Buyer personas and customer journey mapping are terms that have been thrown around in marketing for years; however, only recently have digital marketers come to realize how important these can be for creating successful inbound marketing campaigns.

This post is the first in a series of four that is designed to give you insights into developing the tools that your organization needs to more accurately understand your target audience, and expand your promotional reach. Here are the different parts of this series you can look forward to over the next few days:

• Part 1: What is a Buyer Persona Anyway?
• Part 2: The Science of Creating a Buyer Persona
• Part 3: Mapping the Customer Journey
• Part 4: Mind the Gaps: Filling Holes in Your Client’s Content Strategy

So here it goes.

Understanding your customers is tricky business for most organizations. In marketing, you’re typically relying on things like kickoff calls, onboarding surveys, SLA agreements, or the occasional lunch meeting to really get a sense of who your clients’ customers are, and how to create unique, relevant content that will generate buzz, leads, and more customers.

In 2015, creating buyer personas for your clients’ customer base is no longer a whimsical fantasy that should be considered at executive roundtables; these should be considered as tools to help you build stronger, better quality content and campaigns for your clients.

So how do we define the buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fabricated depiction of your (client’s) model customer/buyer/shopper that is based on 1) market research and 2) hard data collected on real customers.

They offer you increased organization of clients’ customer data, and can aid your team in knowing how best to spend time when crafting a new inbound marketing campaign.

Buyer personas are tools for gaining insights about your clients’ existing and potential customer base that guide product messaging, assist in developing concepts for content, and should inform the audience you target with any type of paid advertising.

Now that your mind is spinning about what this means for you and your organization, how do you go about actually building or creating a buyer persona? This question and others will be answered in Part 2: The Science of Creating a Buyer Persona. Stay tuned!

Read the complete series:

• Part 1: What is a Buyer Persona Anyway?
• Part 2: The Science of Creating a Buyer Persona
• Part 3: Mapping the Customer Journey
• Part 4: Mind the Gaps: Filling Holes in Your Client’s Content Strategy

Much success,