Want to generate more leads and sales with your marketing? Start with a great persona!

Effective marketing begins with a deep understanding of your audience:

• Developing a value proposition or an overall marketing strategy
• Positioning your product and developing the messaging to support it
• Fine-tuning your web, social media and content marketing strategy
• Too often our marketing becomes reactive and deadline-driven. But developing well-informed, up-to-date personas for key influencers, decision makers, and users can help your team achieve their desired outcomes more effectively.

This isn’t new information. We have all heard the advice.

The challenges?

• In the rush to get to market, we don’t always make the time
• Our customer’s needs and what creates value for them is constantly changing
• Their business, their priorities, competitive offerings, and how they evaluate and make purchase decisions are continually in flux
• Product management, product marketing, marketing, and sales each have their own sources and viewpoints on what is important
• Those teams don’t always make time to inform each other and reconcile viewpoints before launching the next major push

The cost of not making a few hours to bring these teams and the information they have together is huge

• In a market drowning in content, getting personas right can mean the difference between marketing that totally misses the mark and marketing that is well, insanely great
• It can result in major oversights that impact sales and marketing priorities, target audiences and understanding and addressing current customer needs
• It  means wasted time, budget and even customer credibility, something no one can afford in this market

The good news? It takes only a few hours of the team time to significantly reduce these risks

• Developing personas collaboratively in an Agile fashion can create a real competitive advantage
• In a relatively few hours the team can share current insights and reach agreement on priorities, decision makers, influencers, users
• They can update each other on what is impacting the customer’s needs and priorities and the value they place on those
• With that information, they can quickly align the company’s personas before the next major push gets underway

It takes just a few simple steps to create well informed updated personas for each new push, and deliver big results!

1. Review and update segmentation and priorities
2. Identify and refine descriptions of the key personas involved in purchasing and use of your solution
3. Test, validate and refine  persona assumptions in real-world settings – ie review them with real prospects and customers
4. Apply those personas to marketing and sales activities

• FYI: this approach doesn’t replace the need for in-depth market research. It should, however, guide it and leverage it when it’s available.

This fundamental tool and process should be used to support all your major product and marketing efforts

• Not using it is a lot like playing Russian roulette with your marketing and sales time and budget
• There are a lot of good sources and examples out there of marketing personas and processes if you look
• We just launched a great online course on Udemy.com which we would encourage you to consider,“Create High Impact B2B Personas | 4 easy steps”
• It’s a great way to assess and refresh your skills and process for this critical marketing component

Thanks for taking your time to read this! I’d love to have you share your stories and experiences with personas. In particular how you include them in an Agile marketing setting.

Mike Connor.