The Importance of Personas in Industrial Marketing

In a digital world of personalized customer experience, knowing your audience is vital to a growing, thriving industrial brand.

Selling a product may be the most important part of your company’s profit margin, but understanding the individuals who investigate, research, and purchase from your company is the foundation.

For today’s modern industrial companies, simply defining a target market is no longer enough. At the end of the day, developing a marketing persona is perhaps the most important aspect of creating, marketing, and selling a successful industrial product.

What Is A Marketing Persona?

Contrary to popular belief, marketing personas are not quite the same thing as a target audience. Unlike target audiences, marketing personas are individual, fictionalized characters with specific personal attributes who are customers of your business.

There are a few ways to tell the difference between a target audience and a marketing persona:

Personalization

Marketing personas are given unique names, hobbies, job titles, income ranges, and ages. In contrast, target audiences generally use surface-level demographic data to determine circles (profession, type of buyer, etc).

Personification

Marketing personas have first names and complete identities that give a clear indication of marketing channel preference, preferred type of contact, and personal values or goals. Target markets are usually far more generalized.

Perceptionalization

Nothing about the marketing persona is vague. While target audiences act as broad guidelines, the marketing persona requires comprehensive perception and understanding from your leadership, marketing, and sales teams.

Marketing personas fit into the customer’s journey by allowing your company to pinpoint exactly where leads may fall in the marketing funnel. Targeting the right personas at the right time will help to drive quality traffic to your brand, usually much further down the buyer’s journey.

How Are Industrial Marketing Personas Created?

Marketing personas are developed with equal parts research and relative data, along with some marketing segmentation and a dose of creativity.

Creating a marketing persona often begins with a research and data analytics team, working to segment out the largest portions of your customer base. These segments should have summarized data points to assist the development and marketing teams with the first draft of your personas. Marketing research is then leveraged to produce more concrete data points about each persona.

Typically, companies develop more than one marketing persona throughout their research and tailor their voice and branding to fit the personas that are investing the most in the business.

What Do Marketing Personas Typically Include?

Generally speaking, marketing personas can be as detailed or as broad as desired. However, it is important to note that the more specific your persona is, the better marketing tactics your company will be able to develop.

There are several details that personas should have before being considered complete:

• A name
• An image (to put a face to the name)
• A job title
• An elevator pitch of themselves
• Age, gender, and salary
• Decision criteria
• Shopping preferences

Marketing personas vary from business to business according to their individual needs and desires. Other points can and should be included in your company’s unique persona write-ups, especially benchmarks that matter most to your success. Not every marketing team will need the same format for their persona profiles.

What Are The Benefits Of Developing Industrial Marketing Personas?

Developing a strong and specific marketing persona is not a project solely benefiting the marketing aspects of your business. In fact, a well-developed persona can deliver a plethora of benefits to all kinds of industrial companies:

• Over 70% of businesses that surpass their revenue and lead goals use personas in their marketing strategy.
• The use of documented marketing personas increased the user experience and effectiveness of websites by two to five times.
• Cold calls using marketing personas are 58% more effective at generating leads.
• Using personas can increase website traffic by as much as 120% and sales by nearly 124%.

Ultimately, the greatest benefit of developing marketing personas for your industrial business is the ability to condense information and establish a real connection between your company and the customer.

Find Your Persona With Marketing That Matters

In a time where personalized marketing is perhaps the biggest factor of business success, implementing the right personas can be a particularly difficult thing to do right.

Despite this, marketing industrial products and services with detailed personas are richly rewarding and a necessary marketing project. Coming together as a team with all aspects of your company, discover the incredible benefits that marketing personas provide at all levels of your operation.

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