Buyer Persona Blog

News feeds listen to the market for you

The best way to get to know your buyers costs nothing and takes no effort whatsoever. Establish a news feed (Google offers one, for instance) based on the keywords you think matter to your buyers. Set your preferences to get a daily emal with links to any new web content and blogs published on that subject. If you notice that there is a lot of information you don't want, refine the keywords until you see valuable results.

There is so much free, amazing information on the Web. Here's one example I found today -- a Ziff-Davis study that identifies the highest priority goals for CIOs in each of four areas: strategy, management, security and risk,  and technology. If you sell to senior IT people, this is good stuff --  free reports based on "thousands of interviews over the course of the last year."

Let's say you're marketing knowledge management solutions. Check out the technology report and you'll see that "improving the quality of our data" is one of the top IT priorities for 41% of the companies with revenues less than $100M, and only 25% of the companies with revenues over $1 billion. This doesn't mean that you should ignore the larger companies, but it does give you a way to estimate the size of your addressable market. Read on and you'll see that your ability to "convert raw data into accurate and actionable analysis" is a priority for 56% of respondents, while only 37% of them said that "managers often doubt the accuracy and reliabiity of the information." This is good information when you're choosing messages.

You don't want to make decisions based on any single data point, but spend a few minutes each day reading what's published online, and you'll start to see patterns that result in more effective  go-to-market strategies and optimze your PR, advertising, and marketing investments. No excuses now -- listening to the market is far too easy and important.

It's risky to sell marketing short

Let's face it. Everyone loves to poke fun at marketers. And that's OK, we're pretty tough, we can take it. But this morning I read a post from software developer Erik Sink that features fictional marketers Daisy and Goofy (yeah, you get it) at a planning meeting for a new product launch. Erik has good points about targeting markets, but his portrayal of marketing people inspired this post about one of my favorite topics; how tech companies underestimate the role of product marketing, and why its costing them a lot of business.

I agree with Eric that it's best to identify the market before you build a product. In fact, I partner with Pragmatic Marketing because they do a terrific job teaching product managers how to understand market problems and define products the market will want to buy. If you are fortunate enough to work for a company that has implemented their market-driven practices, cherish your job.

But let's say you work for a sales or development-driven company and your product managers spend most of their time with the developers, project managing the next release. On the rare days when someone leaves the building it's to help a sales person win a deal, not to listen to the market and gather market data. Therefore your product isn't targeted to any validated business need, it's a collection of features that the developers thought would be nice or a few customers wanted. You've got the requisite benefits statements, but they were reverse-engineered by thinking about the problems that the product could solve. No one can say with confidence that there is a match between the persona's buying criteria and the message.

So about that product that has been languishing on the shelf? It might belong there, but what if  someone who really knows the buyer persona got involved? There could be a market segment that would absolutely love it -- if only the message and program strategy were aligned with the persona's needs.

Message to software developers everywhere: Before you develop a product, bring in the market experts. And if you want the product you've already built to succeed, consult with product marketing -- in their role as the buyer persona experts, not the t-shirt or events department.