Are you using personas in B2B marketing?

Ardath, we've started formulating our buyer personas as a way to better understand and "get closer" to our customers. For us, it's a way to understand how we can create content that reasonates with them, serves them better and makes them more engaged with us. (win-win, love that.) It's going to provide a good touch point for us as we create the content in the future. With this we can ask "How is the content serving Jane Doe Buyer?"

In our initial pass, we learned that we a much more varied customer set than originally imagined. Each persona with unique pain points and needs that they are hoping to address. So we've got some work to do but the results should be worth the effort.

I attended a webinar with MarketingExperiments today on email marketing and they had hard data on the improvements that come from segmentation and fine tuning -- personas, so to speak.

I wish I had that data at my fingertips, but I do not.

However, the conclusion was clear. Their data showed that the marketing gets significantly better results from fine-tuning their marketing based on buyer demographics.

Jeff Ogden, President
Find New Customers
http://www.findnewcustomers.net

Personas should include behavioral traits, too.

A recent client marketed to engineers and scientists. Here are two case studies showing the importance of understanding common customer behaviors.

(1) Phone Calls or Web Forms: A website review showed that most pages had contact forms that were producing leads, but the company phone number was missing. We added a trackable 800 number on every form. Nothing happened. Unlike the marketing and sales people who requested the change, engineers and scientists did not generally like to talk on the phone.

(2) Marketing Speak: To improve website landing pages, the company added customer testimonials and marketing copy that included the word "free." The conversions (completed forms) on those web pages did increase, but qualified leads (those who passed a filtering process) went down. The bottom line: enticing marketing text deflected the engineers and scientists, but it packed the house with students and other unqualified noise.

If you are an advertiser in any of the Reed Business magazines, ask for a copy of the "Mind of the Engineer" study - very helpful in understand this target audience. And, I always recommend that you test your marketing methods and learn from the feedback. Beyond just knowing your personas, you must play to their behaviors too.

Jaren Green
Partner, SolutionPipe
http://www.solutionpipe.com

Thanks, Jaren. Two great examples of why we need to monitor the changes we make to our marketing programs for relevance and how our assumptions as marketers can be misleading. I would submit that behaviors (likes and dislikes) are part of personas - not a separate issue.

So you've now got two new insights to add to your personas for that client.

They don't like the phone and by using "free" you attracted the "wrong" kind of leads.

The challenge appears to be how to get engineers and scientists to take next steps without using the phone. Have you planned content to pull them forward from that first download? For example, is there a link in the PDF to help them access more content related to that topic?

Will scientists and engineers watch videos or slidecasts? Or do they prefer the written word? Is the writing in the PDF academic in tone and technical enough to interest them to return when more content becomes available?

I do have one more question. For the sake of longer-term marketing cycles, were the students nearly finished with their college degrees? If they're entering the job market, or even in a career but expanding their education (e.g. a masters degree) they may be worth marketing to over the long term. They could become valid prospects down the road, couldn't they? Or, at least influencers for decision makers - although it's hard to tell without knowing the nature of the product we're talking about.

Hi Big Wayne,

You make great points. Thanks for sharing them.

I particularly like this sentence - "Throw away the data and pay attention to the verbatims and stories that buyers tell!!!"

Personas are about the nuances. Excellent! What they share and how they say it can provide great insights for developing a nurturing storyline.

Hi Parker,

Excellent! The takeaway for me in what you said is that you discovered a "much more varied customer set than originally imagined." This is fantastic insight to achieve. Often it's not the big things, but the nuances that make the difference.

The question, "How is the content serving Jane Doe Buyer?" is a great way to consider the application of content. It keeps us from falling back into promoting a company message instead of "serving" our prospects with something they find valuable. It's not about what we want to say, personas help us stay focused on what our prospects want to know.

There are many personas. Where should we focus?

A target audience might contain many personas including window shoppers, hobbyists, people without budgets, and some buyers. In a recent blog article, I recommend that we focus only on the buyers. Ardath was quick to offer an alternate point of view and it has lead to an important debate.

http://www.longtailorganic.com/2010/01/get-in-the-buyers-path-focus-on-buyers...

In my experience, personas, when done well, are a "cornerstone" competency that yields benefits well beyond marketing and sales. Knowing the DNA of the types of customers you serve is a fantastic journey that starts with some initial intelligence and analytics but continues on through the years and never ceases to change. The personas get richer and morph over time as market conditions and buyer behavior changes as well. The value you derive is not only knowing in detail the 4-5 personas that you deal with but most importantly how they morphed over time and why.

To Jaren's point...sometimes it's hard to know how many perdsonas to settle on. When we did this kind of exercise before, we let the actual purchase behavior define the number of personas. What separates personas is how they behave at the time of the sale. Once you have that then you can dive into a lot deeper and understand what makes each persona unique and enrich that understanding over time. Rule of 5 applies. Tracking more than 5 tribes tends to yield diminishing returns.

Ardath, We're developing personas right now. While they require some work the main benefit will be to better align our content to specific targets during specific stages of their buying process. Personas help make sure our communications are more relevant and more helpful to our prospects. It all amounts to more connected marketing that benefits marketing's customers: sales and our end users. We think this will result in more and happier customers all the way around. I'll keep you posted.

Earlier this year the Journal of Marketing Management published a revision to an age old approach to segmentation that is all about the importance of personas. Check it out. It is well worth the read and a great piece of work. We're already looking at implementing for a client a review to their existing segmentation around this approach, which will lead to an introduction of personas for them.

Business psychographics revisited:
from segmentation theory to successful marketing
practice
James Barry, Huizenga School, Nova Southeastern University, USA
Art Weinstein, Huizenga School, Nova Southeastern University, USA

Lots of great comments here and good insights on the use of personas. Highly recommend it.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor
Find New Customers "Lead Generation Made Simple"
http://www.findnewcustomers.com

Ardath,

I'm late to the discussion but very good question. The approach to segmentation and the use of personas has had many debates over the last 10 years. In my opinion they are complementary approaches when executed with this type of thinking in mind and distinguishing between information and motivation insight. In terms of content marketing, personas (buyer personas in particular) derived from qualitative insights can reveal important messaging clues. Especially as they pertain to attitudinal and perceptual beliefs as well as goals that either need to be reinforced or addressed with content. Thus enabling content development that will have relevance and impact.

Tony Zambito
Goal Centric
Founder and CEO
www.goalcentric.com
1-888-972-8937