Why are Buyer Personas Important?

So, your offer is so irresistible that once a consumer glances at your landing page they are helpless to do anything but submit to your will. After all, they probably haven’t been exposed to any advertising all day.

Meet Sally Shopkeeper:

On a previous post I introduced you to an actual Buyer Persona of one of our current clients “Sally Shopkeeper”. We know from our Buyer Persona that Sally owns a women’s fashion boutique and is looking for an edge to make her successful and free up some time. Since our client sells Point of Sale (POS) software to the retail industry, we can help Sally. She just doesn’t know it yet…

Sally doesn’t know that our clients POS software can make her life better, so just offering a demo is probably not a step she’s ready to take. But learning more about what makes a successful retail business just might ring her bell at this early stage of her buyer’s journey.

The Primary Offer:

So on our landing page, we offer Sally a free eBook called “The 5 Pillars of Retail Success”. Since we wrote the eBook, naturally our client’s service is baked into each of the 5 pillars and subtly branded throughout. On our landing page there is no navigation to other pages or any other distractions. The landing page is focused entirely on one low-risk offer that would be of interest to the Sally Persona.

Sally fills out the form (a very basic unintimidating form) and immediately three things happen:

Sally gets the link to download the eBook in her inbox.
Sally goes directly to the “Thank You” page (the secondary offer)
Sally is now in our database

The Secondary Offer:

The email not only has the link to the eBook Sally requested, but it also suggests that she request a free demo of our software.

The “Thank You” page is more than just good manners, the real emphasis is moving Sally farther down the sales funnel by making a strong case for requesting a demo.

There is another form on the Thank You page for her to request the demo. We decided to use a “Smart Form” so Sally won’t have to fill out any fields that she already filled out. The navigation has returned to the landing page in case she isn’t ready to request a demo but wants to browse through our site.

If she does request the demo (our real goal) she will get the obligatory email acknowledgment and another Thank You page with further instructions, along with other resources that she might be interested in such as blog articles or other eBooks we may be offering. We want Sally to view us as an authority long before we do the actual demo.

Landing-Page-Sequence

If Sally is content with her eBook and not quite ready for the demo, we’re not worried… Sally is in our database and will be hearing from us with the offer of the free demo again once she’s had enough time to go through the eBook.

By the way, if we collected Sally’s phone number, why not give her a call to see how she enjoyed the eBook and see if we could be of any additional service?

Giving away free eBooks is great branding, but it’s a Top of the Funnel activity. The demo however is farther down the sales funnel because Sally is requesting something of us, and it requires interaction with her. Spoiler Alert… The secondary offer is the real objective.

Note: This article is an excerpt from the upcoming revision of the WSI Book: Digital Minds: 12 Things Every Business Needs to Know About Digital Marketing. You can download the current Kindle edition from Amazon now for free