Abridged with the author’s permission from Connected Marketer.
In lead nurturing campaigns, 64 percent of marketing and sales executives say they are unhappy with their nurturing program results. This is because one size does not fit all!
Prospects are people, people are interested in different things, have different roles in companies, and have different ways of communicating their concerns.
As a marketer, a business really, it is our responsibility to help our prospects and customers solver their problems, and now more than ever this is happening through constant content generation.
In order to effectively organize your content strategy, and speak intelligently (meaning in the language of your consumers) to customers or potential customers, you need to understand them.
The easiest way to get to know people is to listen to them. The reason people build relationships with one another is because they want to be understood, heard, and accepted. They want to know that what they give is equal in weight to what they get in return. Since social media have been a catalyst for many businesses to become more like people and less like corporations, the consumer has a different expectation for businesses. The consumer expects to engage with a brand on a totally new level.
But, you as a brand cannot effectively connect with your consumers on this level unless you understand them. To deliver the right content (of value to consumer) at the right time, once you’ve listened attentively to your consumers you need to define them through user personas.
Some companies may have hundreds of personas. Amazon for example, has an enormous reach, and they have set up a pretty good system for connecting like-minded consumers on their site to feed them valuable information about how these consumers behave, and how valuable they find consumer-rated products. In the B2B setting, however, you may only have one product or service, so the persona groups are likely to shrink down to a level of “role” in the buying process or company. Some main roles to consider are:
- Influencer
- Decider
- Buyer
- User
- Gatekeeper
In many cases you might find that your decision maker is also your user, but this distinction is a good place to start. You want to be able to outline individual user groups that share similar roles, concerns, motivations, etc. If these roles tend to overlap, position in the company may be another direction to try. For example, CEO, VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, etc. It depends on your product or service, of course.
Ultimately, you want to come to a place where you have a handful of users and give them names. You’ll want to have the typical psychographic/demographic information like their name, age, company size, vertical, location, education, family and work life, personality traits, etc. But you’ll also want to note the following (these examples are based on a more sales-focused team):
- Responsibility (e.g., “performance generator”)
- Role in the buying process (e.g., Influencer, Decider, etc)
- Drivers (e.g., revenue or personal success)
- Business need (e.g., team performance, closing rates, ease of use)
- Concerns (e.g., ease of use, conversion, pipeline)
Barbra Gago is the Inbound and Social Marketing Manager for Genius.com.
