How Buyer Insights Will Make You a Better Marketer and More Valuable Member of Your Organization
Buyer personas are the core of good marketing
The foundation of an effective marketing strategy begins with the question – who are you selling to?
To answer that question, you must get close to those people you’re selling to and know what they care about on a day-to-day basis.
Many business marketing schools or certifications teach the buyer persona exercise. However, any marketers treat the process as just an exercise and not necessarily as the important research process it should be. For your message to land, a marketer must have defined and documented buyer personas that truly reflect the language and concerns the humans you’re building products for.
Buyer personas illustrated
For instance, a business may target multiple departments within an organization like human resources, compliance, and general counsel. Those three department heads care about drastically different issues.
When you deepen your understanding of each buyer persona, you have the language to speak to each stakeholder individually with confidence.
Persona-driven marketing converts
Impactful marketing goes beyond expected business-speak. With persona research and integration you can use the language of your market including the things your ideal customers genuinely care about.
Ultimately, you will sell better because you're communicating in a way that impacts your audience with authenticity.
What if you don’t have time to do persona research?
In short, you can always make time for activities that are profitable. Persona research is a revenue-generating activity. You will get more out of the work you do because you're going to be doing it better if you understand your audience.
When you're actually talking to your prospects and customers, those conversations create focus and the ability to prioritize your business and marketing initiatives in a way that's going to deliver higher ROI.
Low investment, high return
Persona research is possible even on a limited budget. Sometimes B2B clients assume this type of research involves a hefty study with over 50 hour-long interviews.
In our experience, we’ve found that you can get what you need out of a five to ten, 30-minute conversations.
Best practices for persona interviews
The most effective way to gather information on your buyer personas is through 30-minute conversations. We typically conduct our interviews using Zoom. While we don’t recommend a rigid formula for persona research sessions, here are some general principles to follow.
Prepare a list of questions
Create a list of buyer persona questions ahead of your interview. Some of our most useful questions include:
What do you need in order to look good at your job?
What is the most frustrating part of your job?
Let the conversation flow
You can uncover really interesting insights if you let people talk in an unstructured, casual way. Respond to the conversation as it unfolds. If you notice energy or enthusiasm peak during a particular question, follow it.
The more comfortable you make the interviewee feel, the more authentic and useful the information you will gather.
Document what you learn
Always record the conversation. But, before you do, be sure to get approval from your interviewee. Make notes, but don’t get caught up in taking notes. Since you’re recording, you can focus on really listening and then go back to the recording to get the nuggets of information you need.
Transcribe your conversation using a tool like Scribie. For just a few bucks, you can have the interview transcribed, which makes it really easy to translate into a Buyer Persona cheat sheet. Other tools for recording and transcription are Fireflies.ai and Tetra Insights.
Persona research is useful for more than marketing
Buyer persona research is a highly-leveraged activity that can impact multiple departments across the company. The benefits aren’t constrained to marketing.
Product development
Buyer persona research almost always delivers ideas for product innovation. Customers that are enmeshed in your product have a perspective your development team just can’t access. That’s why customer feedback is so powerful because it can drive product-led growth.
Case study generation
In the process of customer interviews, you will likely uncover potential case studies or testimonials. With a simple 30-minute customer interview, you could walk away with several perfect quotes for sales materials, web copy, and other collateral.
Loyalty cultivation
The process of customer interviews actually strengthens loyalty. Humans fundamentally want to be helpful. When asked to contribute to the success of a business, your customers will likely take it as a compliment. Including customers in your product improvements gives them a feeling of being involved and listened to, which is an undeniable retention benefit.
Referral opportunities
Another byproduct of the persona exercise is referral generation. Many times during the course of persona interviews, we’ve come away with referral opportunities.
Surface market problems
For the sales team, our buyer research can surface market problems before they become an issue. We can then equip sales team members with the right knowledge and talking points as they approach specific industry segments.
Your personas are people with real challenges – and you have real solutions
We can’t overstate how important language is. When you hear someone speak in their day-to-day language, it helps you internalize who your buyers are so you can create content with intention and marketing messaging that works.
Ultimately you’re seeking to learn what your buyers care about, how they speak, and the resources they use. That information provides the materials to build world-class marketing programs to attract them and positions the marketing team as a strategic leader and guide in the organization. Buyer insights are gold for a growing organization.
Want to learn more about how to conduct buyer persona research? Reach out! We’d be happy to share with you some of our best practices.
