Best Practices to Create and Use Buyer Personas
Overview: This blog post content is part of recent document that is available on my website. For the full document, go to my website on the Tools and Techniques page: Creating and Using Personas.
Successful marketing requires a deep understanding of the target audience. Personas go beyond traditional customer segmentation to represent the goals and behaviors of groups of like buyers.
What is a Persona?
Personas can be thought of as a deeper step of customer segmentation, creating a more robust profile that includes mindsets, motivations, perceptions, actions, desires, measurable attributes and more. A popular definition of a persona is: a semi-fictional representation of the ideal customer based upon real data and some educated speculation about demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
Most businesses and organizations view personas as a way to help focus marketing, sales, and operations efforts and goals. They are derived from answering questions about target segments such as these:
Who are they (personal demographics)
What do they want (at work and personally in their career)
How do they interact with you and your competitors (their role and relationships)
What’s important to them (motivation and value definition).
How Personas Can Be Used
Personas should be the starting and reference point for all your marketing and business strategies and goals. Personas are normally used in product development, marketing and sales. For purposes of this document, it is assumed marketing is the key user. Groups of buyers will be top priority, followed by users of the technology, and then stakeholders. Personas provide representations of the goals and behavior of real groups of individuals. They are developed from data collected from both quantitative and qualitative sources and can include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment.
Personas can be both intriguing and compelling because they provide human characteristics to a more abstract customer profile. Defining personas and building them into segmentation models provides many benefits to marketing, sales and product development processes and their respective teams, including:
Establishing a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups; groups can be put in a context and can be more readily understood and remembered.
Developing solutions tailored to the personas; product features and associated services offerings can be prioritized based on how well they address the personas’ needs.
Providing a humanizing element to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
The major uses marketing groups can make of personas are:
To reach and attract the right buyers, with the right content, at the right time
To structure all content creation
To aid in creating targeted customer loyalty programs
To design more focused demand generation programs, with stronger product value propositions, associated messaging and channels to market
To support sales when communicating with likely prospects.
Best Practices for Building Personas
Establishing buyer or user personas is a multi-step process:
Step 0: Determine if you need personas
Step 1: Prepare to build the personas leveraging internal and external research
Step 2: Design the personas according to the level of detail required
Step 3: Populate the personas and verify clarity and effectiveness
Step 4: Utilize the personas in the marketing and sales processes.
Before initiating this level of research and analysis, make sure that you have appropriate management-level support to conduct and complete the analysis. Frequent updates and milestone meetings should be agreed upon and supported throughout the entire process.
Recommendations
Evaluate current sales and marketing capabilities regarding the similarities and differences for the personas that you develop. Realize that for the most part there will be a blend among personas’ traits and attitudes within IT organizations and customer base. One persona's approach is not better or worse than another’s and vice versa.
Business that can establish go-to-market strategies embracing multiple persona styles may be more successful than those that promote one style over the other. Do not create conflict between persona positions because this can create unnecessary strife due to the potential for differing motivations, desires, and ultimate final outcomes regarding long-term projects and day-to-day operations if one side is played against the other.
To enhance the overall acceptance with your target audience, here are some recommendations:
Establish some type of multiple persona segmentation that establishes differentiation across the audiences
Determine the appropriate features, benefits, and value as aligned to the specific needs of the personas
Implement a comprehensive set of market and positioning initiatives aligned to these personas
Align value propositions and ROI metrics to business requirements, such as:
Internally focused: operational efficiencies, cost savings, infrastructure support, and improved security
Externally focused: revenue growth, improved customer service, increased employee effectiveness, innovation, information sharing, and creation of intellectual assets.
Please contact me if you have any questions or comments: thomasgeid@comcast.net.