Conducting and analyzing your buyer persona research is only half the battle. We see organizations struggle to put their personas into practice again and again. We don’t want that to happen to you. Here are five persona best practice tips you should be following to ensure your hard work (and marketing dollars) aren’t under-utilized.
- Tip 1: Deliver analysis in pragmatic, easy-to-consume documentation. Concise statements and scannable design elements (i.e. bullets) work well here. Help your team easily identify which part of the research applies to them. One way to easily do this is to coordinate the research to align with you internal language.
Pro-tip: Conduct a persona roadmap for key departments to explain how they can specifically leverage the persona research.
- Tip 2: Organize campaign teams around personas. Ensure each of your key marketing functions is represented, for example marketing communications, online marketing, content development and product management. This will help enable the adoption of personas company-wide.
- Tip 3: Align marketing goals and tactics to the stages of the buyer journey. A lot of organizations will jump right into tactics, but by aligning your marketing efforts to the buyer journey it will help you more clearly identify where the gaps are, and what is and isn’t working along the entire journey – not just at one conversion stage. The place where information is sought during the awareness stage may differ from the channels relied on in the decision stage. Similarly, the content consumed may begin with educational white papers and videos, and then progress to product demos and comparisons, and end with justification and ROI tools.
- Tip 4: B2B buying is a team sport. Buyers seldom buy alone in the B2B buying process. The average buying group is 5+ people, so it’s critical to understand how your personas interact. Therefore, you must know how to engage them individually, and collectively.
Pro-tip: Understand and tier your personas into primary and secondary.
- Tip 5: Last, but definitely not least, align your sales and marketing processes around customer behaviors, not sales activities.
There you have it. Pragmatic steps you can take within your organization to ensure you extract the maximum value from the valuable insights that come along with buyer persona research. Have questions? Please don’t hesitate to reach out.
