What are buyer personas and why are they vital to an investment management firm’s marketing effort?
HubSpot defines buyer personas thusly:
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. When creating your buyer persona(s), consider including customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals.
In essence, buyer personas are composite characters that represent the various client types with whom an investment management firm does business.
For institutional investors, a partial list of their personas may include consultants, pension fund trustees, or an insurance company executive. But a buyer persona is more than just a title on a person’s office door. Creating one of these composite characters is as much an exercise in psychology as strategy, as it asks the marketing executive to identify what frustrations and challenges their ideal client confronts in their professional lives on a regular basis. What motivates and excites them? And what do they need to help them to do their jobs better/make their jobs easier?
Insofar as inbound marketing for investment managers is concerned, personas are what guide the content creation effort that underpins the entire strategy (for a recap, click here). They allow investment management firms to keep their content generation efforts laser-focused on those people they need to engage if they hope to grow their business over the long term.
Importantly, it keeps content creators from what we could call a type of “mission drift,” or wasting time on content their target audience does not value.
A fully-realized inbound marketing strategy enables asset management firms of all stripes to more effectively target the right prospects, then nurture those prospects to become sales qualified leads, then clients of the firm.
But before any of these can transpire, the important first step is to create buyer personas. If you are interested in learning more about these personas and how they fit into your specific marketing strategy,
