Last week, I took an introductory look at buyer personas and how to create them. This week, I expand on how to effectively use these personas. In case you missed it, you can find my post, “what is a buyer persona and how does it influence digital content”, by clicking here.
Last week I determined that creating a Facebook profile is a lot like creating a buyer persona. A buyer persona can be defined as a semi-fictional representation of your ideal (and current) customer, based on market research and data about your current customers (Source: Hubspot, 2014). The more that you add to your profile, the more people can learn about who you are as an individual.
Now you’re probably wondering, ‘what do I do with this profile and how do I use it to its fullest potential?’ If you recall, I previously mentioned that when surveyed, 60% of respondents admitted that they had very little to no understanding of what the best practices are for buyer personas (Source: Tony Zambito, 2015). Creating buyer personas is great, however, if you do not know how to use them to their full potential they are not going to be beneficial.
Effective Buyer Personas
So you’ve created a buyer persona… now what? Many people think that creating a buyer persona will automatically put them on the path to success. The fact of the matter is you actually have to know how to use your buyer persona in order for it to be effective. When it comes to using buyer personas, 85% of B2B marketers believe that they are using them wrong (Source: Lean-Labs, 2014).
Creating a buyer persona is only the first step to achieving sales success. Marketers have to keep in mind that the second step is just as important. That is, that choosing your marketing strategies and tactics according to the information that you have gathered about your buyer is just as important as creating your personas (Source: Lean-Labs, 2014).
Interested in learning the importance of persona mapping? May I suggest that you read my previous post, “The role of sales enablement for persona mapping”, found here.
3 Ways to use Buyer Personas Effectively
Make Your Personas a Reality
Celebrities like Jessica Simpson and Kristie Alley are prime examples of buyer personas turned into reality. Simpson and Alley, like many people, wanted to lose weight. Having been in the public spotlight for years, many have followed the up’s and down’s when it came to the weight of these women. By partnering with weight loss companies such as Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, both women shared their journey to a healthier lifestyle with the world. For both companies, Simpson and Alley are perfect examples of buyer personas that mirror reality.
In order to have really effective buyer personas, your marketing and sales teams should feel like these individuals are real people. So whether it’s naming the persona, putting a face to the profile, or creating a background story on the individual, the more you elaborate on this individual the more they come to life and provide useable information for you (Source: Lean-Labs, 2015). The more believable you persona, the more you are able to understand your real customers’ needs.
Assumptions Are Never Right
Assuming key aspects about your customers isn’t going to make for a very effective buyer persona. The purpose of creating a buyer persona is to take all the assumptions you had to make about your customers in the past out of the equation. For many marketers, too much guesswork in their personas leads to ineffective profiles. An effective buyer persona should be data-drvien and based on real information that you gathered about your customers (Source: Lean-Labs, 2015). The more data that you have, the more realistic and useable your profiles will be.
Understanding Customer Pain Points
Making effective use of buyer personas also means taking the time to determine customer pain points, and more specifically, what is motivating your customer to solve that pain (Source: Lean- Labs, 2015). Understanding why a customer is seeking you out and what needs they expect you to fill is extremely important as “closed deals live and die with pain points” (Source: Lean-Labs, 2015). The more you can understand a customer’s problem, the more you are able to relate to them.
[RELATED CONTENT] Part of understanding the need for personas revolves around recognizing the evolving B2B trends influencing sellers and marketers today, and what needs to be done in order to mitigate those challenges. If you're unfamiliar with the trends, or want a quick refresh, may i suggest reading our eBook on the need for a new approach to sales, and the tactics to invest in for mitigating the challenges.
Common Mistakes Made When Using Buyer Personas
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again- creating buyer personas is not an easy task. The top 3 mistakes that marketers make which are affecting the usefulness of their personas are:
- using old information;
- having too much of a good thing; and
- not considering customers outside of your personas.
Using Oudated Data and Information
If you’re using out-dated information and data, your buyer personas will be ineffective. Consumer preferences and buying behaviours are constantly changing. Moreover, just because a buyer falls into a certain persona, doesn’t mean that they will stay there. Studying up-to-date data and analytics will ensure that you are current on the buyers’ habits right now and you can then place them accordingly in a more applicable persona.
One way to collect data efficiently is through sales enablement. Using sales analytics software, sales reps are able to collect real time data and analytics based on customer buying and content consumption behaviour. The software also enables sales enablement integration with marketing automation allows marketing teams to what information was presented and how long the information was viewed. This enables a better understanding of where the buyer stands in the decision journey. As your buyers move along in their decision, the steps that they take to get to the end result can have an impact on their persona.
Looking to learn more about sales enablement? Check out our previous post, “What is sales enablement? Sales enablement definition for 2015”, found here.
Too Much of a Good Thing!
Ever heard the saying, ‘don’t spread yourself too thin’? This is especially true when it comes to having too many personas. An abundance of profiles means that you have less time to actually concentrate on the ones that are most important to your company. Spending less time on customers that really matter means that you could potentially lose them. On the flip side, you also want to ensure that you’re not wasting money on customers who have no intention of buying your product, also known as negative personas.
