Tag Archive for: Buyer Persona

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3 Ways Marketing Automation Helps to Build Your Buyer Persona

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Marketing Automation Helps to Build Your Buyer PersonaImplement successful marketing strategies and make the most of content-driven, scalable automation confidently through understanding your buyer persona. Marketing automation is a useful tool in gathering the analytics you need to build your buyer persona, strategically reach your target audience, and truly understand what they’re looking for.

According to an article by Tony Zambito, thought leader on the topic, buyer personas describe “who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, where they buy, when buyers decide to buy, and why they make buying decisions.” That’s quite a bit of information to gather. In the end, building accurate models of buying behaviors helps you to understand how your prospects expect and prefer to interact with your brand. Use marketing automation to build your buyer persona. Uncovering such knowledge will arm both sales and marketing teams with the information and assurance they need to seal the deal.

Integrate the Analytics

With features such as Lead Liaison’s Social Append, marketing automation allows you to gather data available from a variety of sources and channels and build a telling profile of your ideal prospect. Not only will you understand their social interactions, but you’ll also have a grasp of how they expect to interact with your brand and product. Another useful way to implement the numbers and stats you’ve gathered is to sort your prospects: what actions were taken by you that won a prospect over? What were the signs that you were about to lose a prospect? Building out a thorough analysis of this data will help to create a persona based on previous experience that will ensure a successful plan for the future.

Work with the Sales Team

Get insights from the sales team to refine the personas. They’re the ones with the most direct contact with prospects, so take advantage of their findings. When using marketing automation to build your buyer persona, marketers and sales teams need to maintain a two-way communication plan so that they can nail down the specifics- what questions are your prospects asking during their buying process? What are their goals, or what are their company’s goals? What are the signs that a prospect is ready to buy? Productive lead tracking and nurturing can provide the data you need to see what action steps the marketing team is taking that lead to higher success and ROI in the sales interactions.

Create a Range of Different Personas

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket by creating and implementing just one persona. Recognize the common factors in your buyers’ decision-making process, and develop a few different personas that are testable. When thinking about a relevant range of personas, utilize customer surveys, case studies, and other tools and strategies already in place. Having a broader perspective allows you to try out various strategies to discover which works best.

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How to Develop Your Customer Persona

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How to Develop Your Customer PersonaHave you ever wondered how fiction writers develop realistic characters that captivate readers? Have you thought about how actors develop roles that resonate with their audiences? Successful authors and actors spend a significant amount of time developing the personas they portray in order to connect with their “markets”. Similar tactics can be used by your marketers to develop a customer persona.

B2B marketers are expected to be marksmen, targeting their messaging to appeal to each buyer’s unique attributes. To be successful connecting with your prospects requires the same dedicated focus on developing personas that award-winning fiction authors and actors commit. Developing a customer persona is an essential step towards more effective and efficient marketing practices. There may be several customer types that engage with your brand. The key to successful customer persona development is to create a profile that embodies the same complexity as your typical customer. Consider as many characteristics as possible and be as specific as possible about each one when you’re building your customer persona.

Remember this caveat: Data integrity is important to the persona development process. Without good data, the quality of your customer model is diminished.

Determine “Physical” Characteristics

The most obvious starting point to developing a customer persona is to define who your typical B2B customers are. Break out business and personal characteristics including title, seniority, family makeup, education, geographic location, and any other identifiers that make up your typical customers.

Define Customer Habits

The next step is to define what your typical customer does. Although it can be challenging to collect data on every behavior embedded in a customer’s buying cycle, behaviors that are recorded, such as digital searches or trade show registrations, can be identified, categorized, and organized to reveal the footprints that your customers make on their way to choosing your solution. Typically, the patterns that emerge provide distinct habits that can be used to develop your customer persona.

Uncover Psychographics

This is the challenging step – even giants like Google are still working on better ways to understand digital human behavior – determining why your customers make buying decisions. Many SMBs don’t have the resources to devote to psychographic analysis; however, to successfully attract suitable prospects you should understand their attitudes, opinions, and values. Look at what motivates, scares, and interests your customers. Shape your customer persona to reflect what makes them tick.

Despite evidence that shows marketing automation is effective at improving your marketing and sales practices, if you’re marketers are randomly targeting prospects marketing tech won’t be as effective. Before you set out to connect with your prospects, make sure they are the right ones to target – develop a customer persona.