How to Use Your Competitors Personas to Boost Your Marketing

Creating personas is an excellent way to perceive and understand your target markets. In essence creating personas involves dividing your existing, or required, customers into common factors including age, gender, location and so on. The factors you use as input into your personas will vary for your specific needs. Once you’ve attained the data to create your personas you will see common factors that allow you to segment your customers into specific ‘groups’. We’d document the various personas and then use the personas to target our marketing. In my marketing strategy and planning workshops I’ve seen fantastic results where small and large businesses use personas for the first time.

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Personas are a practical tool to help  prioritize content and functionality. They are fictional characters based on an identified  audience or user type. They  serve as an encapsulation of your understanding of the intended audience. 

Yale University

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Example of Buyer Personas

Most organisations have three to five personas. Below is an example of two personas.

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Know your Competitors Buyer Personas? Use them to get Sales

There is alot of information available about what buyer personas are and how to use them to target your marketing. There is very little information however as to how your competitors buyer personas may be used to get you more sales for your organisation or small business.

There are three competitive strategies when using your competitors buyer personas which I’ll describe soon. First we need to know what the personas are that our competitors use.

How to find your competitors buyer personas

In identifying your competitors personas there are two obvious first items to consider:

1. Who are your competitors?
2. Do they target their marketing? If they don’t then merely identifying your buyer personas and targeting your marketing will likely give you a competitive advantage.

If your competitors do target their marketing then you can identify the personas they using, using one, or a combination, of the following:

1. Do you have knowledge within your organisation of your competitors personas?
2. Do an internet search as to whether your competitor has published information about their targeting.
3. Analyse your competitor’s marketing and create personas that you can identify from their marketing.

Tactics in using Competitor Personas for your Competitive Advantage

Once you know your competitors buyer personas and have created your buyer personas then you can use various strategies:

Find Buyer Persona Gaps

By analysing your competitors and your buyer personas you may find gaps between the personas. These gaps can be very profitable as the target segment isn’t being served. For small businesses this strategy will likely result in the best ROI (Return on Investment).

Target your Competitors Buyer Personas Directly

You could target your competitors personas directly. This is a viable strategy however be aware that you will need to position your product, service or brand differently to your competitors. Of course you could go head-to-head with your competitors with the same positioning targeted at the same target markets but this could be costly and may not result in a competitive advantage. If however the market is big enough this may be a viable strategy.

Use a Hybrid Targeting Strategy

A combination of targeting buyer persona gaps and targeting your competitors buyer personas is a viable strategy. The danger with this strategy is that you need the resources and budget in your organisation to target this wide group of target markets. This is likely the safest strategy.

Get Started With Competitive Buyer Persona Strategies

In this article we have looked at three competitive strategies we can use for our marketing. The strategies rely on knowing who your competitors are and the buyer profiles that they target.