I’d like to open my first post with a shameful admission, as we’re all friends here – in the first 20 years that I worked in B2B Marketing, I didn’t hear anyone ask for more detail on a target audience other than job title. When we talked about audience at all, it was just IT Managers or IT Directors or C-Suite and that was that. No further questions.
Then, in 2015, I did a course in social media marketing where I was introduced to user personas for the first time. This involved specifying not just basic demographic details about the audience, but also documenting their motivation, concerns and why they’d care about whatever it was we were trying to get them to do. It was game changing.
Audience personas hold the answers to most Marketing questions:
- What tactics should we use? Whatever will reach your personas.
- What messaging will help us meet our goals? The one that you’ve crafted in the language of your personas.
- What content should we create? You guessed it – the content that is going to be most useful or entertaining to your personas.
Personas take your personal taste and opinions out of the equation, as well as that of your colleagues and your organisation, short-circuiting any internal arguments on plans. Do this work first, and you can plot a clear path through a minefield of Marketing decisions.
One hesitation that many people have with personas is feeling like they have to commission extensive research or expensive management consultancy to generate them. You don’t need to do that and it’s important not to get stuck in the mud between nothing (or just a job title) and a long statistically-significant audience research project.
A ‘Brilliant Basics’ method to create your personas
My preferred method for personas focuses on identifying those key details marketers need to get under the skin of the people they want to influence:
- Identify people within each target group – I like to use real people I know who fit the type as a jumping-off point, you may need to get some examples from your sales teams if you don’t personally know your customers.
- Map out details of who they are and also how they’d be likely to feel about your offer. Put yourself in their shoes.
- Validate your assumptions with data from your digital channels – it will quickly tell you whether you’ve made the right calls
- Share the personas with your wider teams so that everyone has a shared reference point for their decisions. Stick them up on a wall!
Now, when everyone is being asked to do more with less, prioritising audience work can help B2B Marketers focus the development of their strategies, programmes and campaigns on the activities most likely to generate results. You know where we are if you’d like some help!
