mark connolly, marketing mavens - buyer personas
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What is a Persona and why is it useful, Mark Connolly, Marketing MavensTRANSCRIPT
Understanding Your Customer With
Buyer Personas
Mark Connolly
Overview
• Introduction to Mark Connolly and MarketingMavens
• Understanding Your Customer
• What Are Buyer Personas?
• What Are Negative Personas?
• How Can You Use Personas?
• How Do You Create Personas?
Mark Connolly
• Chartered and Inbound Marketer
• Business Owner of Digital Marketing
Agency – MarketingMavens
• Tutor for Chartered Institute of Marketing
(CIM)
• Marketing Communications
• Digital Marketing
• Author of a book on Digital Marketing
Strategy
• Website – www.marketingmavens.co.uk
• Contact – [email protected]
Who am I?
• MarketingMavens is for marketing managers and business owners who are tired of spending a lot of money on campaigns that can’t be measured and don’t deliver results.
• We take a holistic approach and put together integrated inbound strategies and campaigns that will drive visitors to your website and convert those visitors into leads.
Some of my ‘Tech’ Clients:
Importance of Understanding Your Customers
• It is key to making money and providing a great customer service
• You need to be attentive to their needs
• Put yourself in your customers' shoes
• Using data to understand your customers
– CRM/Customer Database
• Ask your customers what they think - Survey
Target Audience
What Are Buyer Personas?
• Personas are a common marketing and design tactic that helps you to focus on your
marketing
• They are character sketches of individual audience members that define who the
website, product or service is for.
• Personas help marketers visualise their audience and better understand their needs
• Personas are defined as archetypal users that represent the needs, goals, values, and
behaviours of larger groups.
• Personas bring users to life by giving them names, personalities, and faces.
What Are Negative Personas?
Whereas a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a negative -- or
“exclusionary” -- persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.
• IKEA • Blackcircles • Dulux
Examples of Buyer Personas
How developing a persona is helpful?
Understanding the needs of your audience is critical to the success of
marketing!
• Personas will help you to identify and communicate their needs efficiently and effectively.
• It helps with messaging and campaign development
• Personas help to move you away from what the marketing team wants and towards what
the persona wants.
How Can You Use Personas?
• Personas allow you to personalise the message
• Target your marketing for different segments of your audience.
– For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in
your database, you can segment by buyer persona and tailor your messaging
according to what you know about those different personas.
How Can You Use Personas?
• They can help you improve your marketing overall
• You will understand what type of mediums/channels they use
• When combined with lifecycle stage (i.e. how far along someone is in your sales cycle), buyer
personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content.
How Do You Create Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target
audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects and those outside of your contact
database who might align with your target audience.
Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop
personas:
• Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about
your product or service.
Persona Questions to Ask Yourself
• What is their demographic information?
• What is their age?
• Where do they live?
• What industry do they work?
• What is their job level/senority?
• What does a day in their life look like?
• What are their pains/issues?
• What do they value?
• What are their goals?
• Where do they seek their information/data?
• What are their most common objections to your
product/service?
Sample Sally
• Head of Human Resources
• Worked at the same company for 10 years; worked her way up from
HR Associate
• Married with 2 children (10 and 8)
• Majority female
• Age 30-45
• Dual HH Income: £100,000
• Suburban
• Calm demeanor
• Probably has an assistant screening calls
• Asks to receive collateral mailed/printed
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Sample Sally
• Keep employees happy and turnover low
• Support legal and finance teams
• Getting everything done with a small staff
• Rolling out changes to the entire company
• Make it easy to manage all employee data in one place
• Integrate with legal and finance teams’ systems
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Sample Sally
• “It’s been difficult getting company-wide adoption of new
technologies in the past.”
• “I don’t have time to train new employees on a million different
databases and platforms.”
• “I’ve had to deal with so many painful integrations with other
departments’ databases and software.”
• I’m worried I’ll lose data transitioning to a new system.
• I don’t want to have to train the entire company on how to use a new
system.
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Sample Sally
• Integrated HR Database Management
• We give you an intuitive database that integrates with your existing
software and platforms, and lifetime training to help new employees
get up to speed quickly.
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Continual Persona Research
• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or
customers find and consume your content.
• When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important
persona information.
– Company size
– Social media accounts
– Where did you hear from us?
• Take into consideration your sales team's feedback on the leads they are interacting with
most.
Thank You
Any questions?