “C” level managers with 100-300 employees in a 3-state area in a specific list or perhaps you want to simply create a list where follow-up emails can be generated. In either case, making your lists and your leads more specific will definitely increase the effectiveness of targeted CTAs.

Get Personal: Design and Copy

Finally, let’s talk about getting personal with your leads’ CTAs. Not in a weird way, but in a way that can actually close some sales! Smart CTAs have the ability to change the copy on a CTA button or change the design based on the end user.

If you’re selling chocolate candy bars to a potential customer, perhaps you want them to click the “Get a Free Sample Here” CTA at which point they become a lead and potentially a sale. On the other hand, however, your website may be entertaining an existing chocolate buyer who already loves your product. As a result, giving them a sample won’t necessarily get the job done nor further the value of your expertise as a chocolateer.

This is where smart CTAs show their beauty. Instead of offering a sample, a smart CTA would show your existing customer the “There’s S’more to Chocolate” CTA. Here, they can learn about how to use your product to their advantage. While the example may seem silly, the fact of the matter is that both the design and copy can be altered based on the input of your CRM.

MAXIMIZING YOUR MARKETING BUDGET

media mix

How To Create Content For Each Sale Funnel Stage

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Even though you may not realize it, you go through a process before buying something, unless, of course, you are an impulse buyer. This process is called a sale funnel. It refers to “the buying process that companies lead customers through when they are purchasing products.” But for any company to succeed, its process must have quality content. Having quality content is having leadership, which is a part of attraction marketing. Here is how to create quality content:

Phases of a standard funnel

  1. Top of the funnel (TOFU): awareness stage

At this point, your followers do not know they have a problem or are just now realizing they do. TOFU involves driving traffic to you as well as providing free surface information with “how to”, “improve”, and “prevent” content.

  1. Middle of the funnel (MOFU): consideration stage

When a potential buyer gets here, they graduate to a potential lead. They need the best solution for their problem and are willing to make possible future purchase commitments. For this stage, begin providing deep content with a wide coverage of topics.

  1. Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): decision stage

Here, someone is making a final purchase decision. Still, there is no guarantee. A little nudge from the right content and assistanced from a call to action will win the customer over.

[Read to learn about the importance of lead generating content marketing]

Creating sale funnel content for each stage

  1. TOFU

Content can be in the form of an eBook, checklist, podcast, whitepaper, etc. It should be rich with key words, compelling, informational, correctly format, and delivered in a timely manner. Do not attempt to sell at this stage because the potential customer is not yet considered a qualified lead. Make your content both easy to understand and enjoyable to read. Try to obtain the potential customer’s personal contact information at this point through forms and landing pages to use later in the lead qualifying process.

  1. MOFU

As your visitors transition to this stage, your content should transition with them. This content can be in the form of case studies, demonstration videos, trial offers, cost estimates, etc. You should offer expert, in-depth content. For example: “The Complete Checklist for a Refurbished Phone.”

As they look to expand their personal understanding, usher in lead nurturing techniques such as personal engagement and email marketing. This is usually the longest phase because potential customers need to weigh their options and research further. However, an advantage to this wait is that you can take time to filter out unqualified leads and instead focus your resources on marketing qualified leads.

  1. BOFU

When your leads reach the final stage, you will probably be a little anxious, but don’t push too much. Offer content to make them understand why you are the best best option for them. Position yourself as a solution to their problem. Be careful not to sound too much like a sales person, and focus your content on their needs. “Guidelines For Success” or “How to Implement Inbound Marketing Strategies” are some examples of content you should provide in order to convert your leads into sales.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

buyer persona

How to Drive Website Conversions with the Buyer’s Journey

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Before any customer commits to purchasing a product, they will have to go through the sales funnel. The sales funnel is comprised of several stages that the buyer will go through, from identifying the problem they have to making a decision. In online marketing, the sales funnel expands from a prospective buyer to a buyer looking to purchase. Marketers are responsible for guiding prospective clients along the sales funnel until they eventually make a purchase. Attraction marketing is what will catch the attention of customers.

Growing social media usage gives marketers a chance to engage their prospective buyers by creating customized content. However, some marketers still find it challenging to identify the most effective content for each step. The following is a guide to creating the right content to drive website conversions at each step of the sales funnel.

