Leveraging Customer Personas for Targeted Lead Generation

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The essence of driving traffic and engagement to your website is to make sales and convert your online visitors into customers. When the audience is aware of what you offer and connects well such that they purchase a product or service on your website, you can now gradually build a targeted lead list and nurture leads for maximum conversion

You can’t connect with a customer when you don’t see through their stress or pain point. It takes empathy and proffering solutions to a targeted lead generation before you win a prospect’s trust. This is why lead targeting is essential in digital marketing or lead campaign. 

You don’t give what is meant for a bird to a lion. Likewise, in marketing, for you to attract personas for conversion, you must feed their thirty interests by solving problems for them. To do that, you have to understand customer persona; which means a representation of a targeted lead generation or potential customers. In this article, you will be able to understand how important it is to leverage customer persona for targeted lead generation.

Who is a Customer Persona?

This represents an ideal customer, and it is required that you know about their behaviour, values, and also your content marketing objectives. A customer persona is also called a model for your lead targeting. It is important to note what drives your target audience and why they buy your products; that way, you can channel more helpful strategies to retain your targeted lead generation.

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Importance of Customer Persona for Targeted Lead Generation

Customer persona is important to help the marketing team achieve a successful targeted lead generation campaign by increasing conversion. Below are the benefit of personalizing buyer persona in targeted lead generation.

Improves Lead Targeting

This helps you focus on your objective. That way, you can attract your target customers to take action. Once they provide useful information to research, you can convey the right messages that interest them. You can improve lead target in different ways, such as A/B testing, keyword research, target advertising and market survey.

It helps you Customize your Content Format

Personalizing content gives the targeted lead generation the confidence to trust your judgments. Persona information gives you an edge in making the right decisions in crafting content through the most accepted formats through social media posts, blog post, press releases, etc. To provide the right content for your targeted lead generation, you must:

• Address customer persona pain points.
• Create content relevant to a buyer’s journey, even if it means creating multiple personas.
• After addressing these vital steps, you can create compelling content that satisfies their needs.

It helps you Discover Audience Behaviour

To have an optimum targeted lead generation, customer persona helps you discover audience behaviour to assign a lead score to them and follow up appropriately for an effective conversion rate. Knowing what topic interests them and where these conversations drive more traffic then, you can take advantage of customer’s online behaviour for your business growth.

It Helps You Build Alignment Between the Sales and Marketing Teams

Sales and marketing impact the lead generation process from start to finish; every team has its role in converting a lead to loyal customers. This is why working together as a team to nurture better high quality leads generated from marketing down to conversion is essential. 

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Steps to Leverage Customer Persona For Effective Targeted Lead Generation

Customer data profiling is necessary for reaching targeted leads because it helps you prepare your team by knowing what to expect throughout the persona’s journey. Every sales team wants a qualified lead that will effortlessly move throughout the cycle. To achieve that, you need to follow the right steps:

Identify Your Customers

To get more qualified leads, you need to define your target audience and know their expectations. Creating an idea buyer personas is the first thing to do, for example, if you want to reach first-time preggy mothers who know nothing about childbearing. You should know how to convey your message to these expectant new moms knowing that different persons experience different reactions at each stage of their pregnancy. This will go a long way to improve your lead quality by connecting with their emotions to take action, such as booking an appointment.

However, you can identify customer segments using criteria such as demographics, psychographics, behaviours, and value in your lead generation strategies. Use tools such as cluster analysis too group your customer personas based on similarities and differences for targeted lead generation.

Collection of Reliable Data

The lack of quality data for targeted lead generation will result in the failure of marketing in general. Your data should give details of your ideal target audience. Using templates to guide you through creating detailed customer persona is not bad. It is essential because it includes information such as:

• Name
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Pain points
• Expectation
• Buying behaviour, etc.

To make customer data more realistic, images of each persona with these attributes beside the image will give a clear representation of how to follow up targeted lead. Also, to gather reliable data, you can track website visitors, see how they interact with your content, and monitor the trends of consistent buyers.

For B2B companies, the marketing teams use detailed contact forms to reduce the risk of sending unqualified leads sales items.

Update Customer Persona

Change is always constant, which applies to our daily life engagement. This depends on marketing and buyers preferences that can change over time. Various factors may affect targeted business leads which can result from competitors actions, market trends and budgets. There is need to update regularly and ensure it reflects to their current needs. Asking for feedbacks from customers is the first step to updating customer persona.

Buyers personas are roadmap that directs you through a customers buying journey which include likes, dislikes, habits, etc. Your sales and marketing teams should be ready at all times to proffer solutions.

There are 8 Epic ways to updating a customer persona:

• Review the existing buyer persona and adjust your sales teams methods as your company evolves.
• Ensure personas updates are in line with companies targeted sales.
• Analyze websites and social media data.
• Interview existing and potential customers
• Communicate with your sales and marketing team on the lead generation strategy to follow.
• Revise with various free tools and create templates for your customer persona.
• Input your buyer persona into your CRM contact data to generate targeted leads.
• Check to see whether your updated buyer persona sales process is effective.

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Building Relationship

Building relationships through the buyer’s journey is the most effective way to find targeted sales leads. Most businesses ignore this step and miss out on getting quality leads. You can utilize customers’ data to build connections intended to facilitate relationships between the sales and marketing efforts. 

You can build relationships on human-to-human interaction, making you eager to connect with buyers. You can use buyer’s data to score leads and gain insight into your target prospects.

How to build relationships with targeted lead?

• Providing customers with excellent customer service, such as accessibility through websites, emails, and empathy for targeted lead generation. 
• Understand your buyer’s pain point, by describing their state of mind.
• Personalize communication by offering recommendations and sending anniversary emails such as birthdays.
• Create value for customers by creating quality content, building community, and partnering with nonprofit organizations.
• Reward customers’ loyalty with incentives.
• Exceed the expectations of customers by reviewing customers feedback, 
• Communicate consistently using inbound and outbound marketing strategies.
• Finally, gather customers’ feedback.

Take advantage of Social Media Platforms 

Social media is a powerful tool used for the lead generation process. You can not complete a customer’s journey without using social media to interact. Here are some tips used to leverage social media targeted lead generation.

• Choose the right platform that your targeted leads use more frequently.
• Optimize your social media profiles with relevant information on your website link and contact.
• Create engagement content such as social media posts that resonates with targeted leads.
• Use social media ads/ paid advertizing  to target specific audiences.

Measure and Analyze Results 

To ensure the success of your targeted leads strategy, carry out analysis using Google Analytic tool to measure your lead generation results. You need to identify key metrics to help you track your conversion. The key metrics for analyzing targeted lead generation include:

• Conversion rates 
• Click-through rate and 
• Cost per lead.

You can determine the effectiveness of your targeted lead generation campaign by using these metrics. Google Analytics provides a free tool that provides insight into customers behaviour and website traffic. Also marketing automation platforms like Hubspot provide robust analytic capabilities to track targeted lead generation efforts. 

Conclusion 

The importance of customer persona can’t  be overemphasized in this article, some marketers fail to prioritize this while drawing out campaign plan for the company. Creating customer persona can shape the entire marketing progress and this is essential when it comes to B2B lead generation or sales funnel techniques. You must understand the value of targeted lead generation and how to reference targeted leads when creating inbound marketing campaigns.