To maximize your marketing and sales efforts, you must have a deep understanding of who your target audience is and what they need. Creating realistic buyer personas for manufacturing can help shape your content marketing strategy.
Today’s consumers expect custom experiences that cater to their unique needs. Research shows that 76% of shoppers are frustrated when they don’t find a personalized customer experience. To attract new customers and retain your current buyers, it’s important to understand the wants, preferences, and pain points of your clientele. Realizing these attributes can help drive website traffic and shape your manufacturing brand marketing. All of this increases the chances of conversions, sales, and revenue.
Keep reading to learn how to create realistic buyer personas for manufacturing that can positively impact your bottom line.
Key Takeaways
- A buyer persona is a profile that identifies your hypothetical ideal customer and is based on market research and existing customer data.
- Buyer personas can help you identify attributes like purchase behavior, needs, and possible objections, all of which help you learn what kind of content to deliver (and how) for best results.
- From audience research to understanding how to meet market needs, you can create helpful buyer personas in just five steps.
What is a Buyer Persona for Manufacturing?
A manufacturing buyer persona is a customer profile you build from market research and existing customer data that identifies your hypothetical ideal customer. It’s typically presented as a one-page document that highlights the following attributes:
- General buyer information: Age, gender, job title, and a photo make the individual more personable and relatable.
- Buyer behavior: Understanding what attracts customers and how they shop shapes your marketing approach.
- Typical day: Imagining your buyer’s hobbies, interests, and how they spend their time helps you envision your products’ role in their life.
- Needs: Understand what motivates people to make their purchases.
- Goals: Knowing what customers aim to achieve can help you promote the right products.
- Objections: When you foresee their reasons not to purchase from you, you can circumvent those issues.
- Preferences: Understand how consumers want to receive information.
Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas for Manufacturing
With all the information you gather about your customer, you can create the following:
Customer Back Story
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer, you can begin strategizing how to draw them to your business. You’ll know what kind of messaging will resonate, whether images or videos appeal to them, and which channels to use for your efforts.
SEO Strategy
You can also gain insight into what keywords to use in your digital content, enabling you to maximize SEO basics for manufacturing and industrial companies. You can also learn what kind of experience customers want to have on your landing page, dictating manufacturing website must-haves.
Custom Content
Ultimately, creating buyer personas helps you build custom content for the unique needs of your specific audience. This helps to gain trust, increase customer loyalty, and strengthen your customer relationships. Best of all, it can lead to more sales and higher revenue generation for growth and success.
How to Create Buyer Personas for Manufacturers
Before you can create an impactful marketing campaign that drives traffic to your site and generates revenue for your business, you first have to know who it is you’re trying to reach. Here’s how to create buyer personas for manufacturers that help you maximize your advertising efforts.
1. Begin with Audience Research
Conduct audience research to see who is interested in the solutions you provide. Look at demographics like age, gender, challenges, and purchasing power. Look through your current records to see who is consuming your content and what’s resonating with existing customers. Look at social media analytics to reveal background information for your followers.
Track the performance of digital and social media campaigns. See what ads appeal to your audience and which ones fall flat. Learn what trends in marketing for manufacturing companies are successful and use this information to fine-tune and build a campaign that delivers results.
2. Identify Unique Needs
Once you have an idea of the demographic of your ideal audience, you need to understand their unique pain points. When you know what problems they’re trying to solve, you can begin to brainstorm ways your products can help. Social media analytics is a free service that delivers beneficial insights into the challenges your customers are facing and what would help alleviate their frustrations.
Social media platforms can deliver helpful information through hashtags and candid commentary. Chat threads and forums can reveal useful insight about who is interested in your products, how they perceive your brand, and whether they’re satisfied with you or your competitors. Look for gaps and find ways to meet their needs.
3. Pinpoint Customer Goals
A customer’s goals could range from finding the most affordable product in the market to building a relationship with a supplier for an ongoing relationship. Whatever their objectives, it’s important to understand their priorities. Then you can develop a plan for how your business and the products you sell will help customers reach their goals.
Include sales and customer service representatives in this step of discovery. They’re the frontline workers who are engaging with customers on a personal level. As such, they can provide invaluable insight into what customers want from you and your offerings.
4. Determine How You Can Help
From the information you’ve gathered already, you can assess the features of your products and begin to understand which of your offerings would be most beneficial to your customers. Now it’s time to develop a more in-depth list of benefits (ways you can help your customer). These are the reasons that would entice someone to purchase from you rather than your competitor.
Buyer personas grant you a fresh perspective on your products and services, as you assess how your brand can help people who need your solutions. Your buyer persona should include:
- A one-sentence statement that addresses how you can help your prospects
- A list of obstacles for your customer and ways you can help them overcome those challenges
- An understanding of where people are in the buying process
Including these things can help ensure you’re delivering the most helpful information, products, and services to your prospective customers. As a result, you’ll increase satisfaction rates, conversions, and closed sales.
5. Create the Buyer Persona
Once you’ve gathered all the above information, it’s time to compile it into a one-page profile that identifies your ideal customer. Create a character for your buyer, complete with photo, name, and back story. Consider the details of this hypothetical person’s life, which include:
- Marital status
- Pets or children
- Where they live
- Educational background
- Travel habits
These details help your team envision your audience segment and enable them to create impactful marketing materials that will resonate. By personifying customer categories, your team can engage in more personal conversations and increase success rates for customer attraction, retention, and sales.
The following video guides you through the process of building a buyer persona:
Source: Semrush on YouTube
Boost Success with Buyer Personas
Shanahan Strategy closely follows marketing trends for manufacturing companies to help industrial businesses develop effective digital marketing strategies that resonate with their specific audiences.
Contact Shanahan Strategy today to learn how we can help your business create powerful buyer personas that shape your marketing efforts for optimal results.
