Do you love fishing?
Or paintball?
Perhaps you spend your free time antiquing? Or bungee jumping?
Everyone is different, with unique hobbies, interests, and things that make them tick.
In marketing, this is one of the most important lessons to learn.
Who’s buying your product or service?
Know your audience. It’s one of the cardinal rules of marketing. If you know who your audience is, what they need, what they are looking for, then you can give them what they want at the right time and make them happy.
That works fine for the corner store in a small town. But what about B2B marketers who are trying to engage hundreds or even thousands of potential customers online at once? And not even people you know, but those who may only have interacted with your brand in an email or on a landing page, or not yet heard of your business at all?
That’s where buyer personas come in.
A buyer persona is a detailed outline of the type of individual who is likely to be interested in your product. It includes a whole lot of detail about their possible age, job title, interests, pain points, available budget, past buying behavior and much more.
In digital marketing today, it is important to sketch out the profile of potential buyers that you want to target, and not just one. You may have several buyer personas that you are targeting, each with their different needs and problems to solve.
According to HubSpot, websites that are built based on buyer personas are 2 to 5 times more effective and user friendly. Plus, emails personalized to buyer personas see 14% improvement in clickthrough rate and 10% improvement in conversions.
Why personas matter
Buyer personas matter because they are your guiding light to how to create marketing campaigns and messages that will resonate to succeed in engaging them. For example, if your buyer persona doesn’t spend much time on LinkedIn, then there is no point in targeting them there with PPC ads. Or if your buyer persona is hyper-concerned about climate change, then you know not to send them a glossy printed brochure about your new product launch.
Understanding who is buying your product or service and what their needs are, is a key component in marketing. You can’t possibly know most of the customers you are targeting online, so a persona-based strategy is the best way to approach them.
Let’s take a look at what can happen when you combine buyer personas with corporate gifting too.
Corporate gifting according to personas. It’s smarter.
The best gifts are those given with thought and intention. Show a customer you have taken the time to know them by giving an appropriate, engaging and relevant gift.
Did you know that 49% of corporate gifts are cards or calendars, 26% are restaurant or shopping vouchers and another 23% are company branded items? Go beyond boring corporate swag. Make sure to craft personas and then consider what gifts will make the most sense to them at every stage of interaction. Use gifts to really engage customers through the marketing funnel.
For example, a recent Outgage campaign featured a golf themed gift as an incentive to book a sales meeting. The target persona? Mostly male, middle aged individuals in managerial positions with high income.
Of course, not every prospect is interested in golf but a on-point message still grabs their attention. The gift may not hit the mark 100% of the time. Rather, it’s about using demographics as a guide.
Here’s another example: many C-suite executives receive an awful lot of gifts (and many useless ones) or cannot accept the gift either from a regulatory or policy standpoint. Why not stand out with a gift of a charitable donation to an organization that speaks to their personal or professional heart? A charitable gift is a great way to engage and get your brand noticed.
Finally, automation is one of the reasons why buyer personas can be so effective. Once you have your ideal prospect profiles, campaigns can be created with the best messaging to suit their personality. Then, you can automate targeted campaigns for each buyer persona, and expand your campaign reach and engagement far more efficiently.
But wait, there’s a hitch
Accurate persona-based marketing requires deep insights about buyer characteristics, behaviors and interests. According to Forrester, 75% of automated, personalized engagement campaigns will not succeed due to insufficient buyer insight.
Luckily, there is a solution. For corporate gifting campaigns, the Outgage platform track recipients throughout the gifting workflow. This enables marketers to understand levels of engagement at every stage. With this data, marketers can consolidate their persona-based strategies and optimize gifting campaigns to achieve even better conversions and ROI.
Prep your personas
Buyer personas are an effective way to tailor gifting campaigns to be more appealing to speak to buyer's interests. B2B marketers know it – 44% of B2B marketers are already using personas for their marketing efforts. Are you?
