Know­ing all of the buy­ers who influ­ence the sale, and devel­op­ing detailed per­sonas for each, enables you to cre­ate pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing roadmaps. You’ll reach buy­ers in the right place with the right mes­sages at the right time to dri­ve the rev­enue nee­dle.

Few mar­keters have enough con­fi­dence in their buy­er per­cep­tion to define, defend, and deliv­er strate­gies that don’t con­form with the company’s inter­nal per­spec­tive. Lack­ing a detailed under­stand­ing of buy­ers means you run the risk of mak­ing deci­sions based on inad­e­quate infor­ma­tion and try­ing to per­suade buy­ers who sim­ply don’t care.  This approach can lead to per­fect­ly good prod­ucts that fail because the com­pa­ny doesn’t iden­ti­fy and com­mu­ni­cate with buy­ers who have the real need. How do you com­bat that? The sure­fire way to reach and influ­ence poten­tial buy­ers is to iden­ti­fy who they are and get to know them. Per­sonas are the per­fect vehi­cle for these efforts. The pow­er­ful infor­ma­tion per­sonas pro­vide will help you cre­ate an effec­tive mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that res­onates with poten­tial buy­ers.

Demographics vs. Personas

Many mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als sim­ply gath­er demo­graph­ic infor­ma­tion and call it a day. How­ev­er, a sim­ple cat­e­go­riza­tion of your buy­ers’ age, sex, income sta­tus, and occu­pa­tion isn’t enough to direct a cohe­sive and effec­tive mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy. What exact­ly is a buy­er per­sona? It goes well beyond demo­graph­ics to iden­ti­fy a pro­to­type or arche­type of your poten­tial buy­ers. It’s cre­at­ed from research you con­duct with poten­tial buy­ers and exist­ing cus­tomers via direct con­ver­sa­tions and ana­lyz­ing their behav­iors online and off. (Read more about this in 6 Keys to Cre­ate Per­fect Mar­ket­ing Per­sonas.) To illus­trate this, let’s say you have a sales enable­ment soft­ware for mid-sized busi­ness­es. From your per­sona research you’ve iden­ti­fied three pri­ma­ry buy­ers: Tom, a sales rep; There­sa, a region­al sales man­ag­er; and Philip, the direc­tor of IT. All three work for the same com­pa­ny, but have dif­fer­ent motives and chal­lenges.

• Tom is moti­vat­ed to con­tin­u­al­ly improve his sales per­for­mance to meet the demands of ever-increas­ing quo­ta. Meet­ing quo­ta enables him to remain employed, and exceed­ing quo­ta helps him increase his income and pay for his daughter’s pricey tuition. Tom is con­tin­u­al­ly chal­lenged by hav­ing to ful­fill oth­er demands like report­ing, meet­ings and respond­ing to inter-office email, all of which take away from his valu­able sell­ing time. He’s ded­i­cat­ed to work­ing hard, but work/life bal­ance is also impor­tant. Tom finds per­son­al val­ue in keep­ing on top of trends in sales tac­tics and ways to stream­line pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. As such, he rou­tine­ly starts his morn­ings read­ing blogs and fol­low­ing indi­vid­u­als on Twit­ter who cov­er those top­ics.
• There­sa, also moti­vat­ed to meet quo­ta, is under pres­sure to ensure she has the best sales team with­in the com­pa­ny. This means she needs to track per­for­mance, devel­op a plan for coach­ing, iden­ti­fy sol­id can­di­dates to onboard and report to the C‑suite. Since she over­sees a region that includes sev­er­al states, she is extreme­ly busy and trav­els con­stant­ly. Most of her job is done via mobile phone.
• Phillip is the ulti­mate gate­keep­er of any soft­ware imple­ment­ed through­out the com­pa­ny. He is the head of IT and comes with a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent set of motives and needs.

So which per­sona should you mar­ket to? Who is real­ly your poten­tial cus­tomer? The answer: all three. Tom, There­sa, and Phillip each rep­re­sent three dif­fer­ent per­sona types:

• A func­tion­al buy­er, the indi­vid­ual who will be the pri­ma­ry user of the prod­uct.
• An eco­nom­ic buy­er, the indi­vid­ual in charge of the purse strings or bud­get for a pur­chase.
• A tech­ni­cal buy­er, the per­son respon­si­ble for review­ing the prod­uct against com­pa­ny stan­dards and require­ments.

Ensur­ing that you have mar­ket­ing pro­grams and mate­r­i­al designed for all three is the secret to a tru­ly suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing pro­gram.

Appealing To Various Personas

By under­stand­ing these three dif­fer­ent buy­er types — and devel­op­ing detailed per­sonas for each — you can more clear­ly iden­ti­fy the types of mar­ket­ing mes­sages and chan­nels that will reach each one.

• Mar­ket­ing to the func­tion­al buy­er: Tom wants to know about usabil­i­ty and how the prod­uct will make him a rock star. You can begin to iden­ti­fy the types of media out­lets he con­sumes and direct your adver­tis­ing and PR efforts to them. Because you also inti­mate­ly under­stand the prob­lems and chal­lenges he faces, you can direct­ly appeal to those in the mate­r­i­al.
• Mar­ket­ing to the eco­nom­ic buy­er: With There­sa (the eco­nom­ic buy­er), it’s easy to see that any mar­ket­ing will need to be short, punchy and address things like effec­tive­ness, pric­ing and how the tool will make her job eas­i­er. And the mar­ket­ing may be more effec­tive when deliv­ered via mobile, whether that’s in-app adver­tis­ing or pro­mot­ed posts on social net­works. Know­ing that she con­stant­ly trav­els opens up addi­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties for mar­ket­ing through air­line pub­li­ca­tions, hotels, or trans­porta­tion orga­ni­za­tions.
• Mar­ket­ing to the tech­ni­cal buy­er: Phillip wants to know how the soft­ware will improve com­pa­ny effi­cien­cies, how long it will take to imple­ment and get the sales force up to speed, and whether it inte­grates well with oth­er sys­tems in place. Phillip may be influ­enced by online reviews from rep­utable sources, indus­try influ­encers, sug­ges­tions from oth­er IT col­leagues, and sug­ges­tions from the inter­nal team. That infor­ma­tion should spark all kinds of ideas for reach­ing Phillip.