Half the battle in online marketing is understanding your audience. A powerful tool for gaining understanding is buyer personas – fictional profiles of your ideal customers. Developing the buyer personas can help you build more effective and cost-efficient SEM campaigns.
Here are some examples for a tech product:
- Young Professional Jane: 22-34, early career, frugal, follows business blogs, wants to protect her identity and finances, but is price conscious, needs affordable solution.
- Corporate Carl: 35-54, mid career, reads technical blogs, is not price sensitive, more interested in latest features/best benefits. Needs a trusted product and guarantees.
- Seasoned Sally: 55-65+, late career/retirement, not price sensitive, Needs effective and user-friendly solutions with customer service availability.
Targeted Content & Messaging
Using buyer personas allows you to segment your campaigns and audiences and target them appropriately. Create various Custom Intent audiences based on interests and keywords to use with the campaigns and combine demographic targeting in Display Campaigns and Video Campaigns. For PMAX, Segment your Asset Groups and Audience signals to math your buyer personas.
Organize the campaigns around the different buyer personas for a more structured and effective marketing strategy. Analyze your demographic data in Analytics and establish demographic conversion data and correlate to your buyer personas. For search campaigns with generic keywords where you can’t differentiate the buyer, consider hybrid messages that speaks to all personas, with concentrated messaging around your best performing persona.
Monitor, Measure and Improve
Analyze your data at regular intervals to ensure that your segmentation and targeting based on your buyer personas is yielding the expected results. If the buyer personas and campaign targeting match, you should see a lift in performance measured through Click-Through (CTR) on the ads side. Ensuring there are landing pages in place that correlate to the buyer personas is also crucial. Driving the correct traffic to the appropriate landing page should increase the Conversion Rates (CVR) as well.
Correctly leveraging the buyer personas to structure your SEM accounts should yield better results and a better customer experience.