Marketing Strategy: How Knowing Your Buyer Impacts Your Bottom Line

Growth. Success. Recognition. Financial Stability. Good customer relationships.

Do these sound like the hopes and dreams that trickle through your mind on a daily basis? Have these trickling ambitions been flooded by waves of marketing gone wrong?

Not to worry! There is a tried-and-true way to emerge from the marketing chaos that you’ve been experiencing and to ensure that your business can start reaching the right people in the right ways: knowing your buyer.

Swim to shore! Read on to find out how knowing your buyer really impacts your bottom line.

You’ve Fallen and You Can’t Get Up…Or Can You?

As the owner of a small- to medium- sized business with impressive growth-related goals, we have no doubt that you understand how important marketing is to realizing these objectives.

Your problem lies with the fact that you’ve reached a marketing roadblock and you’re not sure where to go next. You’ve tried so many options—mass email newsletters, SEO, pay per click methods, social media—and you have yet to find a successful method or combination of methods to meet your needs. More likely than not, your road has been blocked not by failure to try the right strategy, but rather failure to communicate with the right people.

It’s time to stop giving in to random acts of marketing, and start paying attention to your bottom line.

Break Through the Barrier: The Bottom Line

Chances are, you’ve heard it time and time again: the answer to your marketing problem is to understand your buyer. Why? What is the benefit of knowing your buyer? How do you know that the time you spend getting to know your buyers will not be wasted?

This is how knowing your buyer impacts your bottom line:

#1: You’ll spend less money.

We hope this grabbed your attention. Once you have a better understanding of whom exactly you should be targeting through your marketing efforts, you’ll be able to design a surefire strategy to reach these people.

Having a strategy that you know will be successful eliminates the guessing from the marketing process, allowing you to stop wasting your money on random acts of marketing, like you have in the past. If you know your buyer, you’ll end up spending less, and the money you do spend will be spent more effectively.

#2: You’ll receive a greater return.

Marketing can be very expensive—you’ve probably learned this from experience. But here is the important thing to remember: marketing is more expensive when it is random.

Once you have developed marketing strategies that you are confident in, that have been shaped by the needs and expectations of your ideal buyers, you can be sure that you’ll be getting more than you’re giving. With an effective strategy, your business will be earning more than it has ever earned, and the best part? Your success will be measurable.

#3: You’ll have more opportunities to upsell.

Knowing your buyer will have a positive impact not only on your marketing program, but also on your sales team. So many doors can be opened by ensuring that your sales representatives are as knowledgeable of your buyer as your marketing team is.

If a sales representative understands your customers’ needs, their daily lives, and what makes them tick, they can be more convincing when it comes to the process of upselling—your customer will become more loyal and your business will be more profitable.

#4: You’ll close sales more effectively.

By knowing what your buyers need, you can be more effective in delivering what you offer in a way that meets those needs.

Once you’ve mapped out a strategy and developed a series of sales and marketing tools to fit the buying process of your customers, you’ll always have options to keep them engaged and maintain their trust.

#5: You’ll align yourself with the sales funnel.

Another way that knowing your buyer will positively affect the sales process is that you’ll adapt to the ever-changing positions of your customers within the sales funnel.

As you get to know your buyers in a general way, you’ll be able to enter into relationships with them and get to know them in a more personal way as well. Aligning yourself with your customers’ sales funnel allows you to target them using methods that are sure to gain their trust. And as you know, continuing to serve a previous customer is much less expensive and time-consuming than depending on constantly attracting brand-new customers.

Reaching the Shore

So now that you realize how knowing your buyers can impact your bottom line, we’re sure you’re convinced that this is the best thing you can do to ensure the successful growth of your company. So now what? The best way to begin to develop a solid understanding of your ideal customers is to create a buyer persona.

What is a buyer persona, you ask? A buyer persona is essentially a fictional character in the marketing story of your business. He or she possesses all of the same needs, aspirations, and pain points as your real-life, ideal buyer.

By conducting buyer persona research, you’ll get to know your buyers’ priorities, their daily problems, how they define success, why they might choose a competitor’s solution over yours, the steps they take before making a decision, and so much more.

Buyer personas are usually developed as a result of a series of in-depth, objective customer/client interviews. This process is extremely important to the success of your company, but it is very complicated. For this reason, many businesses contract with a third party—one that is particularly experienced in buyer persona development—to help them in the completion of this process.

For more information about buyer personas, their creation and usage, and how Hello Marketing, an inbound marketing agency, can assist you with this critical process, take a look at our Buyer Persona Guide.