Best Practices for Buyer Personas

Three simple ideas ensure your success.

#1  — Discover key insights: 

It is relatively easy to capture your personas’ job description, market segment identifier, and a paragraph or two about their goals, but this is not the most important part of your buyer persona and your competitors also have this information.

The five key insights into your buyer persona tell you exactly how your buyers weigh their options as they compare your solution against their other options. Discovering these insights will position you as a buyer expert, the marketer who can identify, with scary accuracy, a strategy and tactics that will persuade the buyer to choose you.

#2 — Build the right number of  personas:

Begin with the notion that buyer personas equate to job titles, and you will have too many personas.  Companies that go to market by industry or company size often compound the problem by defining buyer personas for each job title in each of their existing segments.

To decide how many buyer personas are right for you, we can help you evaluate:

• your capacity to execute multiple marketing strategies
• your findings about significant differences in the way buyers make the decisions you want to influence

When your buyer personas are based on The Five Rings of Insight, you will know when an additional persona and targeted marketing strategy will allow you to grow revenue or achieve a strategic goal.

#3 – Focus on the goal:

The enormous interest in buyer personas often results in a “checklist” approach, with companies in search of easy ways to acquire the requisite PowerPoint slides or posters.

The purpose for buyer personas is to become a buyer expert, a marketer who has the confidence to say “This is what the buyers are telling us. So here’s the plan.”

Target the personas and insights you need to nail a product launch, challenging revenue target, sales alignment, or more persuasive messaging and content, and you’ll be astonished at your ability to deliver results.

To succeed with buyer personas, you need new skills.

It’s surprising, I know, but your buyers will reveal facts that they haven’t shared with anyone else. It takes just a few hours of training to learn how to have an unscripted, agenda-driven conversation with them.

Register yourself or your team for a workshop and be the marketer who is your company’s source of competitive advantage.