5 Marketing Strategies to Boost Engagement, Sales, and ROI With Your Buyer Personas

Jul 13

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The excitement of successfully completing customer persona research is second to none. After meticulous planning and careful execution to avoid the common mistakes people make with buyer personas, a marketer can’t be happier than when your efforts produce critical insights your team can leverage to score record-breaking sales.

Imagine the ah-ha moments when…

… Your persona research shockingly uncovered that moms of young children like to take secret trips to sip coffee in their bathrooms.

…Your buyer persona revealed that “Accountant Joe” prefers reading his emails on his 18-inch office desktop rather than from the tiny screens of his iPhone during his daily commute. Oops, your initial assumption was wrong!

…Your board of directors, VP of marketing, and the entire team are visibly awestruck as you reel out all these fantastic insights to the sitting crowd.

But when you are done with your presentation and the congratulatory handshakes are over, how can you convert all the fantastic insights within your buyer persona to sales?

In today’s blog post, we have compiled five marketing strategies you can use to really apply all that research you put into your audience personas.

Strategy #1: Optimize Your Ad Spend

From your persona research, you will discover both online and offline locations where your customers frequently visit or hang out when looking to buy your products or services. So how can you apply this information to increase engagement and sales?

Let’s use “Accountant Joe” from our earlier reference as an example. Armed with the knowledge that Joe habitually reads his emails on his office desktop instead of mobile gadgets, here are some tweaks that will increase engagement, sales, and ROI of your marketing activities:

Optimizing hours - Set your marketing campaigns (emails, digital ads, etc.) to go out during work hours – when you know Joe is likely at his desk.
Ads placement - If you previously set your social media ads to display only on mobile devices (brands running Facebook ads do this a lot), start spending more of your ad budget on desktop computer ads.
Marketing material format - Optimize marketing materials with formatting and graphics that are best designed for desktop display.
Platform preferences - Are your ideal customers fond of researching your products or services via Google before buying? Start spending more on Google search ads than Facebook or Instagram feed ads.
Location data - If your customers frequent a particular gym, restaurant, or local grocery store, consider ads with geofencing capabilities.
Messaging - If your persona indicates that a segment of your customers value family, setting up your ads with messaging themes or creative elements around “family” can build trust and increase conversion rate. An example is using a character who is portrayed as a family-loving person as the spokesperson in your ad video.

In a nutshell, adjust and reallocate your ad spend and marketing activities according to the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral patterns that your buyer person revealed.

Strategy #2: Allocate Your Workforce Right

Similar to the first strategy, you’ll want to reallocate your people resources across the different online and offline locations your ideal customers frequent.

For example, if you realize that a more significant portion of your target audience hangs out on Twitter than on Facebook, it would make sense to open and allocate more customer support staff to Twitter than to Facebook. Similarly, if more of your customers shop at Target instead of Walmart, it serves your business better to have more of your sales reps or support staff at the aisles of Target than at Walmart.

The idea is to have sufficient staff strength in the right places to cater to your customers’ needs without lapses. The other idea is to not waste money where you don’t need to!

Strategy #3: Segment and Communicate Appropriately

Using the geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral attributes in your buyer persona, segment your larger target audience into niche groups and design marketing messaging that best suits each segment.

For example, if your buyer persona reveals that a segment of your customers is politically inclined while another is averse to anything political, you need to keep that in mind when creating list segments for an email marketing campaign.

So, while you can use politics-related news and lingo in the email copy to pique the interest of and engage readers on the political list, you want to avoid anything political when wording emails for the politics-averse group. Segmenting your audience and carefully structuring your marketing message this way will not only prevent you from offending any segment of customers but also increase engagement and sales.

Audience and messaging segmentation aren’t only applicable and effective for digital marketing. It also increases response when used for offline marketing campaigns.

After all, 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a brand that personalizes their experience. (source)

Strategy #4: Acquire Ideal Customers & Prospects

To find new customers interested in buying collectible coins, the Royal Canadian Mint segmented its customer list and identified similarities between its best customers who purchased collectible coins. By analyzing their behavior and psychographics, they were able to create a new persona of customers likely to buy their collectible coins that were separate from the segment of infrequent coin-buyers.

Armed with their new buyer persona, Royal Canadian Mint launched a highly-targeted digital and print marketing campaign that spoke directly to a new set of prospects. Their targeted messaging and call-to-action resulted in the addition of over 140,000 new collectible coin customers to their books—from just one campaign! Not only that, the organization boosted its prospects for major coin purchases by 15%—leading to a promising pipeline for the following year’s revenue projections.

You can use the insights from your buyer persona to locate prospects similar to your ideal customers, market to them, and convert them into paying customers with relative ease and lower marketing spend. How the Royal Canadian Mint found and acquired customers for its sales of collectible coins business is a perfect example of using buyer personas to unlock new streams of customers.

Strategy #5: Form the Right Partnerships

When your buyer persona has pinpointed your ideal customers, you can use that information to seek partnerships and co-marketing opportunities with businesses with a similar audience type. Some examples of successful co-marketing campaigns are Sharpie and Nike; Volvo and LegoLand; Target and Lily Pulitzer; Mezzetta Pizza and Delta Airlines; Uber and Spotify, etc.

In addition to helping to attract new customers who buy from the complimentary business you’ve partnered with, this strategy may also help reduce your marketing costs.

Conclusion

We have listed 5 ways to get creative with your marketing personas to increase engagement, acquire new customers, optimize your return on marketing spend, and improve brand perception.

And if you read this blog post, think “oh wow, great ideas,” and fail to run with at least one of them, please know that it will deeply hurt the feelings of your buyer personas that have been sitting lonely, waiting to be leveraged to boost your sales, customer engagement, and marketing ROI.

Need help with custom-tailored marketing strategies guaranteed to give you the most traction you can get from your buyer personas? Book your strategy session!

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If you liked this article, you might like my blog post on The Best B2B Market Research Planning Template

Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands, including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.

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