DIY: How To Easily Create An Effective Buyer Persona
Using Buyer Personas to help fine tune your marketing strategy makes a lot of sense. By asking a few questions you can have the start of a few strong and particle profiles.
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However, you don’t want to just make them up out of thin air…unless you have a learning disability when it comes to marketing. So, what tools do you have at your disposal to validate and improve your best efforts in crafting Buyer Personas?
I wanted to ask that question of noted SEO speaker and blogger Lee Odden. Lee share a few of his tips to make great Buyer Personas.
This video was shot at the 2011 Vocus User Conference held in Baltimore, Maryland.
Interviewed:
Lee Odden CEO TopRank Online MarketingAbout Steve Farnsworth @Steveology
Steve Farnsworth provides digital/social media marketing, branded journalism, content creation and marketing for lead generation to companies so they can increase customer preference for their brand, shorten their sales cycles, and generate better qualified leads. Call 650-331-0594 for digital/social media marketing training and workshops for your company.
Adele Revella (@buyerpersona)
October 4, 2011
Given that Lee’s focus is on SEO, I agree with the recommendations in this interview. The resources and tips he recommends are excellent for improving the company’s search position.
But a buyer persona has a lot more dimensions and considerably broader application to marketing decisions. To create persona-targeted messaging and content, for example, marketers need to know what criteria the buyer persona is using to weigh different options, how that persona defines success, and what that persona believes about the barriers that have prevented success until now.
Granted, my work is mostly focused on complex products for B2B markets. So perhaps Lee is thinking more about B2C or transactional buying decisions. For B2B, we need much more. We also want to know how our product relates to a top five priority or initiative that our Ideal customer is targeting for investment, which buyer personas will weigh in on a decision that takes as long as two years to make, and how we can influence the buyer with valuable content at each step in the buying process.
I just wanted to point out that there’s a lot of ways to use buyer personas, and it takes a bit more work than Lee describes to make them effective.
Steve Farnsworth A.K.A. @Steveology
October 5, 2011
Your point is very well taken. I’m glad you made it. Just to put Lee’s comments into perspective let me share this: Lee does a lot of work with B2B and many major brands. However, what I was asking him was really to help those who have less marketing support, and who are forced to DIY. That was the way I asked, and the way he answered. I should have made that clear. That was my bad.
With the marketing infrastructure that is present in leading corporations there would be a thorough and more complex process. Because of my corporate background I would have said the same thing in the past. However, now days as a blogger and speaker I have been stunned to discover numerous mid-sized companies (200m to 1b+) that have very immature marketing functions. They have only a few people to do what other companies have 20 people on staff to do. So, providing quick and dirty options is required, in addition to the more thoughtful process you rightly noted.
Adele Revella (@buyerpersona)
November 20, 2011
Thanks for the clarification Steve.
But I’m working with many companies in the mid-size range that you describe. With a few hours of training, these marketers can learn how to ask the right questions and get really deep insights into their buyers. By conducting one or two half-hour interviews a month, these marketers can gain incredibly useful insights.
Surprisingly, in fact, it’s the small to mid-size companies that are making the most progress towards understanding their buyers and leveraging those insights. A small and tightly focused team often finds it easier to accomplish the change that’s needed.