It’s no secret that buyer personas are an integral component of business communication planning, and though the idea of a persona is conceptually straightforward, few are actually familiar with the practice. At the very least, many struggle to understand the best practices with respect to personas and how they can positively affect certain business goals.
This week, we take an introductory look at the world of buyer personas and lay out a few of the most important reasons to participate in persona mapping.
Profiling Ourselves is the New Norm
Today, we are all connected online in some way or another through various social media outlets. I want you to take a second to think about what your online profile might look like.
If I were to look at all of the information that you have provided in your Facebook profile, without having ever met you, I could tell a lot about you. From factual descriptions such as your gender, age, current location, work history, relatives, relationship status to more indepth politcal and spiritual views, I would be able to understand more about you than you may realize.
If I stayed on your profile a little bit longer and dug deeper, I could determine even more about you by the pages that you’ve liked, nicknames that you may have, your favourite quotes, books, sports and movies. I could even probably track the places that you have visited recently. By looking at your friends, your status updates, your photos, and conversations on your wall, I could get a pretty well-rounded idea of who you are as an individual. If I were to then engage in a conversation with you, I would already have a pretty good understanding of topics that may interest you and grab your attention.
In marketing, understanding a well-rounded view of your buyer is becoming an increasingly vital, albeit complicated endeavor. One way marketers are able to succeed in understanding the buyer is by developing buyer personas. The use of buyer personas in marketing is a lot like creating a Facebook profile for your customers.
Defining ‘Buyer Personas’
Buyer personas are actually a simple concept; however, mapping and servicing buyer personas can become complex. In fact, in a recent survey conducted on buyer personas, only 15% of respondents were very familiar with the practice (Source: Tony Zambito, 2015). A persona is a lot like a social media profile. It is a profile representing detailed characteristics about your customers for the purpose of tailoring their communications. There is no limit to the number of buyer personas that you can create.
A buyer persona is defined as a conceptual representation of your ideal (and current) customer, based on market research and data about your current customers (Source: Hubspot, 2014). This can include information such as your buyer's demographics (age, gender, location, etc.). A buyer persona also incorporates the behaviour of current and ideal buyers (Source: Track Maven, 2015). Understanding certain behaviours will allow you to better understand a customer’s unique needs, and how these behaviours influence the decision journey.
To truly create a well–rounded depiction of your buyers, you should always consider profiling other aspects of a customer's life that tend to be overlooked at first glance. This can include information such as family size, personal interests, hobbies, career history, etc. (Source: Single Grain, 2015). The more information that you can find out about a buyer, the stronger the buyer persona will be.
Once all of the information has been gathered, you can begin to piece together your personas. Buyer personas can be short descriptions, archetypical character traits, purchase decision criteria, content consumption behaviour, etc. (Source: Pragmatic Marketing, 2012).
Are you already familiar with buyer personas? Click here to check out our previous post, The Role of Sales Enablement for Buyer Persona Mapping, for some insights into the role that sales enablement plays in crafting a better buyer persona.
The Need for Buyer Personas
Even without always noticing, we are constantly bombarded with marketing messages. These messages have snuck into our daily lives, and are so pervasive that we often fail to connect with many of them. Let’s consider some of the ways in which you can be touched by marketing messages in your average workday:
Wake up and put the news on in the background as you’re getting ready to head to work. Every commercial break, you’re exposed to marketing messages. As you eat your breakfast, you check your email. If you’re an online shopper like I am, you already have number of promotional emails waiting for you in your inbox. Or maybe you check your Facebook profile, while catching up on updates from friends and you may see a promotional ad or two that has been strategically placed in your feed based on your past likes and search history. Driving to work, you hit traffic so you turn on the radio to listen to traffic updates and you’re again exposed to commercials and marketing messages and at the same time, you can see a billboard advertising a new menu item at a local fast food restaurant out of your window. You haven’t even been awake for two hours before being exposed to over 100 marketing messages.
It is estimated that consumers are exposed to as many as 3,000 to 5,000 marketing messages in a single day (Source: Single Grain, 2015). The question is, how many of those messages actually make a lasting impression on us? For marketers, this makes it increasingly difficult to actually reach the right people. Today, we have to break through a greater volume of noise in order to capture the buyer’s attention (Source: Single Grain, 2015).
The truth is, when it comes to communications we are more likely to trust the ones that we get from the people we know than the advertisements that we see (Source: Single Grain, 2015). So how do we get customers to actually trust the messages that we are sending them?
The answer: by creating buyer personas.