Top of the Funnel: Awareness and Research

This is the primary step where prospective customers realize they have a problem or a need to fulfill. Buyers at the top of the funnel are searching for high quality and relevant information to point them towards the solution

Over 80% of buyers research products online before buying. The best way to attract them is by offering exactly what they need: highly optimized content with original research. Additionally, posting explainer videos that contain demonstrations can have a huge impact on your site. Lastly, create attractive landing pages to offer your visitors solutions at the click of a button.

Read More: How To Use The Buyer’s Journey To Create Great Content

Middle of the Funnel: Evaluation

During the second stage of the sales funnel, buyers are trying to sort through their best options that you and your competitors are offering.  It’s the seller’s job to explain why they are the best solution for the customer’s problem. The purpose of this section of the funnel is to highlight your expertise and begin the process of lead nurturing.

The best content for this stage are webinars and live communication features. These give the marketers and customers a space to interact with live questions and discussions. Email marketing is also a great way to offer relevant and consistent content. Don’t forget to include clear calls to action that will convert leads.

Bottom of the Funnel: Purchase

At the final stage, the buyer has decided they are ready to make a purchase, but they have not yet decided the source of their purchase. Providing them with access to the solution as well as some incentives will likely turn a prospective buyer to a customer.

Clear calls to action linked to trial offers, video tutorials, and product information can have a huge impact on prospective customers. Aligning your offers with educational and entertaining testimonials is an effective technique. It’s also wise to creating a purchasable demo based on a free plan that entices customers to access its premium features.

Pay Attention to the Buyer’s Journey

Above all, remember to consider your clients’ needs first. From there, develop your funnel in order to fulfill these needs at each stage. If the sales funnel is implemented correctly and your content is helpful to customers, your lead conversion rate will definitely increase.

Download Our White Paper Guide To Learn How To Perfect Buyer Personas For Your Business

b2b marketing strategy

Integrating Story Branding With Your B2B Marketing Strategy

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Marketers have realized that their audiences’ attention spans are getting shorter by the day. In an effort to get it back, they resort to anything to engage them: humor, sex, etc. However, it is one thing to get involved in a commercial and another to get involved in a brand. Successful brands market by forging a deeper emotional connection using story branding which is a part of attraction marketing.

In a technique called The Hero’s Quest, they create a story with a hero, a conflict, and a resolution. The hero has a certain drive like love that leads him to action past certain barriers and eventual conquest. Generating emotional connection with the story is what sells. To be successful in B2B marketing strategy, make your brand the hero of your own story.

Where story branding and marketing integrate:

Distinction

Consumers have vast amounts of choice today but are drawn to the one they can relate to. Distinction is vital in any marketing strategy. A good, realistic brand story enhances a brand’s overall presence regardless of its competitive position in the industry. The right perception hits the audiences’ emotional quotient, tipping it in your favor. Wrapping up your brand in a more meaningful story context further adds value to it. To fellow businesses, buying your product will mean getting higher utility compared to the others in the competition.

Humanizing your brand

A successful B2B marketing strategy is one that humanizes your brand. A brand story cannot be underestimated in doing the job. Individual experiences like those of Steve Jobs, when fed into a company message, go a long way in personalizing and even achieving celebrity like status for your brand. You can use employee or your founder experience for this. Although you cannot have complete control of your story, a little positive twist helps to strengthen it by making it more interesting. Your marketing strategy is even boosted further as a result. A story should be a corporate persuasion tool that leads your audience to you.

Read more on 4 Strategies For Improving Your B2B Customer Experience.

Emotion is more compelling than a straight fact

In spoken word, good oratory skills are regarded highly and can be more compelling when they involve more emotion than fact. Arousing an audiences’ emotion can create big turnaround in your brand path. The Royal navy for example, uses stories to boost confidence and productivity where it is expected of the military to have a tough, factual approach to communication. That B2B cannot use warm and emotive storytelling is not a true rationale. Make your story more willingly received and memorable to achieve greater marketing success.

