the value of making personas

The Value and Making of Personas

Laura Patterson President & Author [email protected]

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Three Session Objectives

1. The differences between personas, profiles, and roles

2. How to create personas

3. How to use personas to support demand generation efforts

“The purpose of a persona is to identify a customer’s motivations, expectations, and goals. Even though personas … are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real customers. A well-crafted persona enables you to stand in your customer’s shoes and take a more customer-centric view.” Laura Patterson,

MarketingProfs, January 2007


Four Demand Generation Challenges 1. Strategy and alignment is about creating a clear, common set of objectives and approach to the market. <25% marketers are

generating enough demand to satisfy their sales teams.

Sales needs buyer personas to guide communications with their prospects.

2. Technology is the engine that enables best practices demand-generation tactics such as lead nurturing and lead scoring as well as the integration of multiple programs. 52% of marketers use

some sort of marketing automation platform.

Yet most don’t leverage personas when it comes to lead development and nurturing.


3. Content. If technology is the engine, content is the fuel. Pressing need for content across a range of buying stages and personas. 4. Data is the core of successful demand generation. Reliable, clean data is critical to effective buyer persona development and persona message formation.

Four Demand Generation Challenges


The First Marketing Commandment

Know thy customer These are often

used interchangeably but they are not the same:

Profile Role Persona

“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer…” Peter Drucker


Buyer Personas Summary Buyer personas focus on

identifying buyers’ pain points and their common points of resistance to the sales process.

the purchase process They help organizations

zero in on the key profile and behavioral attributes that are crucial to sales success.

Personas are narrative descriptions that bring profiles to life.

Profiles are broad generalizations, and typically address demographic data – can span across roles


THE MAKING OF A PERSONA


Persona-Based Marketing Persona-based marketing

is part Hollywood characterization and part business analytics.

Involves constructing a fictional

customer based on real-life data and intelligence.

Then using that character as

the touchstone for content, promotional and selling decisions.

Persona-based marketing goes beyond simple demographic data

Persona-based marketing describes who a prospect or customer is- facilitate empathy

Create personas by answering questions about their behavior such as: What keeps this person

awake at night? How does he spend his time? How does she like to be sold

to?


Effective Personas Reflect as much detail

as possible about the target person's background, daily habits, activities, challenges, and problem-solving

approaches. Enable you to connect

and engage with prospects and customers

Develop personas for all the roles involved in the buying process. Technology marketers can break personas into the three major buckets:

Economic buyers – Those concerned about the cost of the solution.

Technology buyers – Those responsible for integrating or managing the solution.

User buyers – Those who will use the solution on a day-to-day basis (or are responsible for the satisfaction of those using the solution).


Answers These Types of Questions What sources does this person

turn to for information and daily news?

Does this person seek advice from colleagues, industry peers, or unbiased third parties?

How does the prospect go about making business decisions?

What will help this prospect do a better job?

What types of organizations does this person belong to and what events does he or she attend?

What makes a good working day?

How much of their day is spent putting out fires?

What make a frustrating working day?

What is the prospect's comfort level with technology?

What are the biggest problems related to your product they deal with today? How do they solve this problem today?

What about this problem keeps this person up at night? What else keeps them up?

What things frustrate this person the most?

What phrases does the prospect use to describe the issues he or she is facing?

Does this person prefer high-level details or a deep dive into a topic?

Why would this person choose this product? Choose us?

What kid of problems are these fires?


1. Basic demographics such as age, job title, length of time in position, and length of time with the organization

2. Job responsibilities and what a typical day looks like

3. Tasks that take the longest and those that are the most critical or are performed most often

4. Major frustrations with the job and the organization

5. What the person likes best about his/her job

6. What teams or which people within the organization the person most interacts with

7. Skill levels relating to the job as well as technology

8. How time-poor or -rich the person is

9. Goals, attitudes, beliefs (conscious and subconscious)

Personas Contain At Least These 9 Attributes


Creating Personas – Seven Steps 1. Convene a group of employees

who interact with your customers and prospects.

