Knowing all of the buyers who influence the sale, and developing detailed personas for each, enables you to create powerful marketing roadmaps. You’ll reach buyers in the right place with the right messages at the right time to drive the revenue needle.
Few marketers have enough confidence in their buyer perception to define, defend, and deliver strategies that don’t conform with the company’s internal perspective. Lacking a detailed understanding of buyers means you run the risk of making decisions based on inadequate information and trying to persuade buyers who simply don’t care. This approach can lead to perfectly good products that fail because the company doesn’t identify and communicate with buyers who have the real need. How do you combat that? The surefire way to reach and influence potential buyers is to identify who they are and get to know them. Personas are the perfect vehicle for these efforts. The powerful information personas provide will help you create an effective marketing strategy that resonates with potential buyers.
Demographics vs. Personas
Many marketing professionals simply gather demographic information and call it a day. However, a simple categorization of your buyers’ age, sex, income status, and occupation isn’t enough to direct a cohesive and effective marketing strategy. What exactly is a buyer persona? It goes well beyond demographics to identify a prototype or archetype of your potential buyers. It’s created from research you conduct with potential buyers and existing customers via direct conversations and analyzing their behaviors online and off. (Read more about this in 6 Keys to Create Perfect Marketing Personas.) To illustrate this, let’s say you have a sales enablement software for mid-sized businesses. From your persona research you’ve identified three primary buyers: Tom, a sales rep; Theresa, a regional sales manager; and Philip, the director of IT. All three work for the same company, but have different motives and challenges.
- Tom is motivated to continually improve his sales performance to meet the demands of ever-increasing quota. Meeting quota enables him to remain employed, and exceeding quota helps him increase his income and pay for his daughter’s pricey tuition. Tom is continually challenged by having to fulfill other demands like reporting, meetings and responding to inter-office email, all of which take away from his valuable selling time. He’s dedicated to working hard, but work/life balance is also important. Tom finds personal value in keeping on top of trends in sales tactics and ways to streamline productivity. As such, he routinely starts his mornings reading blogs and following individuals on Twitter who cover those topics.
- Theresa, also motivated to meet quota, is under pressure to ensure she has the best sales team within the company. This means she needs to track performance, develop a plan for coaching, identify solid candidates to onboard and report to the C‑suite. Since she oversees a region that includes several states, she is extremely busy and travels constantly. Most of her job is done via mobile phone.
- Phillip is the ultimate gatekeeper of any software implemented throughout the company. He is the head of IT and comes with a completely different set of motives and needs.
So which persona should you market to? Who is really your potential customer? The answer: all three. Tom, Theresa, and Phillip each represent three different persona types:
- A functional buyer, the individual who will be the primary user of the product.
- An economic buyer, the individual in charge of the purse strings or budget for a purchase.
- A technical buyer, the person responsible for reviewing the product against company standards and requirements.
Ensuring that you have marketing programs and material designed for all three is the secret to a truly successful marketing program.
Appealing To Various Personas
By understanding these three different buyer types — and developing detailed personas for each — you can more clearly identify the types of marketing messages and channels that will reach each one.
- Marketing to the functional buyer: Tom wants to know about usability and how the product will make him a rock star. You can begin to identify the types of media outlets he consumes and direct your advertising and PR efforts to them. Because you also intimately understand the problems and challenges he faces, you can directly appeal to those in the material.
- Marketing to the economic buyer: With Theresa (the economic buyer), it’s easy to see that any marketing will need to be short, punchy and address things like effectiveness, pricing and how the tool will make her job easier. And the marketing may be more effective when delivered via mobile, whether that’s in-app advertising or promoted posts on social networks. Knowing that she constantly travels opens up additional opportunities for marketing through airline publications, hotels, or transportation organizations.
- Marketing to the technical buyer: Phillip wants to know how the software will improve company efficiencies, how long it will take to implement and get the sales force up to speed, and whether it integrates well with other systems in place. Phillip may be influenced by online reviews from reputable sources, industry influencers, suggestions from other IT colleagues, and suggestions from the internal team. That information should spark all kinds of ideas for reaching Phillip.