young man with cupped hand to his ear _ buyer personas motivate ideal clients to convert

How to Motivate Your Ideal Client to Convert

If your marketing messages are going to be compelling enough to generate new leads, you need to connect with your audience in a meaningful way.

Connections come from knowing your audience well. Like, really well. If you’ve ever heard someone say that they feel like a speaker was talking directly to them, that’s the kind of effect we’re talking about.

Your goal is to create marketing content that makes your audience feel like you’re speaking directly to them, and that you get what they’re going through. You understand their problems and therefore you also understand the right solutions just for them.

Powerful marketing connects emotionally with your audience. And if you can’t get that kind of connection, you won’t be able to motivate them to take action.

So how do you create that kind of connection?

You build out something called a buyer persona. It’s also called a customer avatar, but “avatar” makes me think of James Cameron, so we’re going to call it a buyer persona.

What Is a Buyer Persona?

Essentially, a buyer persona is an assimilation of all the information that you need to know about Who your ideal customer is. It’s basically a semi-fictional profile of this person.

Buyer personas are absolutely critical for successfully marketing your tech company. A persona captures everything that you need to know about who your target audience is:

What motivates them
The problems that they’re going through
How they feel
How to talk to them

Typically, you need to connect with more than one persona to generate a marketing lead, because you have multiple stakeholders and gatekeepers. So you’ll need to have a handful of buyer personas — maybe 3 to 7.

Create one persona for each type of audience you need to address on the journey towards a sale. Think about all the different types of people that your messaging needs to connect with. That might be an end user, a department head, the CFO, and the CEO. You might have different product lines or service offerings, and each one has a different ideal customer.

Each different person who has a different role or a different set of questions or different priorities — each of those people should be represented in their own buyer persona.

What’s in a Buyer Persona?

So what do you put in a buyer persona? It should include all of the relevant information that you need to know about your ideal customer.

DON’T include details that don’t matter. If you’re a B2B tech company, you probably don’t need to know how many kids your persona has, or what car they drive. But you do need to know information like:

Role and responsibilities
Age, sex, and education level
Motivations for success
Big problems, anxieties, and job-related fears
Where they look for answers to problems
What validations they use to evaluate possible solutions
Limitations they’re constrained by
Common questions
Common objections you’ll face

Imagine the difference it will make to your marketing when you have all of this information to inform your content. A fully fleshed out persona gives you an incredibly clear picture of the person you’re talking to.

Without this kind of guide, you’re just shooting in the dark and hoping you eventually hit something. That’s a great way to do a lot of damage.

How Do You Create a Buyer Persona?

Creating a buyer persona isn’t difficult, but you should be thoughtful and thorough about it.

Start with your internal sales team. Interview the sales reps and your customer support people, and anyone else who interacts with your ideal customers. Find out what they know about your ideal customers. Get detailed, ask lots of follow up questions. The more information you have, the better.

Once you’ve talked with your internal teams, then why not reach out to the customers themselves? Conduct some client interviews, maybe four or five of your best customers — the ones you love doing business with them. Ask them questions such as:

How did you find us in the first place?
What were your decision priorities?
What other solutions did you consider?
Why did you choose to buy from us?
Why do you continue to do business with us?

Now you’ve got all the information you need about your buyers — and probably more than you need! Time to distill it down and put it together in an easy-to-read one-pager.

And voila! You have a buyer persona.

It doesn’t really matter what the format is — a spreadsheet, a Google Doc, or an attractively designed PDF. What matters is that you have it and you use it.

How to Use a Buyer Persona

Your buyer persona should guide every piece of content that you create. Literally. Whether it’s a blog article or a webpage or social media content or email or a video — whatever it is, it should be informed by your buyer persona.

If your ideal clients are going to see it, then you need to think about that buyer persona. It should guide what you say and how you say it.

Remember: you want to create an experience that makes your target audience feel like you’re speaking directly to them, and only to them.

You may find that using a buyer persona can immediately take your marketing content to the next level. You’ll be able to connect more effectively with your audience. You’ll provide greater value, and create more compelling messages that generate more leads — and better leads at that.

A buyer persona can be really valuable beyond marketing, too. Use your buyer personas to:

Make product development decisions
Inform your sales team
Provide customer support training

You’ll have happier customers who stick around longer.

Take Your Marketing Up to 11

If you want to generate more leads and win better customers, you’ll need to know and understand your customers — and show them that you truly get them. No one will be motivated to take action on your website unless they feel a connection to your company and believe that they are known by you.

Ready to see better results from your marketing content? Begin building your buyer personas by identifying three that you need to develop. Then pick your most important persona and get started on that one.