Persona Based Marketing: Powerful B2B Marketing Tools For Connecting With Prospects & Customers
Every company is unique and has a different personality. Understanding this can be a valuable marketing tool for business-to-business marketers. Persona based marketing, or the idea that each person comes with their own set of interests, preferences and opinions about your industry, is an effective way to reach out to customers with relevant content.
What are Personas?
A persona is a fictional depiction of an individual customer or other person within your organization, as well as what they might be interested in reading about.
Personas can be used by companies to provide a more realistic and holistic view of who will be reading their content and what topics would get the most attention. They can be used to identify the ways that people tend to engage with your content. Personas can also be used to better disseminate your content.
Personas are helpful because they provide a consistent view of how people in your company will respond to your content, which increases the odds that they will actually see it and engage with it.
Building Personas From Research
Research is key when building personas as well as when identifying a marketing strategy. There are two main types of research that should be conducted: qualitative and quantitative research. The design of an effective persona is based on the results of your research.
Qualitative Research: Searching For Areas Of Interestpersonality traits, desired outcomes, motivations and emotions using behavioral surveys, focus groups or other methods. This information can be used to identify how customers are likely to respond to specific content, what content they are interested in reading, and ways they are likely to share it with their network.
Quantitative Research: Understanding Which Publications Are the Most Popular. This information can confirm and help explain qualitative research results by identifying which publications are the most popular among specific customer personas. This helps to identify the most popular content areas that your personas will find appealing and engaging.
The results of your research will determine how you write your marketing strategy and give you a better idea of what kind of personas best represent your ideal customers.
Benefits of Personas
Once you have the results of your research, you will be able to create personas that best represent your ideal customer and then build marketing strategies that are relevant to those personas. Personas will help you know what type of content to write and how this content can best be disseminated.
Personas provide a more realistic view of how customers behave because they can be accurately used when writing new marketing strategies that are pertinent to each persona. This allows companies to focus on the kinds of content people will engage with and appreciate, instead of wasting resources on what people won't engage with or appreciate.
Personas also help companies to build stronger relationships with customers because they can be used as a reference point when communicating with customers.
This is a guest post by Nicholas Sakelaris, who has been working in the marketing field since 1968. He is now the founder and president of his own company DAS Marketing Associates, which specializes in creating customized marketing solutions for small businesses and nonprofit organizations.
Nicholas Sakelaris
Email: nicholas.s@dasmktgassoc.com Phone: 800-641-4647 Web site: http://www.dasmktgassoc.com/
Copyright 2012, Nicholas Sakelaris
All Rights Reserved. This article may not be resold, reprinted or redistributed without prior permission from the author. Links to this article are encouraged. Please visit http://www.dasmktgassoc.com/.
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Email: nicholas.s@dasmktgassoc.com Phone: 800-641-4647 Web site: http://www.dasmktgassoc.com/
Copyright 2012, Nicholas Sakelaris All rights reserved. This article may not be resold, reprinted or redistributed without prior permission from the author Links to this article are encouraged. Please visit http://www.dasmktgassoc.com/.
Guest post contributed by guest blogger Peter Fader , PhD . Peter Fader is an associate professor of marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He has been studying consumer behavior for more than 20 years and spending the last decade working with firms in a wide range of industries, from semiconductors to spirits, helping them to understand how consumers really behave and what they really want. He is the author of Principles of Marketing , a widely-used textbook now in its 5th edition, and has published dozens of papers on consumers' decision making. He splits his time between teaching and working with industry clients.
Fader received his Ph.D. in Marketing Research and a B.A. in Psychology from Stanford University, and has worked as a strategy consultant at the Boston Consulting Group and prior to joining Wharton, was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School.
Tags: fader , marketing , principles of marketing , principles of marketing review , peter fader , peter fader book review , b2b marketing
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About the Author N Gail Mitzner is a freelance writer and marketing consultant based in Northern California. She also teaches marketing and communications classes at Sierra College . Contact N Free Marketing Coaching Learn how to create powerful marketing strategies for small businesses and nonprofits by sharing your expertise with clients and peers. Free coaching from Proskauer Rose, LLP does not create an attorney-client relationship. For information about Proskauer's free coaching services, please visit: http://www.proskauer.
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