Marketing campaigns can’t generate any real value for the company without a proper strategy in place. You can host webinars, write articles and be a guest on podcasts, but without a solid go-to-market strategy, the leads you generate won’t translate into valuable sales opportunities. As a result, you’ll see a lot of activity but very little payoff.

The best marketing strategy includes multiple facets that, when combined, offer the maximum return on investment (ROI).

A solid marketing strategy includes these steps:

1. Baselining: understand your company’s identity, value proposition and business objectives.
2. Benchmarking: map your company’s performance relative to your direct competitors.
3. Conduct a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis: highlight business strengths and expose weaknesses.
4. Create buyer personas: define your potential buyers with a buyer persona.
5. Conduct SEO analysis: define your priority keywords.
6. Create a media plan: enhance conversion rates.
7. Use an executive brief: share the strategy with the entire organization to maintain alignment.

Defining your buyer persona is crucial to the success of each facet of developing your marketing strategy. Buyer personas should be based on data to ensure that your strategy targets the right prospects for your particular product/service. In this article, we’ll review the benefits of buyer personas and how to create one to improve sales.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are a compilation of data that can help training providers identify who their buyers are, what they’re looking for and why they would buy your solution. Buyer personas are representations of an organization’s ideal buyer. And they can provide insights into their target audience such as buyers’ goals, challenges and their budget.

Your buyer personas should be targeted to direct decision-makers who will buy your product, services or courses. This is different from your audience, which also includes buyers, users, influencers and potential influencers. Your buyer personas should be for a narrower sub-group versus your audience — but which one should you market to? Both! However, the way you market to leads in your buyer persona should be different. In the next section, we’ll review examples of how to market to buyers and the benefits of having a buyer persona.

Benefits of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas can help businesses understand who their target audience is and can inform decision-making across the organization. Understanding a buyers’ goals and pain points can help create marketing campaigns with messaging that is tailored to their audience, increasing engagement and leading to higher conversion rates as well as stronger customer loyalty.

The benefits of buyer personas are that you can understand your buyers’ pain points, which should be the fundamental strategy for your marketing campaigns. Here are a few examples of buyer persona data from Training Industry’s research, along with how they can impact your learning and development (L&D) marketing campaigns when utilized correctly:

1. According to the research, 46% of the 810 respondents indicated that their primary challenge during training is increasing learner engagement. A custom content company utilized this data to send targeted emails highlighting the increased engagement from their created content, leading to 43% more activity from their campaign.
2. And 44% of the 810 respondents highlighted limited resources, such as budget, time, etc., as a primary challenge. A learning management system (LMS) company utilized this data to host a demo showing how their solution could help decrease the time needed for subject matter experts (SMEs) to streamline content, leading to a 22% increase in registrants when compared to their competitors.

Using buyer persona data to tailor marketing campaigns targeting the L&D community boosts engagement, leading to increased leads, conversions, opportunities, and conversations.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

While a marketing team can tackle creating their buyer persona on their own, many will lean on a trusted partner to guide them through the process. Industry experts can easily identify buyer personas based on the large database of information collected through surveys, interviews and more.

Buyer personas are created by researching and analyzing data collected from a company’s current audience and prospective buyers.

You can create buyer personas by:

1. Collecting data: Collect data through surveys, interviews or focus groups on the buyers’ goals, challenges, buying journey and preferences. Surveys and interviews should include demographic questions such as job title, industry and company size along with questions around buying preferences and budget.
2. Segmenting data: Analyze the data to find trends and themes that can segment the target audience. Look for common characteristics and buying preferences that fit the needs of the organization.
3. Creating profiles: Based on the commonalities identified when segmenting the audience, create buyer persona profiles that provide details around each buyer. To make a profile more relatable, provide a name, picture and a synopsis of their buying journey.

Identifying Your Buyer Persona

One of the most effective marketing tactics is highlighting a pain point and showing how your company can solve that problem. Utilizing buyer persona data can help ensure that you’re targeting the right people, tailoring your messages to align with what they’re experiencing, putting your content in the right places and meeting your buyer where they are with a solution that will help solve their problems.

Buyer personas are crucial to any marketing strategy. If you need help creating buyer personas to take your marketing efforts to the next level, connect with us! Training Industry specializes in making connections and helping training providers meet their business goals. You can contact us for more information.

If you need help marketing your training company, let us help connect you with over 250,000 learning and development professionals.

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