Interplay

There is a two way exchange between telling a story and marketing success. Story branding strengthens your business whereas a good, stronger business performance reinforces your story. Similarly, poor performance becomes part of your brand story just as easily. A B2B marketing strategy can be shaped but success will always depended on perception. Story branding is one way of building this perception.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

30 Ways to Boost Instagram Engagement & Following

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Looking for ways to boost your social media brand presence? Knowing how to increase brand engagement on Instagram, the latest and hippest social media platform app, is a great start. People are online all day due to working from home. Virtual shopping has risen due to restrictions and pandemic fears. As we have geared toward a more online world, your brand’s presence on the web is more important now than ever.

Why Instagram?

According to Forbes, 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business or brand, and 200 million users on Instagram visit business profiles daily. 70% of users turn to Instagram to look up a brand, and 60% learn about new products using Instagram. Now is the time to catch up with the competition that is already using these trends to their advantage.

Here is a compilation of our 30 best marketing tips for businesses to grow Instagram engagement and following in 2020:

Instagram Profile and Posting Habits

  1. Get to know the Instagram app and master how to use its basic features such as uploading posts and stories.
  2. Write a compelling Instagram bio and integrate it into your brand personality.
  3. Keep posts visually consistent to meet your brand’s style guide and tone.
  4. Incorporate categorized pinned stories on your Instagram page so it is easily navigable and can be used as a resource for sharing your brand identity to consumers.
  5. Optimize captions using brand hashtags and relevant hashtags with high popularity. (Determine if a hashtag is trending by typing the hashtag in the instagram search bar to see how many posts come up with the hashtag.)
  6. Use tools such as Hashtagsforlikes to optimize hashtags to use for your business sector.
  7. Create and promote a specific branded hashtag for a campaign. Encourage others to share the hashtag with it theming around a relevant, trending topic that consumers are passionate about.
  8. Use local hashtags and geotags on posts in order to attract local users on Instagram in a similar way SEO works for the web.
  9. Post consistently with both posts and stories, including videos, polls, and other interactive elements to keep followers engaged and entertained with your content. 
  10. Start conversations using Instagram stories stickers and polls.
  11. Schedule Instagram stories to generate more views.
  12. Keep in mind that 40% of Instagram videos do not have sound on, so ensure you caption relevant verbal content.
  13. Convert instagram followers into email subscribers by making your Instagram a business account and promoting your email subscriptions in your Instagram posts and stories.
  14. Monitor your tagged photos to ensure a good reputation, and un-tag your account on posts that are irrelevant or spam, so they do not appear on your profile.
  15. Add a link to instagram stories in order to generate website traffic.
  16. Use humor through gif’s and memes to execute your brand message through a creative angle.

Increasing your Instagram following

  1. Optimize SEO on instagram by paying vital attention to your Instagram handle and name. It is very important that your handle (@…) reflects your business industry. Try to make it short, sweet, and with relevant words. The account name should reflect the account handle and industry because it is what Instagram checks its searches against when users type a word or emoji in the search bar.
  2. Partner with micro influencers.
  3. Run a contest, giveaway, or raffle entry through your account page.
  4. Invest in Instagram ads, which targets customers with personalization and buyer persona techniques.
  5. Create “savable” content, or posts that are aesthetically pleasing, informationally useful or relevant. This will entice followers to save the content to their library and increases the chances of further brand awareness. Simultaneously, creating desirable content provides people a reason to continue following your page and share your content.
  6. Participate in popular conversations on accounts with high following and public relevance in order to get your instagram handle out there and quickly generate new followers.
  7. Encourage followers to re-share your Instagram stories through incentives of discount promotion codes and/or contests.
  8. Open up about your business with a weekly featured vlog of the day in the life of an employee, an interesting biographical picture and captioned story of the founders, or inspirational quote from the CEO.
  9. Follow relevant accounts and users following competition in your industry to gain followers back.
  10. Promote your Instagram on other social media accounts. Feature your Instagram account in your Twitter and Facebook bios, and make a post promoting your Instagram page with a link.
  11. If your Facebook has many likes or followers already, consider linking your Facebook and Instagram together to boost your Instagram following.

6 Social Media Trends to Follow in 2020

Keeping Track of your Instagram Performance

  1. Ensure your account is in business mode to automatically receive valuable insights and analytics on how your posts are doing.
  2. Regularly test and analyze new content to post to your Instagram.
  3. Use a free follower tracking app to regularly unfollow accounts that do not follow yours back in order to maintain a good follower/following ratio while continuously following new accounts.

