HOW TO USE A BUYER PERSONA

There are a lot of ways you can use your buyer personas to fuel better marketing, sales, and service initiatives. The interviews, the surveys, the extensive research … the fancy PDF you put together to properly unveil your personas in all their glory. It’s all behind you now.

But once you've taken the time to create buyer personas for your business, don't let them go to waste. There are a number of different ways to rework your strategy with your personas in mind.

To help you better understand the value of the resource you’ve just created, check out the game-changing ideas below:

1) Reallocate your ad spend. After creating your personas, you’ll have a better understanding of where your personas spend their time online. And -- ideally -- you’ll also know what their favorite online publications and news sources are. Armed with this knowledge, you can audit where you’re currently spending resources (e.g. on Facebook ads, retargeting, etc.) and reallocate those resources based on your persona research.

2) Reallocate your human resources. The same principle can be applied to personnel: If you know the majority of your audience is on Instagram, you'll want to make sure you -- or someone on your team -- is regularly monitoring that network and engaging with people who belong to your target persona. The goal here isn't to hunt people down -- instead, you just want to make sure you're hanging out where you're personas are hanging out.

3) Use language that your persona is familiar with. Once you know how the people in your different persona groups communicate, start speaking their language. Use the buzzwords they use. Use the slang they use. This will help to ensure your message resonates.

4) Segment your list of contacts by buyer persona. List segmentation is the key to delivering more personalized experiences to your leads and customers. Once you’ve segmented your list by buyer persona, you’ll be able to do all sorts of fun stuff.

5) Create a piece of content with a specific persona in mind. Creating buying personas gives you an enhanced knowledge of what your ideal customers like and respond to, as well as what they struggle with. Using those insights, you can create a targeted ebook or blog post that solves a common problem -- or answers a common question -- that a particular persona has. And if you’ve segmented your contacts list by buyer persona, guess what? You can easily share that piece of content with just the group of contacts who you know will be interested in it.

6) Audit your existing content for persona alignment. Perform an audit of all your content and try to figure out which persona each piece aligns with. If you discover content that doesn't align with any of your personas, you might consider updating it or -- if it's had zero success in generating leads -- just get rid of it. At the end of the day, to attract the right people, you need to create the right content.

7) Combine personas with lifecycle stages to map out content ideas. In addition to targeting content according to personas, you can target content according to another dimension: lifecycle stage. The lifecycle stage refers to how far along someone is in your sales cycle (and how close they are to making a purchase). By adding this dimension to the mix, you can ensure that you're not only creating the right content for the right people but that you're also creating it for them at the right time.

8) Optimize landing pages for personas. When you offer up a new piece of targeted content, make sure that the accompanying landing page conveys to your persona -- in their language -- how that content can help them solve a problem or add value to their lives.

9) Use dynamic content to tailor your website to different personas. Say goodbye to the one-size-fits-all website. With dynamic content, you can display different messaging to different people based on what persona you have them assigned to.

10) Do some co-marketing with companies that your personas follow. Whether it's a webinar, a co-written ebook, or simply a guest blog post, working with other businesses that you know a particular persona likes and respects can score you some serious street cred.