A buyer persona allows you to get inside your audience’s head and determine what their needs and problems are. Once you know how they think, you can work toward meeting those needs and offering solutions.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published on 7/13/16 and has been updated for accuracy and comprehension.
This is the third blog in a series of articles covering inbound marketing for motivational speakers and authors.
Catch the series here:
Inbound Marketing Companies Get Outrageous Success -- Here's Why (Part 1)
Inbound Marketing Services That Drive Revenue (Part 2)
How to Align Your Marketing Strategies to Your Buyers (for speakers) (Part 3)
Inbound Marketing Series: How to Start a Blog – for Professional Speakers (Part 4)
What Is SEO Marketing? (Part 5)
Why Your Inbound Marketing Strategy Should Include Social Media (For Speakers) (Part 6)
Best Email Strategy to Power Your Inbound Marketing (Part 7)
How to Solve Your Biggest Sales Problems and Revenue Shortages (Finale)
If you’re like most professional speakers, you know your stuff.
Perhaps you’re a sales genius.
A human resources guru.
A social media phenom.
But when it comes to your marketing strategies, your genius won’t get you anywhere.
You see, it’s all about the people.
In inbound marketing speak, this is your buyer persona, or the people you are selling to.
There’s likely a gap between what you know about your customers and how to effectively market to them.
If you can fill in that gap, you’ll ramp up your sales revenue significantly.
Here’s what your outbound marketing strategy probably looks like: You chasing customers for sales.
If you notice in this image, for the outbound model, it's all about the business.
How they can make money from their customers.
It’s never about the prospects’ needs.
But it should be.
In this model – using the inbound method – it’s all about:
...through free content.
We’ve already talked about why you should make the switch to inbound marketing and how the pieces of the inbound puzzle work together, using four strategic steps:
We’ve also covered WHY inbound marketing works to give you a bigger speaker platform than you’d ever dreamed about.
But first, you need to build a foundation upon which to build your marketing approach, by getting inside your buyer's mind.
Inbound marketing strategies like your blog, email, website and social are constructed on your buyer persona. (You may have more than one.)
Think of it this way:
Your customers, or their needs and problems, are very real.
And they’re looking for problem-solvers.
If you can get inside their heads and intimately speak to them about their needs, well, that’s when things will really start to hum.
What are your buyer's largest challenges? What obstacles can you help them overcome? Asking yourself these questions helps set the scene for getting your inbound marketing built.
Let’s create a buyer persona example that will highlight how the inbound process works.
Let’s say you’re a motivational speaker on leadership.
You believe your primary customer or audience is “anyone who runs a business.”
And while that’s perhaps true, you can’t effectively sell to EVERYBODY.
Trying to sell your product to every person who runs a business is short-sighted and will actually demolish your marketing and sales efforts at every turn.
Your primary customer, however, might be someone who runs a business AND:
Once you know more about who your client is, you can dive even deeper into her fears and worries, problems and challenges:
Do you see how these concerns could drive your buyer persona development?
With this kind of insight, you’ll be able to craft a separate email autoresponder series on motivation, leadership, innovation, inspiration, strategies, and so on.
You can create blog articles that speak to each need, building your authority and increasing your brand awareness.
Your social media will drill down into your buyer persona’s needs, wants and sales objections, building a high-level overview of how you can help and inspiring solutions.
Learning how your buyers think, feel and act will empower your inbound marketing efforts and help your business really take off.
