The Best All Frills No Chills way to Build Brand Awareness A buyer persona identifies who you are targeting with marketing initiatives. Its the go to foundation of all your marketing. You may have more than one. Your surveys, samples and interviews will flesh out the optimum profiles.Four Critical Steps for Building an Accurate PersonaYou cant make it up; interviewing a few sales or customer service reps and talking to 2-3 customers wont cut the mustard. Your building a foundation on a house of cards thats doomed to failure.Dont confuse a basic customer profile with a persona. The latter are a much deeper dive than a profile, giving you insights into the underlying characteristics of your optimum target. Think about how an actor infuses the deep characteristics for an Academy Award.Remember the old saying: dont take a knife to a gun fight - dont put an intern on the assignment or expect to create a personal after attending a half day seminar. This should be deep dive research done by people who understand marketing strategy and tactics.Great personas begin and end with a translation of marketing goals. Your integrating qualitative research: pain points, motivation, drivers, lifestyle, education, personalities that help to build a target which in turn defines tactical marketing processes.How Buyer Personas Help Your BrandBuyer personas help to identify deep issues and behaviors that may not be on the surface. Your visiting a foreign country for the first time. Your customers may not tell you what they want; i.e. they are speaking a language you need to decipher (motivation, pain points, fears, wants, desires and needs).Quantitative research may not be sufficient for creating an accurate persona profile. Its all about context too, the type of surveys used, size of the survey, questions and how this data is put together to identify a viable persona.All of your work has a tactical end game: to identify goal centered customer strategies. How to reach them, via what channel, frequency of messaging, types of content, sales funnel systems and back end lead capture systems. Dont fall in love with the data: move to tactical marketing for testing.Buyer personas help brand understand who the customer is and how to reach them via a content marketing strategy that identifies platforms, long or short form content (snackable content or long form story), rinse and repeat frequency, with social engagement measurement and lead flow analysis.Key Differentiators for Consumer Facing BrandsWhats the age demographic?Major concerns/pain identification?Education level?Marital status?Where they find information and make social connections?What are the key purchase drivers?What person in the family makes the buying decision?Preferred content and/or social channels?What images (as below) will get their attention?Tips for Savvy Persona MarketersEditorial Calendars help to add order to your tactical marketing and enable you to track content that maps to a specific persona, assuming you have more than one.Creating a visual picture with actual images (especially for consumer facing brands) can help you to keep the optimum persona in mind - it puts a face to your marketing processes.Dont silo the processes; talk to sales and customer service and use sentiment analysis tools across your social media channels.Complaints are opportunities to help you fill in the picture better. Dont ignore them.Polls and surveys should be part of your tactical marketing processes.Recognize pattern shifts in customer behavior: its a fluid world and brands need to listen and watch for and identify shifts in behavior.Back end ROI analysis needs to be integrated into the process; as above, big data is cool but incremental revenue is the ultimate measurement of any persona marketing process.Your ads gotta grab their attention like this one below from Fox - its crowded out there brands.By Lee Traupel A buyer persona identifies who you are targeting with marketing initiatives. Its the go to foundation of all your marketing. You may have more than one. Your surveys, samples and interviews will flesh out the optimum profiles.Four Critical Steps for Building an Accurate PersonaYou cant make it up; interviewing a few sales or customer service reps and talking to 2-3 customers wont cut the mustard. Your building a foundation on a house of cards thats doomed to failure.Dont confuse a basic customer profile with a persona. The latter are a much deeper dive than a profile, giving you insights into the underlying characteristics of your optimum target. Think about how an actor infuses the deep characteristics for an Academy Award.Remember the old saying: dont take a knife to a gun fight - dont put an intern on the assignment or expect to create a personal after attending a half day seminar. This should be deep dive research done by people who understand marketing strategy and tactics.Great personas begin and end with a translation of marketing goals. Your integrating qualitative research: pain points, motivation, drivers, lifestyle, education, personalities that help to build a target which in turn defines tactical marketing processes.How Buyer Personas Help Your BrandBuyer personas help to identify deep issues and behaviors that may not be on the surface. Your visiting a foreign country for the first time. Your customers may not tell you what they want; i.e. they are speaking a language you need to decipher (motivation, pain points, fears, wants, desires and needs).Quantitative research may not be sufficient for creating an accurate persona profile. Its all about context too, the type of surveys used, size of the survey, questions and how this data is put together to identify a viable persona.All of your work has a tactical end game: to identify goal centered customer strategies. How to reach them, via what channel, frequency of messaging, types of content, sales funnel systems and back end lead capture systems. Dont fall in love with the data: move to tactical marketing for testing.Buyer personas help brand understand who the customer is and how to reach them via a content marketing strategy that identifies platforms, long or short form content (snackable content or long form story), rinse and repeat frequency, with social engagement measurement and lead flow analysis.Key Differentiators for Consumer Facing BrandsWhats the age demographic?Major concerns/pain identification?Education level?Marital status?Where they find information and make social connections?What are the key purchase drivers?What person in the family makes the buying decision?Preferred content and/or social channels?What images (as below) will get their attention?Tips for Savvy Persona MarketersEditorial Calendars help to add order to your tactical marketing and enable you to track content that maps to a specific persona, assuming you have more than one.Creating a visual picture with actual images (especially for consumer facing brands) can help you to keep the optimum persona in mind - it puts a face to your marketing processes.Dont silo the processes; talk to sales and customer service and use sentiment analysis tools across your social media channels.Complaints are opportunities to help you fill in the picture better. Dont ignore them.Polls and surveys should be part of your tactical marketing processes.Recognize pattern shifts in customer behavior: its a fluid world and brands need to listen and watch for and identify shifts in behavior.Back end ROI analysis needs to be integrated into the process; as above, big data is cool but incremental revenue is the ultimate measurement of any persona marketing process.Your ads gotta grab their attention like this one below from Fox - its crowded out there brands. ift.tt/1gB4pon
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 02:29:41 +0000
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