Cannabis Marketing Fundamentals: Creating Powerful Buyer Personas (Part 1)
Creating Powerful Buying Personas - Cannabis Marketing Fundamentals from CannabisNet on Vimeo.
Buyer personas are the foundation of all marketing efforts and the starting point for successful campaigns. It’s already 2018 and unfortunately many, many cannabis companies still aren’t relying on personas to inform their marketing. Some CannaBusinesses have done persona research, but don’t know what to do with the information.
Marketing without the guidance of buyer personas is like trying to build without a blueprint or traveling without a roadmap. Here are some guidelines on what personas are and how to leverage them for your cannabis marketing campaigns.
What are Buyer Personas?
Basically, a buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a specific demographic that a marketing campaign is targeting. A thoroughly crafted persona will mirror the goals and concerns of thousands of real people that your dispensary or business is trying to reach. They identify which categories of people your content should be focused on, and help you provide the information and products that those specific customers will be looking for.
A buyer persona is not simply a listing of impersonal details such as, “all females over the age of 35 with an income over $40k”. Though this type of information is helpful, it does nothing to inform your content or the tone, messaging, voicing, and other nuanced details.
Your persona should be fleshed out with a bio, goals, pain points, personal interests, and a story. They should be as close to a real person as you can get them. For cannabis businesses, it’s recommended to have at least one main persona, and a few secondary ones that fit the other types of customers you come across.
Why Do You Need Buyer Personas?
The function of buyer personas is to shape and inform every part of your brand’s cannabis marketing efforts. With a persona in place, you can now begin to speak directly to your audience’s needs, without having to search in the dark.
Personas should provide guidance to several areas of your dispensary marketing campaigns, including:
● Social media posting
● Ad campaigns
● Website copy and landing pages
● Blog content
● Event promotion
● Print and packaging
● Keywords and other cannabis SEO best practices
When you implement buyer personas, you’ll quickly realize that you’re ahead of the curve. You may also begin to realize how much effort was wasted in the past when operating without the direction of personas.
Tying it All Together- How Personas Provide Focus for Cannabis Marketing
Personas will tie all of these marketing channels together nicely. For instance, you’ll be able to target ads directly to your persona of choice. The ad will lead them to a landing page which contains content that is targeted for the same persona. The landing page will contain a form that is highly targeted to the persona, and so forth. So they add an aspect of continuity, creating common threads that run through all your dispensary marketing campaigns.
Buyer personas can even help you determine which platforms are best to engage with potential customers. If you’re targeting medical cannabis users, it would be useful to offer a downloadable white paper on medicinal benefits. If you’re targeting a recreational cannabis user, a more visual channel such as Instagram might be ideal.
More Benefits of Buyer Personas
The benefits of utilizing buyer personas in a cannabis marketing context are probably too numerous to count. Immediate benefits of implementing buyer personas in your campaigns include:
● Overall fewer wasted resources on the wrong clientele
● Provide laser-focused targeting for ad keywords and geographic audiences
● Create more loyal customers, since products and ads are targeted specifically for them
● Help organize customer contacts, which greatly assists customer relationship management (CRM) tools and platforms
● Allows company to pivot on a dime if new persona needs are recognized
Lastly, personas tend to have a snowball effect - the better your personas are, the more you’ll understand your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better data you can collect. Better data = more refined personas = more customer satisfaction.
The bottom line? When personas are effective, they give your brand a powerful, focused voice that cuts through the marketplace noise and reaches the type of customers you’re looking for, the ones who you’ll love to work with over and over again.
Who is Your Target Persona?
If your answer is ‘everybody’, then it’s time to call in some backup with 4Blooms.Guru Cannabis Marketing Services. When you work with 4Blooms, each marketing campaign starts with a persona which drives all the content and campaign elements. Identifying the best personas for your market is their specialty, ensuring your messaging is always being received with open arms.
If you enjoyed this post, check out Part II of this blog for tips on how to shape your buyer personas into useful marketing & sales tools.
Marijuana Marketing Fundamentals Creating Powerful Buyer Personas from CannabisNet on Vimeo.
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