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Create Buyer Personas by Defining Your Audience Part I

Category: Marketing

Well, the first step is simple. Who is your audience? Once you identify who you are targeting you will print buyer be able to jump into the planning process to develop your message, choose relevant channels for promotion and plan for future lead conversion. Not until recently have B2B marketers really started adopting communication strategies like using personas to identify key customer segments. This unique tool, the buyer persona, is designed to help define one’s audience. Without deploying an organic, holistic marketing strategy for each target and then crafting its evolution, you will be putting your market results in sinking territories.

Before we continue, let’s establish that the “design persona” is not the “buyer person.” With the use of anecdotal evidence and observation, a design persona works to help shape product offerings and create user experiences. B2B purchase behavior requires a little more insight to be effective. Buyer personas do not focus on scenarios as much as they do on identifying the pain points and the common points of resistance of the buyer. So, in short, a buyer persona focuses on the purchase process to create a key profile of behavioral attributes that is crucial to sales success.

Let’s get started. Our first stop is building acceptance. This is done by choosing the right team. The infrastructure of corporate acceptance typically starts with the endorsement of a senior corporate champion. This individual mandates that the marketing activities are strengthened and adhere to the directions of the initiatives. This helps to ensure that the marketing program is given enough priority and focus within the organization. The sales team, in turn, offers a key benefit by helping to define the key attributes of target prospects and qualified leads--two components intrinsic to the buyer persona. Before any architecture of the program is worked on, never forget that when you are building personas you can not over emphasize the target companies. The deals are going to be generated between people and conversation, not corporate entities. The danger in focusing on the company is that the buyer persona will be less focused on inspiration and engagement.

The main core of the buyer persona is the segment profile. The segment profile designs measurable and descriptive data points for qualification methods. Once your team defines the necessary questions to ask or the key segment identifiers, you can work on capturing fundamental needs with your propositions. This segmentation method identifies key buyer types. While there will be many types such as technical, economic, executive and key influences, keeping it simple will allow you to refine your methodology on an ongoing and necessary basis. Determine whether your key clients list has common attributes and how many unique sales propositions you will need to design. Define differences such as vertical market, size, distribution and geography and then shift the focus towards identifying the key people involved in the sales process.

These points present to you the first and necessary steps of the buyer persona creation process. Next week we will look over what makes prospects tick, how to follow the eyes and ears of the prospect and how to build a lead scoring framework. If you are interested in looking at some white papers for your reference, please email me and I will provide them for you.

Read part II here.

Posted on Jun 18, 2010.

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