By now, you’re probably aware of how important buyer personas are in order for your digital marketing strategy to succeed. Without knowing exactly who to target, you can’t create effective copy, capture attention, and move your leads down the sales funnel. But what about the people you don’t want as customers? When it comes to marketing, you can’t afford to waste your resources. Instead, you need to focus only on the prospects that will become valuable customers.Negative buyer personas are arguably just as important as regular buyer personas as they help you identify the people you shouldn’t spend time marketing to.Here are some reasons why some leads may not be the best fit as customers for your business:

• They may not ever actually buy from you
• They may end up as a customer, but be inordinately expensive to acquire
• The sale price is too low compared to the cost of acquisition
• They’re unlikely to be repeat customers
• They may not be able to afford your product
• They may keep you up at night with constant complaints and inefficient communication
• They may be impossible to satisfy and continually ready to jump ship

While you should still engage with prospects who are negative buyer personas, you shouldn’t waste your marketing budget trying to convert them into leads and customers.And once you’ve identified who your negative buyer personas are, you can easily segment them out from your target customers, lowering your cost-per lead and cost-per customer.

Creating a Negative Buyer Persona

Creating a negative buyer persona is similar to creating a regular buyer persona, and you’ll need to analyse similar information. It’s important to remember that your product or service isn’t for everyone. Once you realise that you may not be able to satisfy certain people, you can focus more on your ideal customers.

Here’s how you can create and benefit from a negative buyer persona:

Review your Data
The information you need can be found in a variety of places. One of the best ways to find information about negative buyer personas is through interviewing your former customers..
This will help you identify common characteristics to shape your negative personas.

Speak with your customers who have historically had low satisfaction scores, which can indicate that they weren’t the best fit to begin with. You may also want to talk to your customer service team, to get an idea of the kind of customers that make their job difficult.

Consider which customers don’t tend to stay with your business for long, which customers have the highest customer acquisition cost, and which tend to generate the least amount of profit.

Talk to Your Team
Most of the time your teams will be the ones who will first encounter your negative buyer personas. Since they’re on the front lines of your business, they may have been dealing with the wrong types of customers for some time.

By educating your team about negative buyer personas and the type of customers you don’t want, you can decrease your cost-per- customer.

Be Transparent
The most successful companies understand that their product isn’t for everyone. That’s why you should take the time to describe your ideal customer on your website. This will set expectations for which prospects will get the most use out of your product or service.
Consider it as a self-qualifying exercise for your leads, which saves your customer service team qualifying them later on.

Need some help developing a negative buyer persona? Or maybe you’re looking for a digital marketing strategy that will set your brand up for success? Get in touch today to learn more.