Persona-based marketing is a natural fit for most inbound marketing techniques. 
By isolating the ideal consumer for blogs, articles and promotions; you and your financial institution can devote precious resources to engaging them.
Unlike the shotgun approach of traditional advertising methods, inbound marketing techniques like content marketing and social media can produce strong relationships with market segments which translate into business growth.
The keys to an effective buyer persona marketing strategy include:
- Identify the key players—Most financial institutions must manage interactions with various personnel in businesses like buyers, gatekeepers, and decision makers. Whatever position your point of contact is, it should be identified and profiled individually.
- Build a profile—When producing a profile, you should include the responsibilities, needs, out of work activities, where they like to hang out, what they like to do outside of work, what interests them, etc. These profiles should be based on reliable marketing research as well as experiential data. Try to describe your ideal client in a fictitious profile. Using photos can help.
- Produce a management strategy—Once the buyer personas have been created, your sales team should develop a strategy specific to them that will spur a positive buying decision.
- Devote personnel to marketing channels—Your sales or marketing team should learn the intimate details of each buyer persona, then begin generating the content that will most appeal to them.
The advantages of buyer personas encompass:
- Targeting—An ideal buyer persona allows your sales and marketing teams to keep in mind the same consumer while developing your financial institution’s inbound marketing initiatives. In essence, it keeps all the disparate elements of your company focused on the same target, limiting conflicts and counter-productive miscommunication.
- Fully detailed profiles—The point of a buyer persona is to establish a model that will provide actionable insights. With an entire team devoted to analyzing professionals in this role, incisive evaluations can be made that allow point of contact personnel to better manage their interactions.
- Anticipating reactions—Rather than walking into a meeting with a client without a grasp of probable reactions, your sales team can be armed with a list of likely responses. A decision tree can be developed for each type of client which will allow personnel to have response strategies to common reactions.
- Better content—Rather than producing videos and articles that praise the virtues of your financial institution, you can generate content that recognizes the challenges facing your consumers and describe your financial institution’s services and products that most readily provide solutions.
A study by Frost & Sullivan shows that only about 46 percent of businesses utilize buyer personas in their marketing strategies.
By employing this proven technique you are focusing resources on the consumers who are most likely to respond to your marketing campaign. You are also using a specialized technique that your competitors are probably ignoring, which allows you to establish an enduring relationship with your ideal consumers.