Getting your customers to trust your marketing isn’t the only recognizable issue. Customers must also be able to trust other areas of your company so the use of buyer personas assists your marketing, sales, product, and services departments build stronger trust with your buyers. Essentially, buyer personas allow you to relate to your customers on a more personal level (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
Having well-developed buyer personas will allow you to better understand your customers and make it easier for you to tailor content, messaging, product development, and services to their specific needs, behaviours, and concerns (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
Benefits of Creating Buyer Personas
Taking the time to develop detailed buyer personas for your customers will greatly benefit your company in the long run. Paying close attention to your personas will then help you to determine where to focus your time, and will help to develop your products. Buyer personas will also ensure that all departments are on the same page (Source: Hubspot, 2014).
Stronger Sales and Marketing Alignment
Using personas is a push in the right direction for stronger sales and marketing alignment. This is because personas steer the creation of communications away from random development towards tailored development.
Over time, the effectiveness of content and communications is enhanced because those communications which had no influence on the persona expire while the stronger pieces become more refined.
From a sales and marketing alignment perspective, improved communications develops better leads. The power of personas also allows sales reps and marketers to openly communicate about strategy effectiveness. This kind of benefit feeds into itself, as sales and marketing alignment is a crucial component of long term persona refinement.
Interested in learning more about sales and marketing alignment? May I suggest our post, Why use Sales and Marketing Alignment, and 5 Best Practices, which can be found here.
More Efficient Marketing Campaigns
For many of the same reasons as above, marketing campaigns and communications will be more easily enhanced with targeted and actionable data insights.
The more relatable the content is to the customer, the more likely the customer is to listen to your sales presentations. Stronger, more persuasive messages will result in more sales and revenue for your company (Source: Single Grain, 2015).
SEO Results
Being able to create more tailored content will also be beneficial for your company’s SEO-results.
How?
As you begin to see your customer’s persona become more refined through the content and communications that they are exposed to, you will be able to hone in your SEO keyword strategies to better reflect the specific areas that add value to those personas that you are targeting.
Think about it like this: you begin to notice that lead conversion to MQLs is higher among those visitors who downloaded XYZ whitepaper about an industry challenge. You now refocus your inbound blogging, social media, and ads to those topics discussed in the XYZ whitepaper. In this case, you should now see an increase in that type of persona visiting your site because of this more tailored lead acquisition inbound strategy.
As you may have noticed, the power of buyer personas lies not in any one of these benefits on its own, but rather in the fact that these benefits are continuous, influence one another, and collectively enhance the sales process overall.
How to Create Buyer Personas
Whether you’re new to buyer personas or have experience working with them, learning how to create personas can be a complicated process. What information do you include? What information do you leave out? How do you get all the necessary information to begin with? And how can you incrementally improve your ability to create over time?
In a recent survey, “80% of respondents indicated that they were confused about what buyer personas were, what were the differences between profiling and buyer personas, what were the essential elements of buyer personas development, and the role of qualitative research” (Source: Tony Zambito, 2015). Understanding the fundamental basics of buyer personas will make creating them that much easier.
To Start...
Where do you start? Initially, going through your current customer database is probably the best starting point. Your database is already filled with important and relevant information such as customer demographics. Keep in mind that you will need to gather a lot more information, as effective personas are also based on market research and behavioural insights (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
Consult Internal Resources
Staying internal for now, the next best place to dig up some information on your customers is from your sales team. Remember how I mentioned above sales and marketing alignment was crucial for creating effective buyer personas? Your sales team holds a wealth of knowledge about your customers that your marketing team may not even know about (especially end-of-funnel criteria).
Your sales team interacts with your customers in ways that your marketing team doesn’t. Sales reps are more aware of your customers' buying process and have more information on: 1) what encourages customers to make a purchase; 2) what discourages them in making a purchase; and 3) any pain points that they encounter throughout their decision journey (Source: Agile Leverage, 2015).
Explore Outside Sources
When you’re ready to gain insight outside of your company to assist in creating your buyer personas, it's time to turn to the customers themselves. Collecting data directly from customers through surveys, interviews, and buying patterns are just a few of the ways you can get this good quality information. Be aware when collecting qualitative data that it is easy to ask close-ended questions which do not give customers enough opportunity to expand on their reasoning (Source: Agile Leverage, 2015). In this case, interviews or focus groups are the best form of qualitative research as they allow for more opportunity for development and analysis of the thought process behind an answer.
Surprisingly, only 15% of those using buyer personas are conducting these in-depth interviews (Source: Zambito, T. 2015). Note that earlier we cited a buyer persona survey which found that only 15% of respondents felt they were ‘very familiar’ with the practice. An interesting similarity...
Create your Personas
After your research, you now want to start putting together your core group of personas. Don’t worry about being 'wrong' as the magic of personas lies in the fact that you can enhance them over time with new and actionable insights.
Apply the initial research from your examination of the customer in order to determine the basic profiles of your target market. You will likely have different personas for those customers who are at the beginning of the decision journey as opposed to those who are nearing the end of the decision journey. You may also have personas that reflect certain positions in the company (B2B), and some that define personas through lifestyle characteristics (B2C).
