Listly by Listly
Are you wondering whether you should build your own buyer personas or turn to third-party researchers for these insights? Since we have considerable experience in both roles - conducting buyer research and leading workshops for marketers who want to do their own research - we have a unique perspective about the short and long-term results that each approach delivers.
How are you positioned? I'm not asking about your products, I'm asking about you, a career marketer who needs to be positioned as an expert that clients or internal stakeholders will trust to market their solutions. I had a quick look recently at how marketers are writing their LinkedIn summaries.
Maybe I missed it, but I haven't seen David Letterman do this one, so I want to tell you what B2B buyers tell us about marketing's influence on their decisions. Note that every one of these statements comes from real interviews with actual buyers. After all, we don't believe in making stuff up about buyer personas.
Solutions that report on marketing results have been around for decades. Demand for useful data has produced mature marketing automation solutions at prices that make them affordable for companies of every size. So why do marketers still struggle to gain credibility for their results? Why can't anyone tell me how much revenue they are generating?
I'm concerned that so many people think that buyer personas begin and end with a description of a person. This demographic approach to buyer personas typically results in far too many personas, and information that is obvious or irrelevant for most marketers.
It was 8:30 a.m. Pacific Time on January 28, 1986. This would be my second day as an Account Executive at Regis McKenna, the PR firm that Apple, Intel and most of the successful technology companies at that time trusted for their positioning and marketing strategies.
Knowing your buyer isn't exactly a new idea. I first learned to interview buyers in the 80′s when I was with Regis McKenna, the PR firm that represented Apple, Intel and many other technology leaders at the time.
How much time do you spend truly listening to buyers and customers? Marketers get little, if any, quality time with the real people they hope to persuade to listen to them. Once or twice a year, you may attend a client dinner or an industry conference.
I'm excited to see more marketing agencies among our workshop attendees because by training just one agency to develop actionable buyer personas, we can help many more companies. To get a sense of how agencies are leveraging buyer insights in the messaging, content marketing, advertising and campaigns they deliver for their clients, I interviewed recent Buyer Persona Institute graduate Julie Squires, CEO of Softscribe Inc.
I've seen this question posed to several of the industry's most renowned marketing experts, but I have never heard a really good answer. The differences between B2B and B2C remain mysterious - so much so that marketers rarely cross from one side to the other during their careers.
I used to think that creative genius and rare intelligence separated great marketers from those who toil away in relative anonymity. It was easy to imagine that something as unmanageable as luck and native talent determined one's place at the top of the marketing profession.
I rarely mention it, but I spent a year of my marketing career as a sales rep. I was in a marketing role at a software company/hardware reseller when I noticed that our existing customers were bypassing us for their computer upgrades.
If you've developed buyer personas, does your content show it? When persona-guided content looks much the same as it always did, it's a sign that the underlying personas are missing key insights. Most marketers focus their buyer personas on information gained from their sales people, a product expert, the latest analyst reports, or purely demographic data such as job title, industry and company size.
When I founded Buyer Persona Institute a few years ago, I made it my mission to educate B2B marketers about how to develop and use buyer personas. So it worries me when I see so many people focused on "buyer personas" that are little more than a generic list of demographics and obvious business priorities.
Just because you've met with internal stakeholders and can tick off buyer pain points- increasing operational efficiency, reducing costs and minimizing risks-doesn't mean you know your buyer personas. Marketers need to go beyond the obvious, generic stuff and understand the real questions buyers ask as they evaluate the solution you are marketing.
When I ask B2B marketers about their personal priorities, they describe their desire to participate in strategic, high value decisions. Too often, this goal stands in stark contrast with their stories about a typical workday, toiling away with little more autonomy than a production-line factory worker.
I'm frequently asked for examples of buyer personas, but my clients never allow me to share their findings publicly. That's because the insights they discover about their buyers are non-obvious and therefore the source of significant competitive advantage.
When I hear about buyer personas built on input from the sales people, I think about all the times that I asked our reps why a customer chose us (or didn't). For deals we won, it was always some version of "I have a great relationship with the customer."
I've always suspected that B2C marketers got far more respect than those of us in the B2B world. While well-marketed B2C products seemed to sell themselves, the sheer complexity of matching B2B products to a particular buyer's needs appeared to position Sales as the permanent source of meaningful revenue results.
Watching the Grammys last week, I was captivated by the acclaim for Adele, who dominated the night with six awards, including best song, best record and best album. I love her music and was anxiously awaiting Adele's post-surgery performance Sunday night.
In your marketing strategy meetings, do you discuss Jason's reaction to the new launch, and why Sharon is the target for the upcoming campaign? Experienced buyer persona users know that a well-researched buyer persona generates high confidence in marketing and business decisions, while transforming a marketer's ability to impact buyer attitudes on solutions and brands.
A recent engagement started with a familiar problem - the client wanted a single value proposition for a proposed suite of solutions that includes four existing products. The messaging would drive the development of their content marketing assets and help the sales people cross-sell the underlying products.
The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) thinks it knows how to solve the problems with sales and marketing alignment. According to a just-released report, within 10 years, marketing will report directly to sales. "For too long, the trend has been towards separate marketing and sales," said David Thorp , CIM's director of research and professional development, in a new "Marketing and Sales Fusion" white paper.
If you want just a quick, easy way to "say" you've done buyer personas, make them up based on what the sales guy in the next cube tells you about the company's ideal customer. Recently, I was surprised to see several bloggers advising content marketers to do just that.
At noon Eastern time today, a new web TV channel focused exclusively on practical content for marketers is going live with its first weekly episode. Now here's the best part - in the inaugural interview, Jeff Ogden, host of MadMarketing TV and author of the Fearless Competitor blog, talks to me about buyer personas!