Defining Persona
When you want to start promoting your product or service, one of the first things to consider is to define the personas.
What is the concept of a persona? A persona is the fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is a certain group of people that benefits from your product or service.
There are many variables that can be a part of this initial draft of the “persona”. It will depend on the product or service you are offering. To illustrate a bit more, here are some things you can look at:
Demographics: age, gender, level of education, family status, salary, location.
Department, job title, and the industry they work in.
Their role in the buying process: they can be the end-user, influencer, or decision-maker.
What are the pains that your product solves for them?
How can your product be useful to them?
Once you structure the persona, you can create a buyer persona guideline with stories, motivations, challenges, and goals for each of them. This will help your content team to start planning upcoming marketing collaterals for every stage of the marketing funnel to bring awareness to the prospective customers and to build a winning customer journey.
If your company is already investing in account-based marketing programs, sales and marketing can easily personalize and align efforts to drive engagement within a target set of accounts. You can reach every relevant persona within your target accounts across the full life cycle of that account instead of targeting each individual lead separately.
When you have some interesting content to be digested by the most valuable personas defined, the next step is to understand in which channels you can find them. Which social media platforms are they on? Which media outlets do they usually read? Which physical events you can find them at?
If you have customers already, you can ask them a few questions to understand your audience behavior and preferred channels to help you with the marketing plan.
I found a very nice resource online to define the B2B personas. It is called persona cards B2B and it will enable you to map your entire buyer journey, develop an engagement strategy, and discover how to personalize your marketing and sales interactions. If you are starting your business or want to re-evaluate your target audience, this is an interactive and fun way to do it. Now that we are finally all able to be back at the office, it can be a good team exercise!
