Listen to the persona, know who you're talking to. The first step to producing relevant and meaningful b2b messaging is to know who you're talking to. Curiously, this is the first step most marketers Miss. In their haste to get to market quickly. They cast as wide a net as possible, trying to be all things to all people. When I asked me to be high tech chief marketing officers or marketing VPS, who they're targeting, I often get this response, Mike or targeting the IT managers of global 5000 companies.
Wow, could you be any vaguer than that? A response like that tells me nothing about who these people are, where they work, what problems they're trying to solve, and why they might be a good target for our product or service. Unfortunately, this approach of broad inclusiveness leads to poor product design, a mishmash of messages, and an unending Focus marketing campaign that actually extends the sales cycle because it takes longer for customers to understand what we're talking about. Instead, we stand a much greater chance of success if we can laser focus our messages to become more relevant to a prioritized set of potential buyers and users. In this way, the task of market segmentation is like aiming for the bullseye, the sweetspot, consisting of those key folks most likely to buy our product now. The term segmentation refers to the process of identifying and describing potential buyer groups.
Once we've identified the possibilities, you'll want to prioritize which specific segment or segments to target first, segments may refer to vertical industries, geographies, job titles or other dimensions. While rationalizing and prioritizing a target market is a good start, it is not sufficient to guarantee that we truly ended Stand the people who will hopefully buy our products, we need a persona for each type of target buyer. Building a persona is about understanding the prospective buyer. It's about walking in their shoes to better feel, taste, touch and smell the trends and priorities that shaped their purchase behavior. If we fail to empathize with the buyer and the users, then we increase the risk that our messages will be ignored and worse, the product will be irrelevant, will fail to connect. Your success in the market is in your ability to empathize with your target buyers and users.
Empathy is the key word. If you don't truly understand them, there will always be a gap between your products and services and the customer's needs and expectations. And for that we need to develop a persona. A persona is a personalized extension of your target segment. This is your bullseye. It's a fictional representation of a set of real people who share similar traits, experiences and even behaviors.
While the persona isn't a real person, he or she must feel like a real person. Here's a generic template used to build a persona. You'll want to modify it for your own purposes. But notice how it captures key information on a single slide. Information about who they are, where they work, and why they are a good target. You'll want to include only information relevant for the product or service being promoted.
The persona template for your company will be unique, so choose the dimensions important and relevant for your business. The final step in completing the template is to summarize the persona using a two or three word description and the inclusion of a photograph to bring your persona live. The photo in short description provide a shorthand way to refer to the persona. Descriptions like these help us understand our target market. Better. The skeptical futurist, the corporate radical and the globetrotter.
Those few words in the accompanying photos help bring your persona to life. Again, this is a shorthand way to refer to the persona that has a lot more data behind it. If you're looking for more information on buyer personas, I invite you to check out my new online course how to build better buyer personas. You can find it on tablet wise. In this course, I'll walk you through the 10 steps on how to prepare for the exercise. conduct the exercise with your team, and more importantly, what to do with your persona output, how you can apply it to your messaging and your offers to boost the return on investment of all of your marketing campaigns.
How to build better buyer personas from tablet wise