We hope these 30 tips with various resources serve you well on your journey to becoming an Instagram lead-generation powerhouse. Happy “gram-ing”!

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buyer persona

Lessons Learned: Buyer Persona Gone Wrong

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Before a company can establish a solid marketing plan, it must be aware of the specific target markets or customer profiles it has the best chance to attract to its product or service. Creating a buyer persona is essential to effective attraction marketing.

Market Segmentation

In order to perfect your approach in buyer persona launch, these are some common mistakes to avoid:

  1. Don’t Forget to Focus on the Buyer Decision

The most common mistake marketers make is solely defining a buyer persona by the buyer profile, rather than putting detailed consideration in what is most useful: the buyer decision.

How to fix this:

Aside from using previous data, we recommend using the research questions provided by 5 Rings of Buying Insight™, which incorporates every aspect you need to know about your buyer persona’s decision making process:

  1. Priority initiatives – What causes certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours? What is different about buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?
  2. Success factors – What operational or personal results do your buyers expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?
  3. Perceived barriers – What concerns cause your buyers to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?
  4. Buyer’s journey – Who and what impacts your buyers as they evaluate their options and make a selection?
  5. Decision criteria – Which aspects of competing products, services, solutions, or companies do your buyers perceive as most critical? What do your buyers expect for each?

Ultimate Guide to the Buyer’s Journey- Find out What Each Stage of the Buyer’s Journey Entails

  1. Keep Your Research Questions Simple and Sweet

Marketers often stray from insightful target market findings if they use too much detail in their research questions. When conducting research about your buyer persona through surveys or focus groups, avoid questions that are overly personal or technical. This may deviate your campaign away from any productive findings that would help you truly get to know your ideal customer niche.

How to fix this:

When developing questions, it is best to start by establishing what the key problems or questions are that you ultimately want answers for.  You may start with a larger, broader list of questions… however, do not make the mistake of forgetting to shave it down. In the end, all questions should lead to answers that are simple, sweet, and directly related to the problem trying to be solved at hand.

 

  1. Assuming About the Buyer Persona Leads Campaigns Astray

It is important to remember that the most helpful information comes directly from the customers. When researching a potential buyer persona, it is crucial to avoid filling in the blanks, skipping the interview, or assuming anything about the client. A campaign could go in the complete wrong direction if this occurs.

How to fix this:

Rather than making an incorrect assumption based on survey results, in-depth conversations with people can provide the answers you need to bring your brand to the next level. Additionally, a small sample size may lead to incorrect assumptions. Since quality > quantity, and many agencies fixate too much into demographic or other obvious information rather than actually helpful insights, in-depth interviews are again a solution to avoiding this mistake. In order to avoid an over-reliance on anecdotes, always ensure they are backed up by data. You know what they say about assuming… it definitely does not make an accurate buyer persona!

 

  1. Less is More: Master One Buyer Persona First!

It is important to focus on mastering one target market rather than taking on too many to handle. Trying to tackle too many buyer personas at once can overwhelm. This results in a lower quality of target profile insights and vague understanding of individual buyer personas.  Before deciding to take on another buyer persona, it is important to know that this new initiative will bring about sufficient revenue and that your company has the resources necessary to execute.

How to fix this:  

Instead of pondering how many buyer personas to generate, it is important to first focus on establishing how many ways your company needs to market its product or service as the solution for a given buyer persona. Once these are established, it is much easier to gauge if another buyer persona should emerge.

 

  1. One Stock Photo Cannot Fit All

Though stock photos incorporate a creative, personable, and emotion-driven touch to a targeted campaign. However, marketers often forget that one stock photo cannot fit all customers within a buyer persona. Do not make the common mistake of overthinking a stock photo to the point it (mis)leads your campaign into the (wrong) direction.

How to fix this:

In order to solidify your campaign, be sure to start the buyer persona creation process with fleshed out, concrete ideas about who exactly your target market is. Only then should you allow yourself to do the fun part of depicting this persona; stock photos should embellish your envisioned buyer persona- not create it.

More on Buyer Personas:

buyer persona guide for business