Persona Based Campaign: What Most Businesses — and Many Agencies

It’s a mystery worthy of Sherlock: persona based campaigns are everywhere, but most businesses aren’t getting results or ROI. What’s the deal?

Well, it’s elementary (my dear Watson). Persona based campaigns generate significant engagement, conversions and ROI. But these outcomes only happen when all of the fundamentals are in place, which is where most businesses — and surprisingly, many marketing agencies — veer off track. The top mistakes include:

Not Developing and Using Robust Customer Personas

Customer personas aren’t comprehensive psychological profiles that take months to generate. But they aren’t superficial snapshots that take minutes to spin together, either. When that happens, instead of helping businesses reliably predict behavior, most of the time they point them in the wrong direction.

Not Mapping Content and Nurture Tracks to All Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

Another key mistake is assuming that each persona in a customer persona campaign is always at the starting point of the buyer’s journey. However, reality isn’t that neat and tidy. Many people will be further along, and some may be near the end of the road.

For example, take the customer persona “Project Manager Pat.” He may be at the awareness stage (beginning), consideration stage (middle), or decision stage (end) of the buyer’s journey. Businesses need to create content and nurture tracks that map to each stage. In this sense, there are three Project Manager Pats — not just one.

Not Having the Right — or Enough — Campaign Elements

Many businesses believe — or are misled by their marketing agency — that all they need to drive a persona based campaign are some new pages on their website. For example, if their targets are “Physician Peggy” and “Practice Manager Paul,” then putting together a couple of landing pages for these personas is sufficient. Well, it’s not. Not even close!

A persona based campaign is only as good as its campaign elements — or as bad. That means in addition to web content (which could include dynamic content), businesses need to engage target personas in a variety of ways, including offers (e.g. ebooks, reports, white papers, etc.), blog posts, email marketing, social media, and possibly PPC as well (which may also include re-targeting). All of these elements must work together as part of a holistic ecosystem that engages personas and ushers them forward.

Learn More

At Leap Clixx, we build, execute and optimize end-to-end persona based campaigns that are built on solid fundamentals, and generate results and ROI. To learn more, contact us today for a free consultation.

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