Add Buyer Personas to Your MSP Marketing Strategy

Whether you are determining what marketing strategies to use in your MSP’s overall marketing efforts, or deciding what to do during your next marketing campaign, it helps to know who you are marketing to.

That’s where buyer personas come in.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation that a marketer would create of their ideal customer. This representation is typically based on a combination of real data from existing customers and market research that is conducted. With each persona, you’re characterizing commonalities that you find in each group that you are looking at, whether your personas are based on industry, business size, or the position of the decision maker.

These aren’t going to be 100% accurate based on any similar business that you look at - they aren’t meant to be. They are more meant to help you determine where to focus your time, and guide your marketing in the right direction. As a result, you will be able to attract the most valuable leads and customers to your business from your marketing efforts.

What Information Should Your Buyer Personas Include, and Why?

When you Google this question, you’re going to get a lot of different answers that are going to pull you in multiple different directions.

Let us make things easier for you. A small-to-medium-sized IT company targeting businesses in a localized area should be including the following information from the following four categories in each of the personas that they create:

• Demographics & Personality Traits: Knowing this information will allow you to choose the correct tone of your message, frame it the right way, and pick the best verbage for your copy. 

• Communication & Buying Habits: Knowing this information helps you know which specific marketing methods or combination of methods that you should be using (e.g., email, direct mail, social media ads, PPC) when targeting those similar to your persona, and what calls-to-action would be effective (e.g., “buy now!”, “learn more!” or “check out our deal!”). A lot of this is likely going to depend on age, but also the industry that they are in. 

• Company Characteristics: Company characteristics that you should know include characteristics about the industry they are in, the typical company size, and the number of employees. You can break it down even further by determining common characteristics based on each of the three company characteristics listed. For example, for industry, you could include regulations they are beholden to, industry buzzwords, local memberships they might have, etc. If you have a very large service area, you might be able to also look at things based on location. 

• Pain Points & Challenges: Knowing what causes the audience you are targeting anger and frustration allows you to determine how your IT solutions can solve the issues they face, and allows you to personalize your marketing message to what they are facing.

In each of these four sections, you should have a lot of information and detail - the more you have, the better. Remember, it’s okay if these personas aren’t 100% accurate to each and every person you intend to market to during your next campaign.

How Many Buyer Personas Should You Be Creating?

The exact number that you should have is going to vary based on the makeup of your current clientele and those you wish to target but aren’t yet working with. But to put it simply, you should have quite a lot. We recommend creating buyer personas for each industry you are targeting, each type of decision maker you are typically communicating with, and each business size based on whether or not you classify them as a small, medium, or large business. You may even have other ideas in mind based on who specifically you are trying to target during the marketing campaigns that you run.

The point of creating these personas is to help you better understand who you are targeting so that you can personalize your marketing materials to their liking. So, create as many as you need in order to effectively do this.

Ready to Run Your Next Marketing Campaign?

With your completed buyer persona(s), you should be ready to start planning out your next campaign and creating your marketing materials. This part can be a bit more complicated.

Fortunately, you can turn to the experts at JoomConnect - your trusted MSP marketing company. We have multiple pre-built campaigns that you can use to target the personas that you create, and we will spend the time branding them to your company logo and colors. If you want additional changes done to it so you can better target the persona(s) you’ve crafted, we can do that too for an additional fee.

No matter what type of campaign you’re looking to run, we can help! Contact us to learn more about your options.