Understanding the Importance of Negative Personas
In order to fully understand your personas, you must understand how negative personas can impact your marketing efforts. Opposite to buyer personas, negative personas are a semi-fictional representation of the type of person that you don’t want to have as a customer (Source: Redmoxy, 2015). The most obvious benefit of filtering your personas is that it will save you time and money in the long run given that you know not to target selling efforts to this persona (Source: Redmoxy, 2015). In most cases, marketing to these personas will cost more than the profit that they would bring in (Source: Learn Inbound, 2015).
Some companies probably don’t want to believe this, but there are actually people out there who do not need or want your products or services. Creating negative personas will help to create a more realistic perception of your customer because no matter how hard you try, you will never be able to satisfy all groups and the limitations that certain customers face when making a buying decision with your company becomes more apparent. (Source: Sales Mango, 2015).
If you haven’t already started to create your buyer personas, creating negative personas also make a great starting point. Through the process of elimination, determining who does not fit into your customer base can make determining who does a much easier (Source: Sales Mango, 2015).
How to Incorporate Buyer Personas in your Marketing
Last week, we touched on how to incorporate buyer personas in your current marketing efforts to help enhance your SEO and advertising. In case you missed it, you can find that post here.
Knowing how to use buyer personas to enhance your current marketing efforts will ensure that you are using your personas effectively. Buyer personas ultimately enhance your understanding of how you can optimize your content marketing, lead generation, and create a more effective webpage.
Content Marketing
Did you know that “85% of B2B marketers say that they struggle to produce content that truly engages their buyers”? (Source: Smart Bug Media, 2014). Understanding your buyer on a deeper level means that you can create content that will be more valuable to your customer at every stage of their decision journey.
Today it is clear that buyers hold more power in the sales process. Thanks to technology, a buyer’s expectations have drastically changed. Having the ability to access research and content anywhere online from any device means consumers no longer need to rely on sales reps for important information.
By discovering your customers’ problems, wants, and needs, marketing teams are able to construct stronger, and more targeted messages (Source: ROI Online, 2015). The more valuable information that you can create for your customers, the more they will trust your sales reps, ultimately bringing the power of a sales call back into your court.
Interested in learning more about how buyer expectations are changing? Head on over to our previous post, “Executing Effective Sales, Tactical Priorities for 2015”, found here.
Sales enablement software can help you take your content marketing one step further, as sales reps are able to customize marketing materials to better target the buyer. This allows for more engaging conversations with buyers given that content is more customized and related to their specific needs and pain points.
Knowing what content is beneficial to the buyer in relation to their stage in the decision journey can be difficult to pinpoint. May I suggest you check out our post, “Which digital content types to use for each purchase decision stage”, found here.
Better Lead Generation
Using buyer personas effectively will have a chain effect on other areas of your marketing. Developing better content will generate better leads. Similarly, useable buyer personas will assist you in the generation of higher quality leads and will save your sales team valuable time. (Source: AMA, 2012).
It should be noted, however, that having more leads creates more confusion between your sales and marketing department. In fact, “sales reps ignore 50% of marketing leads” (Source: Type A Communication, 2014). To avoid this, the use of a sales enablement solution can assist in sales and marketing alignment while managing all of your leads in one place. With the implementation of software, sales and marketing can work together nurturing leads.
Additionally, sales enablement software captures important end of funnel statistics. These statistics are more directly related to the communications that helped close a particular sale. When you utilize end-of-funnel metrics, you ultimately enhance the quality of leads generated given that you understand which content led to closing, not just lead generation. This is something that marketing automation cannot track or quantify.
A More Effective Webpage
Did you know that understanding your buyer personas can help you design a website that is more effective and efficient? By determining what your customer is looking for, you are able to create content and information for your website which is useful to them (Source: Lean- Labs, 2014). In fact, when a website is designed with a specific persona in mind, it is said to be 2-5 more times easier to navigate for customers (Source: Modgility, 2015).
As mentioned last week, buyer personas can also help increase your SEO. Using key terms and language that is commonly used by your customers on your website will not only make your content more relevant, it will also help increase your SEO ranking. Creating landing pages that relate to certain personas is also another effective way to use your profiles.
Updating Buyer Personas
Making effective use of buyer personas means understanding that they are never really complete (Source: Redmoxy, 2014). Consumer preferences, needs, and expectations are constantly changing. As a result, updating your personas frequently is just as important as having them (Source: Redmoxy, 2014).
What should you look for when updating your personas? One of the biggest indicators that a profile should be updated is when your data is no longer sufficient to be useful. When revising personas, marketing teams should consider deleting profiles that are too vague or feature traits similar to your negative persona (Source: Redmoxy, 2014). Moreover, if you had any changes to your products or services, you should also consider deleting or updating the personas that relate to them (Source: Redmoxy, 2014).
Buyer personas are only beneficial if you’re utilizing them correctly. By understanding effective uses for buyer personas, the importance of negative personas, and the ways in which you could implement your personas, you can actually use the personas you worked hard to create!
[RELATED CONTENT] Are you using the right technology to empower your sales reps in a world where consumer preferences and buying habits are constantly changing? May I suggest taking the time to read our white paper, “Using data to impact marketing campaigns”, as it offers a bevy of related information.
