How to Create Unique Buyer Personas for Event Marketing
You are constantly putting up content, social media posts, e-blasts, reviews, everything you can to encourage people to attend your upcoming event, but the numbers don’t seem to budge.
You are wasting precious revenue on marketing strategies experts claim should be working.
So what’s really going on?
It’s estimated that people are exposed to roughly 5,000 ads a day where the goals of marketing has transformed into the idea that they need to cover every space possible with their companies impressions, logos and campaigns.
This is not the way to capture a buyer's attention.
One reason marketers fail to bring in new leads, is because they are advertising to the data not the people.
Without knowing the exact wants, needs, experiences, emotions, and challenges of who you are trying to attract how can you connect with them?
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer based on real data and selected educated speculation about customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations and goals. (keep reading, this will all make sense I promise).
You create buyer personas to help identify what each of these specific groups desire and how to advertise to them.
This lets you tailor messages specialized for their needs and convey your message as a friend lending a helping hand.
How to create your personas
This is where the real work comes into play. It’s time to gather information and create a buyer persona on every possible target customer you can think of.
However, we can start with baby steps.
I recommend creating personas for your top 5 performing target customer groups.
This should be a team effort, so reach out to everyone that deals with these different groups; sales, service teams, marketing, back office, etc.
It’s important to gather as much perspectives as possible to make a well-rounded persona.
After finding your top 5 it’s time to start researching.
Things to think about are their psychographic and demographic information. Psychographic is their core motivations to doing business or attending an event.
Their psychographic information should teach you the following:
- What their goals are
- What success means to them
- What their job role or title is (this shows their purchasing power and position)
-
What publications or blogs they read
The demographic information you will want is their age range, income range, level of education and location for ad targeting.
- Age
- Income
- Level of education
- Location (add targeting)
Single Grain provides the following list of other information-gathering questions you should also answer:
- What is the buyer’s role in the company?
- What type of company does the buyer work for?
- What level of education has the buyer achieved?
- What does the buyer like to do for fun?
- What is the buyer’s gender?
- What is the buyer’s age?
- What is the buyer’s household income?
- Who lives with the buyer at home?
- Does the buyer live in an urban, suburban or rural environment?
- How does the buyer spend his/her day?
- What does the buyer read for fun?
- How tech savvy is the buyer?
- Which social networks does the buyer prefer?
- What are the buyer’s biggest challenges at work?
- How does the buyer define success in the workplace?
- What are the buyer’s career goals?
- What are the buyer’s biggest fears?
- What are the buyer’s most common objections?
- How can you help solve the buyer’s challenges?
- How does the buyer prefer to communicate?
Questions will vary depending on the services you offer.
You also have a variety of options you can use to find this information:
- Direct Mail
- Surveys & Questionnaires
- Talk with employees
- Talk with customers
-
Educated guesses until data is fully discovered
When creating your buyer persona templates you will want to give each persona a specific name that sums up what defines them so they are easily identified.
Remember not to group them based on their job functions, but their goals and what they are looking to achieve.
Buyer Persona template example:
Name: Researcher Rebecca
Persona Description: Rebecca loves to do all her research, compare products and find contacts before deciding on attending an event, purchasing a product or service.
She likes to have all the facts and if a company can’t give her that she is likely to move on.
Roles: Administrative assistant
Goals: She wants to experience life, but is cautious about doing so.
She wants to make sure anything she experiences or anywhere she goes has the best reviews, and online proof of its success to know she is making the right choice and not wasting time.
She is interested in learning more about modern technology, as she wants to get more into the digital world to move up in her career.
Challenges: She is usually busy at the office and doesn’t have time to do any research until she gets home. With two kids it’s hard to find the time to do just that.
She is constantly searching for reviews or different content to answer her questions, but has to jump around and get creative to find what she wants.
A landing page with all the information about something she is interested in, video reviews, blog links all in one spot might be ideal for her.
Finding something with all the answers on it might help end her search, because this not only portrays convenience, but a company that understands how she thinks and what she wants.
She is constantly seeking out blogs regarding the digital age of marketing, professional growth and development to help improve her skills in the working field.
Age: 25 - 40
Income Range: 41,000 - 60,000
Education: Associates Degree
Location: San Diego
Now create your own buyer persona by using the template below.