How to Create a Buyer Persona

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Since digital marketing is becoming more targeted and personalized than ever before, direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketers should know their audiences better than ever. One way to create engaging content is to create it for a Buyer Persona, or an approximation of someone who fits within your target demographic.

Key Facts:

• Personalized marketing campaigns drive 18x more revenue than broadcast emails

• 3 to 4 buyer personas usually account for over 90% of a company’s sales. 

According to Rob Peterson, founder of BarnRaisers agency, buyer personas can improve the following aspects of a marketing campaign: Targeting and positioning, messaging and media, defining purchase motivations in the buying process, establish company alignment, and creating a human face for sales and marketing.

To build a buyer persona, 

1. Check your site and social media platform analytics for inspiration
2. Create a buyer profile, complete with personal details and customer-specific information, like preferred news sources. I liked the suggestion to start with a famous character with obvious characteristics (see the example, left)

Example: Walter White's Buyer Persona

Download a free Buyer Persona generator template here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/build-buyer-personas


Read more here:
https://www.buyerpersona.com/what-is-a-buyer-persona

https://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/02/12/31-business-building-benefits-buyer-personas/

https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-us/blog/2017-4-27-the-beginners-guide-to-defining-buyer-personas

Four Key Steps to Engage the Millennial Traveler

Every destination we step in from the chilly breathtaking glaciers along the hiking paths of El Chaltén to bustling charming metropolises like Seoul and Buenos Aires – millennials are constantly on the move. Travel brands must develop strategies to attract this new tech savvy traveler as they grow in number and affluence. With millennials expected to outspend baby boomers by 2030, the below strategies will help travel brands engage this valuable consumer.

1. Go Mobile

The millennial traveler is all about booking on the go – whether in the subway to the next important meeting or on the impromptu night out brainstorming vacations with friends. Mobile travel gross merchandise sales are slated  to reach $26 billion this year, an amount more than double that spent in 2013. In fact, by 2017, mobile travel sales will account for one third of all digital travel sales – reaching $55 billion.

Customer engagement via mobile is no longer a bonus companies can provide, it is a necessity they must offer if they want continued millennial loyalty and further bookings and perks purchased through them.

2. Use Targeted Marketing

With the data of all search queries available to travel companies, information on traveler trends per age and type of traveler is readily available. Getting ahead of the traveler’s mind and determining the millennial traveler’s needs and destination desires becomes easier. Travel brands looking to plant the idea into the traveler can now create custom incentives, messages and offers to give the millennial booker what they crave.

3. Personalize the Communication

Alongside custom messages and deals matching each traveler’s style of vacation exploration, millennials are expecting more and more personalized recommendations to be sent directly to them while already on the trip. If there’s a show happening that aligns to that person’s interests in Berlin, they want the travel brand to remind them of this experience with a ticket link. Travel brands are then rewarded for their forward-thinking as millennials tend to share and boast about their travel experiences across highly connected social networks that reach potential new Gen Y travelers for the brand.

4. Convenience is Priority

The constantly moving millennial expects that life keeps up with them wherever they may find themselves. Any spontaneous idea must be able to be satisfied for the millennial to commit to a travel brand. Instant service, quick feedback, and around the clock problem resolution are all noted and shared with friends when discussing a vacation’s flow.

Engaging the Millennial Traveler

The emergence of new technology has made it possible for brands to understand their customer and tailor strategies to retain the millennial traveler as a customer for years to come.

One company leading in this space is inGuest by Revinate. inGuest gives hotels a platform to better engage with guests across their preferred channels, whether it’s Web,  mobile,  or in-person.  By collecting preferences and data while guests are talking with hotel staff regardless of channel, inGuest can integrate this information with existing hotel systems to enhance guest profiles. Having access to these guest profiles allows hotels to personalize all aspects of service as well as future targeted messages to prompt a new booking. Thus, travelers are engaged across all parts of their journey.  

Source:

·         http://skift.com/2014/10/15/4-strategies-to-better-engage-the-millennial-traveler/

·        http://skift.com/2014/05/23/mobile-travel-sales-in-u-s-forecast-to-reach-one-third-of-all-digital-sales-by-2017/

Let’s talk SELFIES

Selfies are all up in the news these days. I came across two topics that I want to talk about: 1) how marketers are stalking your selfies and 2) how Samsung plans to find its next selfie moment. Remember the epic selfie from the Oscars? Ya, that was Samsung.

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal talks about how some new startups are using your selfies to give brands information and targeting opportunities. I’m assuming y’all know that if you have a public profile on Insta, anyone can view your pictures, selfies included. Well, now companies are stalking your selfies and re-purposing these images for big-brand advertisers. One example is Ditto Labs, which uses its software to scan for brands showing up in selfies. For example, if you’re holding a Coca-Cola can in a photo, Ditto can find this photo and send targeted ads your way. Other companies like Piquora store these images to show marketers what is trending in popularity. Pretty cool and creepy, right? Well there are some pretty blurred lines in terms of the privacy issues that are coming up as a result.

Ok so now that we’ve gone over the creepiness of selfies, let’s talk about something more fun! I bet many of you have seen the selfie below where Samsung planned a Samsung-shot selfie of host Ellen DeGeneres and actress Meryl Streep…along with a few other beauties:

This selfie got so much buzz, and many people (including a bunch of CBSers) replicated this selfie after it was posted. Samsung didn’t expect so much success, but when it saw just how big the buzz was, the brand donated $3 million split between DeGeneres' two selected nonprofits: St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Humane Society. This highlights Samsung’s agility and the importance of brands being able to think and react quickly. Apparently only Ellen and Meryl were supposed to be in the selfie – but sometimes things go better than planned! A recent AdWeek article talks about how Samsung is constantly monitoring opportunities like this. Samsung’s Director of Media & Partnerships says: “The goal hopefully should be that you’re looking for another fun, additive, organic and authentic moment for the brand you’re partnering with and yourself. So in that, there’s no time for sleep.”

Facebook about to show better targeted ads

Facebook announced today that they want to use the activities of their users on the web and in apps to  show better targeted ads. Part of such activities are, for instance, which pages a user likes or on which pages a user surfs. While Facebook collected this data before (e.g., through the social graph plugins), it has not used it for ad targeting before. A nice feature is, that users can opt out of this new form of target advertising. Using this new data, Facebook will most likely be able to charge higher advertising prices.

Source: http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2014/06/making-ads-better-and-giving-people-more-control-over-the-ads-they-see/

targeted advertising

With the advance of information technology, more and more firms start to use targeted advertisement in their digital marketing strategy to improve the effectiveness of advertising. For example, Amazon will display the products on the front page based on the user’s browsing and purchasing history. Netflix will recommend movies to the users based on their reviews of watched movies. The advantage of targeted advertising vs. traditional advertising is a higher response rate as the advertising is tailored to the consumer’s preference instead of broadcasted uniformly to each consumer.

Successful targeted advertising requires intensive study of the market trend and consumer’s behavior. The emergence of Big Data makes it possible for the company to get more detailed and more accurate information to come up better targeted advertising strategy. The use of Big Data in targeted advertising needs three components. First, the company needs to collect vast amount relevant information such as purchasing history, browsing history and their social network activities. Second, the company needs to establish the Big Data system so that the data can be stored and processed in an efficient way. Third, the company needs to perform analysis on the available data and come up with right strategy, using state-of-the-art technologies such as machine learning, neural networks, etc.