2. Generate a profile of your best customers and ideal prospect as well as a profile for those you “lose”

3. Make a list of all the roles encountered during the buying process, and at what point in the process, and note any differences between wins and losses. It may be useful to write a description for each role and the purpose of the role in the buying process.


6. Add detail about what this person's daily calendar, life, looks like: What are his or her most pressing concerns? What product or service attributes would be most helpful in solving this person's problems? Is he or she looking to roll up 20 databases into one, getting ready for an IPO, dealing with a new competitor who has just entered the market?

7. Validate and modify - Use CABs and TABs

Creating Personas – Seven Steps 4. Describe the person and their

behavior: Give each persona a name, a title, an age, and describe how he or she looks. How does he dress? What kind of car does she drive? What does he do in his free time? What kind of educational background does she have?

5. Flesh out as many attributes as you need to give a full, rounded picture of who this person is. Then, turn to your persona's problems and goals.


USING PERSONAS IN MARKETING


What are the marketing implications to the following personas?

Use the persona to formulate your marketing messages, think about what path this prospect or customer might pursue to solve his/her problem. Will he or she turn to white papers

or articles in trade publications or Web sites?

Would this customer or prospect seek input from a speaker at a networking group of their peers?

Let the personas steer the route, which you can pave with information that can help your prospect and customers move forward in their consideration and buying process.

Using Personas


FOUR SUCCESS FACTORS


Ground Personas in Reality 1. Base personas on real marketing insights that are relevant to the business. Personas take

profiles/segments and put them into context; context is the nature of how your business interacts with your target buyer.

“Personas that are more rigorous and that are communicated in the language of business are more likely to bring these different groups together and bring their strengths to the table.” Steve Mulder, The User Is Always

Right

“The power and danger of personas is their realism. Good personas use this realism to drive authentic understanding deep into the heart of an organization.” Todd Wilkins, Adaptive Path, ATX


2. Align personas with market/customer segments. Personas are not

hypothetical ideas about who your buyer might be; rather, they are defensible descriptions of your actual buyers … in the scenarios in which these buyers interact with your organization and its products/services.

Combine the demographics/explicit/BANT criteria with your analysis of behavioral/implicit factors.

Segment Users by: Goals Usage Behaviors

Align Personas with Segments


3. Leverage both qualitative and quantitative insights and of both internal and external perspectives: Persona development takes more

than a brainstorming session within the marketing and sales teams. Involve all KEY stakeholders and Collect insights based on real-life interactions and then go forth and do your homework. Include product owners,

marketing design, customer service, sales and so on — everyone who interacts with or serves customers and has a take on the types of users who are out there.

Conduct rigorous data analysis which provides a key opportunity to blend personas with lead scoring models. Basic correlation analysis, which

can be couched in basic cross-tabulation of data

Statistical analysis. To really boil things down and gain more fine-tuned and measurable insights,

Leverage Data


Keep It Simple 4. The point of defining and using buyer persons is to enable you to scale by getting your hands around a discrete number of segments and critical paths that matter — not to create infinite complexity.

“Think of segmentation as the art of finding patterns and stories in the data, whether your data comprises qualitative user interviews or quantitative survey results.”

Steve Mulder


Personas Help Us - Summary Characterize, personify and empathize with users/buyers in

order to develop products and go-to-market strategies that are appropriate to their needs and buying patterns.

Take planning steps such as basic market segmentation to a much more useful level by putting them into context.

Create a tool for re-focusing company attention and resources on what matters — the buyer and his/her needs — especially at a time when buyers have more power than ever and are tougher to reach than ever.

Conceptualize our buyers in terms of how we actually interact with them — important for developing campaign logic and content in terms of a dialogue, rather than a traditional definition of a static campaign.


Thank You and Questions

What is one take away from today?

What will you do differently?

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