This article is written by Ashley Verrill, a CRM Analyst for research firm Software Advice, (@CRMAdvice) She has six years of experience writing business news and strategy features. Her work has appeared in many publications including Inc., Upstart Business Journal, the Austin Business Journal and the North Bay Business Journal. Before joining Software Advice, she worked in sales management and advertising. She is a University of Texas graduate with a bachelor's degree in journalism.

One of the primary goals of inbound marketing is to focus your efforts on those people most likely to buy your products and services. Focusing on buyer personas is one of the most effective ways to maximize your marketing budget. These hypothetical customer profiles define your target demographic as represented by a ficitional persona.  A buyer persona serves as a keystone in targeting your marketing efforts - it defines the fears, needs and wants. This enables you to more effectively personalize your marketing content, from blogs to advertisements and marketing automation campaigns.

When properly aligned, the persona helps you address the right audience, at the right time in the right place. But get it wrong and risk the opposite effect. So how do you know your persona is a match? Many companies conduct sales and customer surveys and market research. But there's another often overlooked resource - customer service.

Whether you have a customer service team or support goes to whomever picks up the phone, these interactions are critical for refining your buyer personas. Here's some tips you can implement for leveraging customer service for your marketing efforts.

 What is the Best Communication Channel?

Buyer personas help your marketing team ensure they are contacting the right audience, at the right time in the right place. Customer service is a great venue for addressing that last factor - the right place.

The right place can mean communities and publications where they gather, but also the communication channel they are most familiar with - whether that's helping themselves online, calling or emailing. Have you customer service team flag each interaction with the communication channel used to submit the issue. That way, you can later pull a report and mine for trends. If one of your personas primarily calls, your sales team will know that's the most effective means for connecting with that lead.

What is Their Level of Technical Knowledge

Understanding your customer's level of technical savvy is also important as you craft your blogs and other marketing materials. To do this, start by meeting with your customer service team to identify the most common questions they receive about your product or service.

Then, for each question, discuss what technical bucket they would fall into -- whether that's "highly technical," "general," or "basic." You could choose more macro tiers that are specific to your company, too.

What are their Fears, Wants, Values?

Your marketing team should work with customer service to identify other possible support behaviors that reveal buyer intent for your product, or realized fears from the pre-purchase stage. To record and track this data, allow space either on your agent tickets or a separate document to track these "fears" "wants" or "values."

Does This Persona Deserve the Spend?

Customer service can also enable your marketing team to prioritize spend. The marketing team can analyze support request volume from each persona. How often does each persona call? How long does each call last? How often do they refund? Depending on what percent of sales that persona contributes, the company might decrease marketing investments for that profile if spend exceeds customer support costs.

Are you Leveraging Timely Opportunities?

Customers don’t always use your product right away. Sometimes they purchase it for a particular occasion, or just for “when they need it.”  Customer service can help unearth these “when they need it” moments in two ways. First, have your service team record how customers are using the product or service. In other words, what were they doing when they had to call to figure something out, or solve an issue. Then, you can look for trends on those uses.

The second way is to allow space to record calls that are relevant to a particular time of year or event. Does your persona attend a certain festival every year? Are they a parent, and need to prepare for back to school? Understanding what is timely to your consumer will help reinforce relevancy and immediacy to buy.

Is Your Team On Board?

In order for this checklist to work, you need to make sure your customer service team understands the persona traits and the value of refining them. Equally important, you need to enable process and procedures for recording and tracking these buyer persona traits through customer service. This could be as simple as a physical checklist they keep at their desk with lines for “communications channel” or “Use case.” Or you could go one step further and integrate this into your issue tracking software with custom fields and reports.

Using your customer service function as integral part of your business growth strategies helps focus your sales approach where it's most effective - on those types of people that are likely to buy your product or service.