With the digital market bigger than ever before — and only getting bigger with time — it’s no longer enough to just be a professional. We have to get personal.
With business, we’ve all heard that you have to keep it professional. But for the best success, you may need more than professionality. At Middlestate, we aim for both the personal and the professional in all our work: creative, digital marketing, and strategy.
With any type of content creation tasks, it’s easy to get fixation on completion. Research and write the post. Shoot the photos. Edit. Upload. Submit. The grind can become monotonous, and in the constant churn to pump out content, the digital assets that you produce can start to feel disingenuous. And disingenuity repels everyone, especially online.
How to combat the slog? Make content that shimmers with authenticity — true lightning in the bottle for marketers and digital strategists. Wondering how you can replicate great authentic material in your own work? The Middlestate strategy is simple. We develop a “buyer’s persona” for all of our clients in order to concoct a custom digital strategy and content cycles that hews to our clients’ goals and appeals directly to our clients’ current and potential future customers.
First off, what’s a buyer’s persona? A buyer’s persona is a detailed description and outline of a likely potential customer or client for a particular business. By creating a sophisticated silhouette of the person most likely to spend money at your establishment, as marketers, we can better target our advertising to the right audience in the right format. In short, think of it as the condensed Sparknotes of your typical buyer’s personality and other key characteristics: their wants, needs, behaviours, etc.
To begin creating buyer’s personas for your business or digital marketing clients, it’s important to think creatively, critically, and expansively. Give your buyer’s persona a quippy name. Run a craft cocktails bar? Margarita Maggie. Develop custom jewelry for brides? Blingy Brenda. Detail luxury cars? High-class Harry. Every time you locate something specific in your potential customers, you unlock information about your preferred customer base.
Margarita Maggie suggests your customer is fun, likes to have a good time, probably drinks your custom cocktails to socialize with friends. Armed with insight, your work as a digital strategist and copywriter for this custom cocktail bar should reflect this: posts should be light and fun in tone, promotions should encourage girls nights out and date nights, and with a demographically younger clientele base, these posts should be hitting platforms rich with the under 35s. Not too shabby of an outline of a potential customer and digital strategy through the power of a buyer’s persona.
Not all of developing a buyer’s persona is grounded in your imagination. At Middlestate we both recommend and use a data-informed approach to flesh out our buyer’s personas. If possible, go to the source — talk to real customers already frequenting your business. Through using incentives and clearly establishing that your desire to interview your customers is not a sales call in disguise, try to tease out key details about their everyday lives. Make the experience frictionless — at no point should it be difficult for an interviewee to say yes to your requests. During these interviews, try to capture the basics ranging from work experience to their digital “water holes”: where they read and when they read it. But most importantly, stay curious. Your follow up question to almost every response should be “Why?” Keep whittling away at your interviewee’s response until you hit the core answer of your original question.
After you’ve collected your quantitative and qualitative data, you can start to chisel out the most calibrated image of your potential customer. That’s powerful stuff! You have a clear outline of who’s most likely to digitally or physically walk through your door, what they like, their values, their spending habits, etc. So how do you maximize the effectiveness of your buyer’s persona for digital marketing to boost sales?
Buyer’s personas should help you figure out where to allocate your ad spend most wisely by the metrics. You should be able to point your staff in the right direction for the best ways for you to utilize your man hours for marketing by networking the right platforms and audiences. Your copywriting should be increasingly keyed into the language of your customer base; you should speak in the same tongues as your customers. Going forward, all your content creation should be developed keeping in mind the buyer’s persona: speaking to this person, adjusting its message to best suit their needs and desires. Even going through your back catalog of content poses benefits — auditing old work and trimming unaligned posts and blogs can help tighten your brand.
The buyer’s persona is a powerful tool that combines brand identity, digital savvy, and sales efficiency into one clean image. With it, you can generate the best content for your business and reach the right audience for the deepest impact.
Feeling inspired? Go get after making your own buyer’s persona for your business. Feeling energized by the Middlestate perspective? Drop a line to one of our researchers, designers, or digital strategists here. (We may have just captured you for our own buyer’s persona. :))
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