Last week, we discussed ways to avoid the “end of quarter scramble,” and pointed out that one of the best ways to insure a healthy pipeline is to segment and narrow your target audience and focus on the audience most relevant to your product.
More advanced companies are now taking segmentation to the next level by developing buyer personas for their key target groups.
David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of Marketing & PR,” described the process of developing personas as breaking buyers into distinct groups, and then collecting intelligence on those groups to make it easier to create content specifically targeted to each group.
“You need to segment buyer personas so you can then develop marketing programs to reach each one,” Scott says. “For each buyer persona profile, we want to know as much as we can about this group of people.” In addition to conducting interviews with recent buyers and target customers, companies are using the intelligence gathered from Web activity tracking tools to build personas and to create content to reach them.
This targeted approach to communicating with buyers is becoming a competitive differentiator, according to Ardath Ablee, author of “eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.” “Companies who truly understand the needs of buyers and develop content to help them learn what they need to know to build the confidence that they’re making the best choice will win. Companies focused on themselves and their products will not. Buyers care about the outcomes the products enable before they ever care about the features, feeds and speeds,” Albee said.
This goes back to one of the most basic lessons in marketing – always focus on your product’s benefits rather than highlighting its features. Buyers simply do not care about your shiny features – they want to know how the product will affect them.
Industry analysts report that personas and buyer profiles are helping to make both large and small companies more efficient. However, less than half (46%) of B2B companies have developed buyer personas to guide communications and sales readiness for their prospects. This means there is still significant room to adopt advanced segmentation to help make sure the deals being pursued at the end of the quarter are based on real business needs and have a greater chance of actually closing.
Tags: buyer personas, segmentation
