I get asked a lot about inbound marketing, what does that mean, what is it, why is it different. When answering these questions I usually begin by talking about buyer personas and the importance of understanding who is your customer and what are their challenges and goals. Which, truth be told, is not just the fundamentals of inbound marketing, but across the board B2B marketing or B2C marketing, big or small companies, all good marketing needs to built on solid understanding of your customer.
But what’s the best approach to create this insight? In this article I will cover the main options for creating buyer personas that not only form the basis of your marketing strategy, but also help to improve marketing and sales alignment.
Option 1 - High level overview
A cool new online tool was recently launched by Hubspot. Makemypersona.com is a great way to get the basics down on paper to inform your marketing strategy. If you need to get something done quickly to use as a starting point to develop your buyer personas then this is as good a place as any to start.
However, I wouldn’t rely only on this tool for your final buyer personas, for a couple of reasons.
- It’s only the opinion of one person, possibly from the marketing team
- It could be complete fantasy, unless that person has direct interaction with customers
Option 2: Running a Buyer Persona workshop
The second option is running a Buyer Persona workshop. These are typically conducted with a broad group of people from across the company. You want to have people in the room who have direct contact with customers. So, it’s great to have a cross-section of people from sales, customer support, marketing and product development. The purpose of having all these people in the room is to get their knowledge of the customer out of their heads and onto a page.
The insights gained from this can provide an overview of the customer, and start to build the alignment between marketing and sales, with both teams in the room, agreeing on the key target audience. In some cases, I have had new marketing messages emerge from the insights that this cross-functional team brings to light. It can be quite profound.
A downside to this approach is that it will still be things that are already known, albeit things that may not have been shared with marketing until now. This in itself is worthwhile reason to conduct a workshop. However, I would also recommend verifying the decisions made with some real data and for that you need to actually ask the customers, via an online survey and then the next stage of in depth customer interviews.
Option 3: Online survey
Part of the problem of the first two options is that much of it is based on guesswork. Sure, they can be educated guesses, but it’s always dangerous to make assumptions.
The only way to gather relevant and accurate data about buyers is to ask them directly. Online surveys are a great way to get some insight from existing customers about their goals and challenges.
However when you are putting your survey together, you must think beyond the demographics and job role information and think about your customer their goals and challenges and how your customer and prospect might research your product or service.
For example you could ask;
- What are your goals this year?
- What could get in the way of achieving your goals?
- How is success measured?
- What are your challenges?
- What industry trends or challenges might make it more difficult to reach your goals?
- Who are the peers, subordinates, superiors and outsiders with whom you frequently interact?
- Where do you source information?
- What blogs do you read?
- What social media networks do you use?
- How much time do you spend on the internet?
- How do you prefer to communicate via telephone or email?
- What content do you prefer to consume (blog articles, infographics, video, eBooks, white papers etc.)?
There are limitations to what you can ask and what someone is prepared to answer in an online survey. You will get some insights and you will have data, but to really gather deep insights and learn something new, then nothing beats customer interviews.
Option 4: In depth customer interviews
Deep customer insight into the how and why people buy is way more valuable than demographics or anecdotal evidence from sales, support or other team members. Which is why to really have effective buyer personas, you must undertake customer interviews.
Last year’s ITSMA Survey revealed that buyer persona effectiveness was impacted by:
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"Not doing qualitative research with buyers; relying too much on sales for buyer intelligence
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Emphasizing demographic information rather than deep insights into buyer behavior
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Creating buyer personas solely based on what buyers do (industry/role), rather than how they decide to purchase "
Source: ITSMA Survey: Increasing Relevance with Buyer Personas and B2I Marketing, March 2014
Adele Revella from the Buyer Persona Institute recommends undertaking 6-8 interviews before building a buyer persona and then continuing to interview at least one customer a month to further grow your customer insights.
These interviews ask probing questions about the decision making process, the hows and the whys that a customer chose to become your customer – or not. This level of inquiry truly generates a great understanding of what is working or not working in the sales process and therefore what content and indeed processes marketing should be doing more or less of.
There are many ways to develop buyer personas and I encourage you to, as a minimum, use the Hubspot app to put a stake in the ground to start the conversation.
As a final note, the most important thing about personas is that they are never static, people change, products change, the economy and industry changes. So keep close eye on your customers and keep in touch with the people who speak to your customers regularly, even go on a few sales calls or sit in on sales phone calls, you will be amazed at what you learn.