Now it is time to take the communications and content that you are currently using and apply it to the new personas that you’ve now created. One of two things will happen:
- You will see that there is content and communications that don’t quite fit the personas you have created, and/or more personas exist;
OR
- You will see that a lot of your content is self-serving, lacks targeted depth, and is just too generic to be valuable for that one persona.
The latter is more likely, but that’s actually good thing! It means that you’re now on track for a future of tailored content creation, and increased marketing contribution to revenue over time.
Enhancing Personas Over Time
Even after creating your newly-tailored buyer personas, you still have work to do. You now want to start leveraging your content distribution to the personas that you’ve created. The best way to do this is through a marketing automation platform given that these systems allow your content to be applied to your personas.
As a buyer interacts with your website and requests a piece of content, you have a great opportunity to capture information about them and put that information into your persona system. These types of online analytics can reveal a lot about your buyer personas in the acquisition stages of the relationship. How are people finding your website? What are they looking at? For how long? Understanding how and where your customers are coming into contact with you can help fill in some of the gaps in the persona profile.
We now circle back to the power and importance of sales and marketing alignment, as sales reps can quantify the effectiveness of MQL’s that you’ve provided to them. Some important next steps include keeping an open line of communication with sales, automating next touch points via email for lead nurturing, and analyzing what behaviours assist a potential customer in going through the process of lead-to MQL-to ready for the sale.
Still not convinced that your company needs improved sales and marketing alignment? Take a look at our post, “Achieving Sales and Marketing Alignment for a Viable Sales Strategy”, found here.
Remember, the purpose of a buyer persona is to assist you in the creation of tailored communications for a particular representative group. If you find that you cannot successfuly craft tailored communcations, you should go back to your buyer persona and modify it as required. There is no use in having buyer personas that do not assist you in your goal.
Tips to Incorporate Buyer Personas
Now you’re probably wondering, ‘how can I use the buyer personas that I have spent time and effort creating?’ When surveyed, 60% of respondents admitted that they had little to no understanding of what the best practices are for buyer personas (Source: Tony Zambito, 2015).
Depending on the information that you’ve collected, there are a number of ways in which you can use personas to create more effective messages. Two important ways that you can begin to incorporate your buyer personas are: 1) through advertising; and 2) through enhancements to your SEO.
Advertising and Content Creation
The buyer personas that you create will give you a better understanding of your audience and in turn assist you in improving and streamlining advertising for them.
The ability to reallocate your advertising dollars is one very effective use of your personas. From your research, you’ll have a better handle on where your customers spend their time (i.e., which social media platforms they prefer to use) and where you’ll gain the most traction on your ads (Source: Hubspot, 2014). You can then decide how to spend more or less accordingly.
Buyer personas also make it easier to create advertisements and content for buyers at every stage in the decision journey. In fact, 77% of buyers expect different content to reflect where they are in their decision journey (Source: Kapost, 2015). Your advertisements and content will not only be more relatable to the customer, but you'll waste less money on unncessary advertising.
In the United States, an estimated 958 million dollars is wasted each year on ineffective advertising (Source: Kapost, 2015). By streamlining your content, you are able to produce advertisements that are actually going to reach and entice your customer. That's the goal isn't it?
SEO
Now that you know your customer, it’s time you start thinking like them. Using the key terms and language that your customer would use, you can leverage buyer personas to your advantage and increase your SEO (Source: Hubspot, 2014). Using terms that your customer is familiar with will not only make them understand you better; it will also make your content more relatable to them.
Creating landing pages that are customized just for your customized buyer personas will also boost your SEO (Source: Hubspot, 2014). It’s important not to just highlight purely generic reasons that describe why your products/services are useful. Instead you must describe what exactly your product or service will do for that particular target buyer (Source: Hubspot, 2014). Creating landing pages with content related to specific personas is one way to achieve this.
Interested in learning how to create more effective digital content? May I suggest you give our post, “4 Steps to get Customers to Say YES with Digital Content” a read.
In order to make a lasting impression on buyers today, it’s important to have content that customers can relate to and engage with. Through the creation of buyer personas, you’ll be able to better simplify the complicated process of understanding your buyer and their needs.
If you’re at the point of using personas within your marketing automation system, may I suggest checking out this post about The Role of Sales Enablement for Buyer Persona Mapping. Marketing automation systems have a limit to the data they can collect, especially once the buyer is speaking with a sales rep. Sales Enablement software is the source for end-of-funnel insights that enable your marketers to tailor content for closing (where it really matters), not just lead generation. Click here for more.
[RELATED CONTENT] While we’re on the topic of data insights, I suggest this whitepaper report about using data to impact marketing campaigns. It’s a great addition to the points that I made about data for persona enhancements, and sheds light on just how important it is for sales reps to have this kind of data management in place for the sake of stronger marketing effectiveness.
