How to Create Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer’s Journey: Retention Stage

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the final blog within the series.

Lead generation and nurturing are important for new leads, but if you’re not pursuing those strategies with existing buyers, you’re missing out on low-hanging fruit.

How do you generate and nurture leads once you’ve already made a sale? By turning your new buyers into brand evangelists. And how do you do that? You have to earn it.

During buyer persona interviews, spend some time assessing the buyer’s current situation. Try to determine how buyers want to continue to be marketed to, and what they’re excited enough about to (potentially) evangelize to their own networks.

Buyer Persona Development for the Retention Stage

To drive retention content, ask the following:

1. How has your experience with our product been since you started using it? What do you really like?
2. What measurable results have you seen?
3. How have others on the buying decision team responded to the product being in use?

Once you have some answers, turn them into a content strategy for existing buyers. The goals of your strategy are two-fold: first, you want to retain them; second, you want them to act as magnets within their own networks, showing so much satisfaction with your offering they recommend it to others.

Type of Content at the Retention Stage

• Continue providing value. How are you communicating with buyers post-purchase? Are you continuing to offer educational content around your product and promoting it to them via segmented delivery? If buyers seem unimpressed with your attempts to “stay in touch,” consider asking about this to learn how you can become more relevant.
• Include buyers in your research. If you identify a buyer who would make good interview subjects for blog posts or participants in Twitter chats, reach out to them with specific requests. People generally enjoy talking about their experiences and are flattered when asked to offer advice or help.

Drive Customer Retention

Acquiring new customers is more expensive than keeping existing ones, so the content you produce for this stage of the buying cycle is critical. Keeping these customers on a separate lead nurturing track can also contribute to your pipeline in terms of leads generated via referrals and shares from within the existing customer base. It’s important to see the value of creating a content strategy for existing users because it will pay off when it’s time for them to renew.

Just remember, buyer personas are not only for the beginning phase of a customer relationship. Those initial personas establish a baseline to work from, but should be revisited and adjusted over time. Nothing is ever set in stone — personas should be fluid enough to change based on customer needs, industry changes and monitoring results. Re-evaluating them in each phase of the process can help you produce the most optimal marketing content that will resonate with your buyers.

Read Part 1: Buyer Personas

Read Part 2: Awareness

Read Part 3: Consideration

Read Part 4: Decision

Read Part 5: Support