Recalibrate your buyer personas in times of change

by | Nov 12, 2020 | Content

Change is a constant, but lately it’s been a bit extra. And chances are, your target audience might be shifting as well. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally adjusted the ways we live: many of us have lost or changed jobs, our home lives have new dynamics, we’re spending more time outside, we’ve cancelled plans and maybe even rethought our long-term trajectories. With all this change, it’s more important than ever to recalibrate your marketing strategies, starting with your buyer personas.

A buyer persona should be representative of your ideal customer and reflect their motivations and behavior patterns. A well-developed, realistic persona will help hone your marketing strategy so it can cut through the digital noise and actually reach your target buyer. In other words, spending time on your personas will help you achieve greater customer success.

We’ll walk you through some key questions to help you make sure your personas are still on target:

Getting to know your buyer

The first step is, of course, getting to know your buyer. The personas you envision should be so clear and all-encompassing that you can predict their decision making and action taking. The three questions below will help guide your recalibration (or, help you get started if you have yet to develop your persona(s)). Only when you know the answer to these questions should you decide how to market to your buyer.

  1. Where are they and how can you reach them? Consider both their preferred avenues for information consumption (ex: local news, Twitter, e-mail newsletters) and the associated mechanisms to reach them (ex: quick snippets, longform media, stories). The answers to this question will determine where and how you market your product or service.
  2. What are their major challenges and worries, and are you still serving those? In other words, think about how you are providing a solution to your buyer. You should be offering them something that will save them time, money, or otherwise solve a problem that they are facing. Really diving into the big challenges or concerns facing your buyer will help you narrow in on your marketing strategy and make sure you’re clearly articulating how you’re serving them. The answer to this question will determine what aspect of your product or service is most enticing to your buyer, and therefore on what you should focus your content.
  3. What are their goals? Maybe pre-COVID, their goals were lofty and ambitious. Now, however, your buyer may be focused on more tangible, bite-sized goals. The answer to this question will help you double-check that your buyer personas are, well, actually real potential buyers. If not, then it’s possible your strategy hasn’t been working because you’re marketing to the wrong buyers in the first place.

Last check: are you speaking your buyer’s generational code?

If you’re not speaking their language, they’re not listening. Knowing your buyers inside and out also means you know their generational code and are speaking it in your marketing. For example, Gen-Z buyers tend to be cause-oriented digital natives that want candid content. If you’re presenting them with buttoned-up, formal content, they’re not likely to listen nor to trust that you understand them (despite how hard you tried in questions 2 and 3 above).

The bottom line

Having clear buyer personas is a key step in creating a successful marketing strategy. It will guide you to where you should market, how you should market and what you should market in order to reach your target buyer. In times like these, it’s especially important to recalibrate your buyer personas to make sure you’re still being guided in the right direction.

Still not sure how to develop a buyer persona to guide your marketing strategy? No worries! We’re here to help. Contact us today to get started.