Construction Marketing Tips: When Should You Update Buyer Personas?

Developing buyer personas for the decision-makers and influencers in your target market should be one of the first tasks that you carry out when developing your construction marketing strategy.

Unfortunately, the research and effort that goes into creating your buyer personas will go to waste if the document is not kept up-to-date and constantly evolving.  So, how often should they be updated?

What is a Buyer Persona?

The buyer persona is a semi-fictional description of your ideal customer, as in the actual people you will be trying to attract and engage with.  They’re also described as marketing personas.

Personas try to tap into the psychology of your ideal customer or specifier, understanding what makes them tick, what their triggers are and how you should attract and engage with them.

It will try to reveal answers to key questions about your perfect customers too, such as;

• The way they find new products
• The way they evaluate new products
• The way they select new products
• The way they tell their peers about new products

In the construction industry, you would expect to have numerous personas, built around the different job roles involved in the specification and decision-making journey. 

Don’t confuse buyer personas with buyer profiles, which are the demographic data about the businesses that you are trying to attract and engage with.  Data such as geographic location, number of employees, turnover are all part of the buyer profile.

When To Review Your Buyer Personas?

Your buyer persona should be treated as a living document, always evolving as your market changes, whether they are becoming more sophisticated, turning to your competitors or changing their buying habits due to macroeconomic factors.

We would suggest that instead of letting them gather dust, formally review them every 3-4 months and check that everything still looks right.

Gather colleagues from sales and marketing and discuss what they have learnt about their customers in the last few months.

Are they using a new social media platform? Are there new regulations that are giving them new challenges? Is new technology impacting the way that they work?

Look for the nuanced shifts in behaviour that you can research and that will give you the edge over your competition when reaching out to your market in your blogs, social media posts and product development.

Communicate The Changes

Don’t keep these new insights to yourself.  Share them right across the company; start a debate and listen to the feedback from your colleagues.

Email out a PDF of the new persona, giving it a revision number and point out what has changed and why in your correspondence.

You need everyone in your revenue generating teams to be on the same page when engaging with your market to maximise the chances of success.

Your construction marketing strategy will start to fray at the edges if you don’t have one voice when talking to your prospects and customers

Get Your Buyer Persona Kit

Insynth have produced a simple guide to creating buyer personas, click the banner below to get your FREE copy.

About Insynth

Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing consultancy based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.  Insynth employ the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to help building product manufacturers grow their businesses by aggressively driving sales lead generation activity. 

As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.

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