We mentioned in our previous blog article about Inbound Marketing Strategy where one of the elements is to understand who you are trying to attract for your business as a client. You can identify that by building your client profile or buyer persona in modern terms.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. They have a name and have goals and challenges just like a real person. Their characteristics are based on real data and through market research about your customers.
In this blog article, we will provide a framework on how you can build your buyer persona for your financial service firm as part of your Inbound Marketing Strategy.
Developing a buyer persona will require several of your team members to come together. By developing your buyer persona for your business, you will quickly notice if all participating members have the same buyer persona in mind.
If there is a big discrepancy between members while building the buyer persona, it means that not everyone is on the same page as to who the company is trying to serve. It is important to acknowledge that the whole company see the need be united and aware of who they’re providing investment opportunities to.
Even though it requires time from several members and even external stakeholders, developing a buyer’s persona could be quite a fun activity for your organization. You can see it as a team building activity.
You need to give a name to your buyer persona and even a face to that name. This will help you identify if your sales and marketing activities are appropriate for your buyer persona.
For example, if you are targeting accredited investors who are CEOs of a large company, you can give him the name CEO Charlie. And here is his picture below.
Whenever you are planning an Inbound Marketing campaign, you can validate if it would be beneficial for your buyer persona by asking “Will this campaign be helpful for CEO Charlie?”. As you can see, by giving a name to your buyer persona, you can quickly associate and recognize the different characteristics of who you are going after.
Here are some questions to help:
Other than demographics, how would you identify this person? Think about your ideal clients. How would you describe their demeanor? Are they someone calm? Always on the go?
How about their communications preference? Do they respond better by email or phone calls? Let’s go with the example of CEO Charlie. Maybe texting is the quickest way to reach him. In addition to communications, how does he best enjoy consuming content? Is he someone that takes the time to read online articles or is he more into videos?
The list can go on, but you get the idea that you want to describe your Buyer Persona as a real person. Don’t be vague when building your buyer persona – the more details you include, the better you will plan and execute Inbound Marketing campaigns.
Notice that I specified both life and work. As a financial service firm, your investment solutions will resonate best when you can help fulfill both life and work goals.
For example, with CEO Charlie, one of his life goals is to be a good father by being the breadwinner. One of his work goals is to build up the company to leave a legacy behind.
In the same wavelength as goals, you can state both life and work challenges. This will help you determine what Inbound Marketing content you could write about.
Going back to the example of CEO Charlie –if one of his challenges is that he is too busy at work where it takes time away from his family, you can address how CEOs are looking for holistic financial advisors to help address both life and work challenges.
We built out a Buyer Persona eBook which explains this subject in more detail. We have also included a complete example of CEO Charlie and a template for you to build out your own buyer persona for your financial service firm.
If you would like to obtain a free copy of the Buyer Persona eBook, you can download it by clicking here.