SaaS Growth Hacks to Generate Your Perfect Buyers Persona

If you’ve been following the PayKickstart blog, you’ve probably already heard about SaaS growth hacks and buyer personas. Both concepts are vital for SaaS companies. In this article, we’re going to meld the two concepts together to see how you can use hacking methods to better uncover your buyer personas. We’ll also consider how buyer personas can help you optimize your growth strategies.

The payoff of growth tips is obvious, your company will grow when the tips are properly implemented. This might mean more trial signups, more emails, or more paid subscriptions. It simply depends on how you define your goals and growth.

The payoff for buyer personas may be less obvious. A customer avatar is a fictional version of your customers, where you outline their demographics, goals/values, challenges/pain points, how they consume info, and objections/roles. Customer avatars allow you to better understand your customers. This, in turn, allows you to tailor your products, marketing efforts, and more, specifically to them. 

So how can you use growth hacks to optimize your buyer personas? Let’s dig in.

Understand What Content Growth Hacks Are Working

Content marketing is a vital strategy for just about every business. One of the topics a customer avatar covers is how the customer gets and consumes information. This is an important step in the buying process. With the right content, you can raise awareness, build trust, and ultimately make an effective sales pitch.

Now let’s say you’ve implemented a bunch of growth strategies within your content marketing campaign. You’re running campaigns on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram. You’re also pumping out SEO-oriented content. 

With the campaigns up and running, you decide to dig in and see which strategies are yielding the most results. Let’s assume you find two key points: your Linkedin campaign is yielding the most inquiries for your product and your local-optimized SEO content is generating the most traffic. 

This could hint at two important insights into your customer avatars.

Are Your Customers Consuming Info Through Linkedin and Local SEO?

If your Linkedin campaign is outperforming your Facebook and Instagram campaigns, it suggests that your customers may be consuming more of their info through Linkedin. If you’re selling B2B products, this quickly makes sense. Your customers are business professionals and are using Linkedin extensively. 

Are business professionals an ideal avatar?

So now you know that Linkedin is an important resource for your particular customers. As such, you can refine your customer avatars, placing more emphasis on Linkedin and potentially even shifting resources away from Facebook and Instagram. This vital refinement of your customer avatar, first derived from your growth strategies, could pay off with increased sales.

You can also use this insight into your customer avatar to devise new growth hacks and secure even more sales, but we’ll dig deeper into that later. 

Using SEO Results to Find the Most Likely to Convert Customers

Next, we’ve got the localized SEO content. Localized content refers to content that’s meant to appeal to localized search results, such as “digital marketing agency in New York” or “dentist in Chicago.” If your localized SEO content is performing especially well, it could hint at an important insight into your customer avatars: local, small business owners and managers are a particularly promising demographic to target.

Now you know you should craft more localized content to target local business owners. You can also position your products and services to tailor directly to small business owners. If you run a marketing agency, you could offer “local digital ad” optimization, for example.

You might also find certain keywords are performing well. Let’s assume you’re a professional business coach and focus on coaching up managers. So you put together several pieces targeting job roles. Perhaps you write an article “Five Leadership Skills Every CEO Must Know” and another “Six Project Management Strategies Every Project Manager Needs to Implement”. 

Maybe younger project manangers are your best target audience?

In this case, let’s assume that your content for project managers is vastly outperforming your content for CEOs. Better yet, your conversion are also higher for project managers. Now you found out something important about your buyer personas. Right now, your products and services are more appealing to project managers, so it’d make sense to spend more resources targeting that particular job role. This job role is now a vital customer avatar for you.

Using Your Insights to Further Optimize Your Growth Hacks

Circling back to our first example of LinkedIn outperforming your other social media campaigns, your refinement of your avatar and the fact that LinkedIn is a major source of information is vital to understand. With this example, let’s assume you manage a website that yells yoga/meditation books, training seminars, and more.

Initially, you might have targeted your content at a more general audience, but you notice that LinkedIn is producing the best results. Now you can refine your customer avatars to focus on professionals. In turn, you can start to craft products that appeal directly to these customers. Instead of a training seminar that focuses on “15 Minute Meditation Techniques that Soothe the Soul”, you could craft something like “10 Great Meditative Strategies to Implement Throughout the Workday.”

In this case, insights from your growth hacking strategy lead to a refinement of your customer avatars. And now, with a deeper understanding of your customer avatars, you can address your product lineup to better meet the needs and pains of your customers.

Insights from your customer avatars could lead to further refinements, such as adjusting your marketing campaign. Perhaps initially you focused your ad campaigns on weekends to support “Meditation Techniques that Soothe Your Soul.” Now you might try running ads on Friday afternoon, when professionals are winding down the week, to sell your “Meditative Strategies to Implement Throughout the Workday.” 

See Your Avatars and Hacking Strategies as One

Customer avatars are important but often overlooked and many businesses never put them together. Big mistake, over 70 percent of companies that meet or exceed their goals put together detailed customer avatars. Among companies that failed to meet their goals, only about a quarter of them put together detailed avatars.

By using your growth hacking insights to refine your customer avatars, you’ll be able to gain even more detailed insights and will better understand your customers. Then, you can refine your growth strategies to yield even better results. 

Michael Harbone

Michael Harbone is an experienced copywriter, writing professionally since 2017. He has written for multiple digital marketing companies gaining the reputation for writing engaging, concise articles one which received an award from Upcity.

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