Buyer Personas, Revised and Expanded (eBook)

Gain Deep Insight Into Your Customers' Buying Decisions and Win More Business

Jim Kraus, Adele Revella (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
240 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-1-394-23634-3 (ISBN)

Infos

A fresh look into understanding your prospective customer's buying decisions to influence them and win more business

Building on the groundbreaking success of the first edition, this newly revised and updated version of Buyer Personas enables marketers to stop wasting time and resources on their best guesses and start drilling down to understand what buyers truly care about-then harness this newfound knowledge to create strategies and messages that break through the clutter and reach buyers on their level.

In a world where buyers frequently struggle to get the information they need to evaluate competitive alternatives and feel confident in their choices, this book lays out a step-by-step approach used by hundreds of companies to understand what buyers want to know and experience as they search for a solution to meet their needs, weigh their options, and make a buying decision. In this book, you'll learn:

• Why understanding the buying decision is far more important than knowing a few things about the individuals or roles involved in that decision
• How to develop a modern Buyer Persona based on five types of buying insights that will inform nearly every marketing and sales decision you make
• Why interviewing recent buyers is the best way to develop your Buyer Persona and how to do it effectively
• How to use AI and quantitative survey research to enhance your Buyer Persona
• Ways to use Buyer Persona insights to increase awareness of your products and services, drive consideration, and convert more business

The revised and expanded Buyer Personas is a complete guide to go beyond benefit-heavy, undifferentiated marketing and focus only on what buyers care about most. It earns a well-deserved spot on the bookshelves of entrepreneurs, executives, marketers, and other business professionals looking to influence their prospective buyers.

JIM KRAUS is the President of Buyer Persona Institute (BPI) and a Principal of KS&R, Inc., a leading global market research and consulting firm. Jim has spent his entire career as an executive and consultant, advising small to market leading global brands on how to understand their prospective buyers and why they make the buying decisions that they do.

ADELE REVELLA is the Founder of Buyer Persona Institute (BPI) and a leading authority on buyer personas. A career marketer with decades of experience, Adele has seen the discipline from all sides: executive, consultant, trainer and entrepreneur. Now retired, she traveled the world as a marketing and business leadership speaker, consultant, blogger and workshop facilitator.

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Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak

A lot has changed in the marketing world since the first edition of Buyer Personas was published in 2015.

• Digital marketing has continued its rise as the Internet, social media, and mobile technology are deeply embedded and interconnected in how we live our lives and how we look for solutions to meet our varied needs.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) has become more sophisticated as brands compete to capture their customers' attention and engage with them in more productive ways when they do.
• Marketers are increasingly using data to personalize their campaigns as advertising, product recommendations, and tailored content have all become more sophisticated.
• Companies are experimenting (and having success) with emerging approaches such as account-based marketing (ABM) and product-led growth (PLG).
• Generative AI (GenAI) is changing the way marketers develop ideas and create engaging content more quickly at scale.
• Throw in the rise of video marketing, user-generated content (UGC), interactive content, voice search optimization, and on and on – and well, you get the picture.

Undoubtedly, as some of these approaches gain traction and evolve, others will die off without demonstrable results, and new methods of engaging with prospective buyers will emerge. The one thing that hasn't changed – or ever will – is the need for marketers to deeply understand what causes buyers to purchase your solution, a competitor's products, or nothing at all. With this knowledge, marketers have everything they need to influence buyers and generate more revenue and profits for their organization. Without this knowledge, it's guessing and hoping for the best (not a great long-term strategy).

The purpose of this revised and expanded edition of Buyer Personas is to show you exactly how to take all the guesswork out of your marketing. Regardless of your strategy du jour, a Buyer Persona is the foundation of your marketing house from which you can erect the framing, hang the drywall, and add the plumbing and electricity. It will inform nearly every marketing and sales decision you make and provide you a distinct advantage because you will know the who, what, where, and why your prospective customers make the buying decisions that they do in a way that your competitors can't match.

Understanding Your Buyer's Story

“So, what brings you in here to see me?”

That question is spoken countless times every day in doctor's offices, car repair shops, bank loan offices, law firms, and hundreds of other professional establishments. What usually follows that question is the customer's narrative describing their problem.

• “My daughter is entering college next year and I want to explore loan options for her education.”
• “It's probably nothing, doctor, but I've been wondering about a small change I've noticed recently …”
• “The engine has been making the strangest sound when I drive downhill. It all started right after I loaned the car to my brother-in-law, who said he used it to move his large collection of Civil War cannon balls.”
• “I'm concerned that my cat has been pacing back and forth at night and making very loud howls.”

