Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas - Marketing Watchdog Journal

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		October 2008, Issue 56

Lead-Generation Best Practices
Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas
By Ahmed Taleb, Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions

Excerpt from a Bulldog Solutions White Paper

This article is an excerpt. Want to read the whole thing?
Request your complimentary copy of the Bulldog Solutions' white paper on buyer personas and audience segmentation.

Strategic Marketing Blueprint: Four Steps for Better Lead Generation

Learn the four key steps to creating an effective strategic marketing plan:

Identify your audience
Develop an effective message
Choose key channels for promotion
Plan for future lead conversion

View the on-demand Webinar now.

Strategic planning is the process by which an organization envisions its future and develops strategies, goals, objectives and action plans to achieve that future. This planning process includes four key steps:

Identify your audience
Develop an effective message
Choose key channels for promotion
Plan for future lead conversion

In this paper, I'll focus on the first of these four steps—identifying your audience. Creating an effective and actionable audience segmentation strategy can be a daunting task for many BtoB organizations; however, if they approach this strategy with the right organizational expectations and a systematic process, they will be well on their way to creating a blueprint for internal planning of better lead optimization and nurturing programs.

Much has been written about the use of personas to guide the creative design process. In recent years, BtoB marketers have begun adopting the practice of using personas to identify key customer segments and to drive marketing communication strategies to better engage those segments. Despite these early successes, creating buyer personas has not been the panacea businesses had hoped for. While buyer personas can be a unique and valuable tool for defining audience, adoption has not been as rapid as anticipated. One key reason for this is beginning to emerge—buyer personas need to be crafted, evolved and deployed at the core of a holistic marketing strategy. They need to be firmly entrenched in the business from the start. Attempts at building and deploying these tools in isolation can lead to lackluster results.

What Buyer Personas Are Not: A Definition

There are many preconceived notions of what buyer personas are and what they're used for in BtoB marketing. Let me clarify the definition I believe is most accurate. First, buyer personas differ from customer segmentation models in that they're typically created using a combination of anecdotal evidence and buyer observation. While a segmentation model is almost entirely data driven, buyer personas require more qualitative analysis in order to add key insights into the behavioral attributes of a particular segment. More importantly, the results of the process are much more versatile at driving targeted marketing communications as well as more formal demographic exercises.

Second, buyer personas are often confused with design personas but, again, there are noteworthy differences. Design personas are often focused on end users; they use detailed, scenario-based content to help provide context into how users interact with a product or service offering. As a result, any insights you may glean from design personas are often more important to stakeholders that are charged with improving perceptions in a post-purchase environment.

Buyer personas, on the other hand, are focused on more pragmatic goals and typically forego scenario-based content in favor of simple value statements to state end-user needs. Because these needs are pre-sale, buyer personas focus more on how the particular product or service offering fills known gaps.

First Step: Build Acceptance by Choosing the Right Team

Creating a working set of buyer personas is an iterative practice that requires a measure of organizational alignment to ensure that the initiative is positioned for success. Building corporate acceptance typically begins with the endorsement of a senior corporate champion, who will help strengthen the mandate that future marketing activities adhere to the direction proposed by formal segmentation.

To that end, make sure you have a strong project team assigned to the initiative. The core team will typically include members of the field marketing team, and within that, a champion and a project owner to ensure that the effort will be given enough priority and focus within the organization to be successful.

Buyer personas have an additional (and often, unintentional) benefit of helping to bridge the Sales/Marketing gap. For this reason, I also recommend that feedback be collected from the field sales team to capture historical sales information. (When the sales team actively participates in defining buyer personas, it is also defining the attributes of its ideal marketing-qualified lead (MQL). This participation creates a much deeper acceptance and accountability of future prospecting—delivered leads begin to align more closely with stated targets.)

You should also solicit sales feedback towards the end of the exercise to identify and document the most common sales objections that are overcome during the sales process. But for the remainder of the exercise, the core field marketing team members will be the key architects of the program.

Words to the Wise Before You Begin

Often, the biggest challenge marketers face when building actionable buyer personas is deciding how many. A useful guideline is to create only as many distinct, discrete and mutually-exclusive personas as is necessary to support targeted marketing that drives sales follow-up. As the number of personas increases, there is also an incremental increase in marketing investment, as well as a diminishing return on that investment as each target contains fewer and fewer suspects. Most persona development exercises will generate between three and six personas in an actionable set of marketing tools.

When building personas, it can be tempting to place too much emphasis on target companies. While this is important information to integrate, remember that deals begin with conversations between people, not corporate entities. If a buyer persona is too focused on the company, it may become less effective in inspiring engaging, targeted messaging.

The BtoB audience is constantly changing. For this very reason, building buyer personas is an iterative process. Organizations can often make the false assumption that they have "finished" their audience definition process once they have created a defined set of buyer personas. On the contrary, buyer personas are only the starting point of an evolutionary process. They should be thought of as a hypothesis; that is, only after marketing results are collected can personas be fully validated, or, on the other hand, revised and improved.

Getting Started: Creating Segment Profiles

The core of the buyer persona is the segment profile. Segment profiles are sets of descriptive and measurable data points that you can capture explicitly via a registration process or through other qualification methods. (See image below for a good example of data captured via a simple registration page.) Data points such as job title, company size and vertical make up the key segment identifiers.The registration page is the "front-door" for your program. Please bear in mind that there is a direct relationship between the number of questions you ask on your registration form and the rate of abandonment. Once your team determines the key segment identifiers, the next step is to articulate a unique value proposition that captures the most fundamental needs of the segment in a single statement.

Registration page captures descriptive and measurable data points such as job title, company size and vertical.

Identify your audience
Develop an effective message
Choose key channels for promotion
Plan for future lead conversion

View the on-demand Webinar now.

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Ahmed Taleb is director of strategic planning at Bulldog Solutions, the lead-generation optimization and management company. Visit www.bulldogsolutions.com to learn more.

Marketing Watchdog Journal is a monthly newsletter from Bulldog Solutions, a lead optimization and lead management company dedicated to helping our clients generate more, better leads and turn them into revenue. We welcome your feedback on this newsletter's content and design, and encourage you to share your ideas for topics you would like us to cover in future issues. Please send your comments or questions about Bulldog Solutions to Amy Bills, senior manager of Field Marketing.