Buyer Personas: The Secret Sauce to Effective Marketing Strategies

You have a great idea for a product, and you may have an initial product specification as well. That’s a great first step. But who is going to buy it?

One of the most overlooked steps of getting a successful product to market is mapping out the customer’s buying process. Who is the actual buyer? Who influences the buyer’s purchase decisions? Who else has a say in product selection? Where do these people get their information from?

The reason this process is so critical is because most people are happy with what they already have, so convincing them to buy something new is always a challenge.

Why is that? ?Behavioral psychologists have shown that people overvalue the product they have today, while undervaluing (even better) alternatives. ?This is what economist?John Gourville calls the 9X problem. According to this theory, your product must be perceived to be at least 9 times better than the current solution to be considered. ?And once you are over that hurdle, you are now in a competitive situation with alternative solutions. ?When all is said and done, just getting someone to take a look at, and consider your product is really tough.

Even an invention as obvious as the telephone took years to be adopted by businesses, because most business people at the time felt the telegraph was a pretty good solution. Can you imagine? And if the telephone was such a tough sell, think about how great your product needs to be, to be considered by today’s customers, who are inundated by non-stop advertisements and email marketing.

The bottom line is that you can’t afford to waste valuable time or money trying to figure out how to sell your product.?The key to doing it right the first time is focusing the product on very specific customer pains or opportunities. When businesses are involved, the process is more complicated because multiple ‘stakeholders’ are involved in a buying process; and each stakeholder has unique pains and preferences. Enter the buyer persona.

The Buyer Persona

The buyer persona is an idealized profile of each stakeholder involved in the buying process. ?Personas represent a practical methodology for product and marketing purposes, so it’s important to understand what they are, and how to use them effectively.

A simple example will drive the point home. ?Assume you are building a business application that helps salespeople organize their daily activities. In this case, your buyer personas will include the following stakeholders:

• Salespeople (the ‘users’)
• Head of Sales (‘approver’)
• IT managers, who need to interface with, and support the product (stakeholder)
• Security and regulatory people (stakeholder)
• Finance and procurement people who approve the purchase (stakeholder)

For each persona, you need to capture characteristics that describe the persona’s role in your product’s purchase. Typical characteristics are attributes like the following:

• Primary job focus
• Level of seniority (junior, director, VP, etc.)
• Sources of information — where does the persona get information about new products?
• Type of technology adopter — are they early adopters, mainstream users, or laggards?
• Who does this persona influence in the organization?
• Who influences this persona?

There are obviously more attributes, so it’s important to pick the ones that will mostly likely influence a buying decision.

To make the persona tangible, it is customary to give each one a name, a personality, and assign them a portrait photo. For example:

• Name: Alfred Jones
• Job Title:?Sales director
• Source of information: Google searches, seminars, webinars
• Type of adopter:?mainstream user
• Influencers:?Wall Street Journal, CNN
• Influences:?Sales team, local CRM meetup group

Now, whenever you consider a product feature or marketing message, you have a clear point of reference. “Does Alfred have this problem?” ?“How would Alfred respond to a specific marketing message?” “Who influences Alfred and whom does he influence?” ?It is easy to see how this abstraction helps focus the conversation about product and marketing decisions.

The Importance of Personas

Personas are building blocks for many of the product and marketing decisions, so it can be overemphasized how important it is to get them right. ?Personas are the focal points of decisions to prioritize product features, to generate marketing messages, and to build your ‘go to market’ programs. In essence, personas define the language that your team uses to discuss and prioritize work, so it is critical that you validate them and make sure your entire team is on board with the personas you defined.

Once you complete your persona definitions, you are ready to work on the pain sheet, which maps the product features and values to customer pains. We’ll cover the pain sheet in a future article.

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