Non Buyer Personas

What is a buyer persona?

Everyone who's anyone should know about buyer personas by now - your buyer persona is a profile of your target audience, using research to understand who they are, what their buying pattern is, where they 'hang out' and their consumption habits are.

But what about those efforts that you are putting into driving irrelevant enquiries to your door?

While there is always value in making a larger audience aware of your brand, and of course notable SEO benefits of increasing website traffic, there is little value in putting paid efforts into reaching out to the wrong audience. 

By paid effort, we are not just talking about things like advertising budgets, and Adwords spend - if you are hashtagging like there's no tomorrow on Instagram, but getting the wrong followers - the time wasted will have a real impact on your bottom line. 

how do you identify your 'non buyer personas'? 

Well, assuming that you have some sort of CRM system (even if it's just an excel sheet of your contacts), start looking at the leads that went nowhere, put them into a list. You should be recording the reason that a deal did not close too - even if it's 'went away' (they did the business equivalent of ghosting you). 

Now take a look at the profile of this list - is there a common theme - for example, no budget, went with a competitor, wasn't the decision maker, or wasn't ready to purchase? 

Group these into those themes. Chose which theme is important to you - for example, those who are not decision makers may be worth contacting to find out who actually is, and start to target them instead. 

Boil this down until you reach the groups that are really of no value to your business- this may be those without a budget, or it may be those who just disappear. 

Now you need to look at the demographics and profiles of the names that you are left within these lists. There are several tools which you can use to do this - from looking at your enquiry data within Google Analytics to paying a data company or using a tool like Patrion 360, however, these options can be expensive. The best thing is to capture as much data as you can at the point of enquiry! 

So you now know the personas that or not of value to your business - how do you determine where they are coming from (and is it one of your paid channels?). 

Google Adwords and Buyer Personas

If you use Google Adwords, you will know that the costs soon add up - and if your campaign is not working for you, you are literally chucking money down the drain! Take a look at your search queries - are there some that are irrelevant? If so - make sure to add them to your excluded list! 

Check the keywords you are bidding on - are they really relevant to your product or service? If you're just going for optimum clicks, but no conversions, you are wasting your precious budget!

Social Media and Buyer Personas

This is a common issue - everyone who's anyone is excited about using social media to promote their product or service, and, done right it's a major way of reaching out and engaging with your target audience. However, again this is one where you really need to be aware of putting the effort into the right channels. Use your actual buyer personas to work out where you audience are, and focus on those channels. Instagram is all well and good, but if your target demographic is 50 year old insurance brokers, it may be a timely exercise to put your efforts into! 

The key to marketing your business is to make sure that you are putting the right effort in - don't waste time and effort on people that are just not going to convert to custom. That's not to say that you shouldn't experiment, but with a concentrated, researched effort, you can make that spend go much further!