For your inbound financial marketing to be a success, you need to move beyond trying to attract anyone and everyone to your website. Capturing high-quality leads that are likely to convert, starts with engaging your specific target audience.

So, how do you find out who they are? By creating a strong set of buyer personas.

Buyer personas are representations of your ideal clients. They usually included generalised biographies that cover everything your business is targeting; age, gender, needs, goals, behaviours etc. These personas can then be used to create value-adding content they will love and engage with.

In order to be useful, buyer personas should be based on real information rather than gut instinct. Here are 5 steps you can follow, in order to create strong buyer personas to use with your financial marketing.

 

1 – Audience Research

You should always start with thorough client research. If not, you will likely end up targeting people who you want to be your audience, rather than those who actually are. Start with your current client database, subscriber lists and social media followers. Use them to gather together all the key information you can; age, location, language, income, buying behaviour, interests, etc. You might also want to consider supplementing this with client surveys.

 

2 – Identify pain points

Once you have an overview of your clients, you need to consider their pain points. What are they trying to solve? What is limiting them? What barriers do they face? What do they struggle to understand? If you have a customer service team you could also check in with them to see what questions and/or complaints they get the most.

 

3 – Identify goals

While pain points are problems your clients wish to solve, goals are positive things they are looking to achieve. Think about their motivations and aspirations, and remember, depending on your niche these goals could be professional or personal. If the goals don’t match directly to your services don’t worry. The information can be used to form the basis of a marketing campaign, or inform the tone your copy should take.

 

4 – Use the data to inform your brand

Now you understand your clients’ pain points and goals, you need to use this data to create a clear picture of how your brand and services can add value to their lives. In order to do this you need to change to thinking of your business from a buyers point of view. This means it’s time to stop thinking of features and start thinking of benefits.

 

5 – Create your buyer personas

Look through all the data you have gathered and look for common characteristics. Grouping these together will form the basis of your unique buyer personas. For example, say you’ve identified a core group of professional men in their 40’s, who live in commuter cities with their families and are the main breadwinner.

From there you add characteristics to turn that group into a persona that you can identify with. Start by giving them a name and a job title, then add defining characteristics that would rightly be considered part of the core group. Finally, don’t forget to include those all-important pain-points and goals.

Once you have your set of buyer personas, you can use them to inform how your business, brand, services, content and incentives can be used to target your audience directly.

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