Listening is an essential part of any first meeting. It's how professionals learn about their customers' concerns, goals, and expectations so that they can present a relevant solution.

Yet in many organizations this one-to-one communication between marketing professionals and their customers is infrequent – if it happens at all.

How often do you have an opportunity to listen to your customers describe their problems? Do you know how to ask the questions that will make this conversation valuable for you and your customer? And most important, do you know how to apply what you've heard to become a more effective marketer?

The art and science of asking probing questions and carefully listening to your customers' responses lie at the core of the Buyer Persona concept. It's the key to discovering their mindsets and the motivation that prompts them to purchase a solution like yours.

One marketing professional confessed to us after conducting their first buyer interview, “This is almost like cheating; like getting the exam paper weeks before the final. Instead of trying to guess what matters, I now know not only what the customer wants – I realize how they go about it.”

This is the power of the Buyer Persona. Built around a story about your customers' buying decision, the Buyer Persona reveals insight into your buyer's expectations and concerns as they look for options, winnow down their choices, and make a decision.

This book will show you how you can listen to your buyers' stories to gain insight into the factors that trigger their search, how they define success, and what affects their final decision that a particular approach is the best one for them. We'll show you how the buyer's personal narrative reveals language and phrases that will resonate with other buyers with similar concerns and how to define and focus on the activities that compel buyers to take action. You will see how giving buyers the clearly articulated information they seek, in the language they understand, when and where they need it, is the essence of effective marketing.

More Than Just a Profile of Your Prospective Buyers

In the simplest terms, Buyer Personas are examples or archetypes of real buyers that allow marketers to craft strategies to promote products and services to the people who might buy them. During the past few decades, the term has almost become a marketing mantra.

But as this book will show, the growing interest in Buyer Personas has resulted in confusion about how they are created, how they are used, and their ultimate effectiveness.

It's the intention of this book to provide some much-needed clarity.

The marketer's need to understand their market is hardly new. But the depth of insight required is increasing exponentially as technological advances demand that organizations rethink how they sell everything from music and books to bulldozers and information technology. A client at one of the world's leading software firms described it this way: “What we are selling is changing; who we are selling to is changing (some are people we've never sold to before); and how these customers want to be engaged, marketed, and sold to is changing too.”

Buyer Personas have a lot to do with attaining that kind of alignment, but not in the way that marketers often use them, which is basically to build a profile of the people who are their intended customers. Rather, the contention of this book is that when Buyer Personas evolve from authentic stories related by actual buyers – in the form of one-on-one interviews – the methodology and presentation allow you to capture the buyer's expectations and the factors that influence them. Then, and only then, can you truly stand in your buyers' shoes and consider the buying decision from the buyer's point of view. This goes way beyond buyer profiling, but most marketers don't realize that.

Not long ago, we met with executives from a large corporation who had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for research on “Buyer Personas” that were essentially worthless. The company had purchased profiles about the people who buy, but these failed to capture the crucially important stories revealing how buyers make this type of decision. We've also seen companies purchase over-segmented research that defined dozens of Buyer Personas, a number that would be feasibly impossible for them to tailor their marketing with any effectiveness.

In both of these cases, the company had lost its way by focusing on the goal to build Buyer Personas without a clear plan to ensure that they contain useful findings.

Naturally, it's far easier to make educated guesses and assumptions about what buyers may be thinking based on extrapolations of your own knowledge or intuition. That's certainly how large aspects of the marketing community have functioned for decades. But the climate of social and technological change favors companies that embrace a culture of buyer understanding that allows them to adapt to customer needs. Just consider the major technology players that have receded or disappeared: AOL, Digital, Polaroid, Wang, AltaVista, Netscape, Fairchild Semiconductor, Palm, Sun Microsystems. The list could run for pages. Each of these companies was outrun by competitors who possessed greater clarity about their buyers' expectations.

Will This Approach Work for You?

This book is for marketing professionals who want to avoid that kind of dire scenario, whether they work in the business-to-business (B2B) or the business-to-consumer (B2C) arena. It is specifically aimed at marketers of “high-consideration” products, services, and solutions – buying decisions that require a considerable investment of your buyers' thought and time. Examples of high-consideration decisions range from selecting the right vendor of capital equipment, or picking which college to attend, to carefully choosing a new car, or the most appropriate location for office space. This decision-making process differs markedly from impulse purchases made in a grocery store or at the checkout...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.7.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-394-23634-4 / 1394236344
• ISBN-13: 978-1-394-23634-3 / 9781394236343