The Value of Making Personas

The Value and Making of Personas
Laura Patterson
President & Author
laurap@visionedgemarketing.com
Improve Your Probability for Success ™ | www.visionedgemarketing.com | ©1999-20112VisionEdge Marketing. VEM Proprietary. Not for reproduction or redistribution without written permission. 2
Founded in 1999 and headquartered in
Austin, TX, VisionEdge Marketing, Inc.
serves more than 100 customers, and
counting.
VisionEdge Marketing, Inc. is a data-driven
and metrics-focused marketing firm
that specializes in improving
marketing performance and creating
competitive advantage designed to
attract, secure and retain profitable
customers.
Services Include:
 Marketing performance management
 Marketing and sales alignment
 Product and strategic marketing
 Pipeline re-engineering
 Professional development
About VisionEdge Marketing – Experienced Practitioners

Three Session Objectives
1. The differences
between
personas, profiles,
and roles
2. How to create
personas
3. How to use
personas to
support demand
generation efforts
“The purpose of a persona is to
identify a customer’s
motivations, expectations,
and goals. Even though
personas … are fictitious,
they are based on
knowledge of real
customers. A well-crafted
persona enables you to
stand in your customer’s
shoes and take a more
customer-centric view.”
 Laura Patterson,
MarketingProfs, January 2007
Four Demand Generation Challenges
1. Strategy and alignment is
about creating a clear,
common set of objectives
and approach to the market.
 <25% marketers are
generating enough
demand to satisfy their
sales teams.
 Sales needs buyer
personas to guide
communications with their
prospects.
2. Technology is the engine
that enables best practices
demand-generation tactics
such as lead nurturing and
lead scoring as well as the
integration of multiple
programs.
 52% of marketers use
some sort of marketing
automation platform.
 Yet most don’t leverage
personas when it comes to
lead development and
nurturing.

3. Content. If technology is the
engine, content is the fuel.
Pressing need for content
across a range of buying
stages and personas.
4. Data is the core of
successful demand
generation. Reliable, clean
data is critical to effective
buyer persona development
and persona message
formation.
Four Demand Generation Challenges
The First Marketing Commandment
Know thy customer
 These are often
used
interchangeably
but they are not
the same:
 Profile
 Role
 Persona
 “The purpose of
business is to
create and keep
a customer…”
Peter Drucker

Buyer Personas Summary
 Buyer personas focus on
 identifying buyers’ pain
points and their
common points of
resistance to the sales
process.
 the purchase process
 They help organizations
zero in on the key profile
and behavioral attributes
that are crucial to sales
success.
 Personas are
narrative descriptions
that bring profiles to
life.
 Profiles are broad
generalizations, and
typically address
demographic data –
can span across roles
THE MAKING OF A PERSONA

Persona-Based Marketing
 Persona-based marketing
is part Hollywood
characterization and part
business analytics.
 Involves
 constructing a fictional
customer based on
real-life data and
intelligence.
 Then
 using that character as
the touchstone for
content, promotional
and selling decisions.
goes beyond simple
demographic data
describes who a prospect
or customer is- facilitate
empathy
 Create personas by
answering questions about
their behavior such as:
 What keeps this person
awake at night?
 How does he spend his time?
 How does she like to be sold
to?
Effective Personas
 Reflect as much detail
as possible about the
target person's
 background,
 daily habits,
 activities,
 challenges, and
 problem-solving
approaches.
 Enable you to connect
and engage with
prospects and
customers
 Develop personas for all the roles
involved in the buying process.
Technology marketers can break
personas into the three major
buckets:
 Economic buyers – Those
concerned about the cost of the
solution.
 Technology buyers – Those
responsible for integrating or
managing the solution.
 User buyers – Those who will use
the solution on a day-to-day basis
(or are responsible for the
satisfaction of those using the
solution).

Answers These Types of Questions
 What sources does this person
turn to for information and daily
news?
 Does this person seek advice
from colleagues, industry peers,
or unbiased third parties?
 How does the prospect go about
making business decisions?
 What will help this prospect do a
better job?
 What types of organizations does
this person belong to and what
events does he or she attend?
 What makes a good working
day?
 How much of their day is spent
putting out fires?
 What make a frustrating working
day?
 What is the prospect's comfort level
with technology?
 What are the biggest problems
related to your product they deal
with today? How do they solve this
problem today?
 What about this problem keeps this
person up at night? What else
keeps them up?
 What things frustrate this person the
most?
 What phrases does the prospect
use to describe the issues he or she
is facing?
 Does this person prefer high-level
details or a deep dive into a topic?
 Why would this person choose this
product? Choose us?
 What kid of problems are these
fires?
1. Basic demographics such
as age, job title, length of
time in position, and
length of time with the
organization
2. Job responsibilities and
what a typical day looks
like
3. Tasks that take the longest
and those that are the
most critical or are
performed most often
4. Major frustrations with the
job and the organization
5. What the person likes best
about his/her job
6. What teams or which
people within the
organization the person
most interacts with
7. Skill levels relating to the
job as well as technology
8. How time-poor or -rich the
person is
9. Goals, attitudes, beliefs
(conscious and
subconscious)
Personas Contain At Least These 9 Attributes

Creating Personas – Seven Steps
1. Convene a group of employees
who interact with your
customers and prospects.
2. Generate a profile of your best
customers and ideal prospect
as well as a profile for those you
“lose”
3. Make a list of all the roles
encountered during the buying
process, and at what point in
the process, and note any
differences between wins and
losses. It may be useful to write
a description for each role and
the purpose of the role in the
buying process.
6. Add detail about what this
person's daily calendar, life,
looks like: What are his or her
most pressing concerns? What
product or service attributes
would be most helpful in
solving this person's problems?
Is he or she looking to roll up
20 databases into one,
getting ready for an IPO,
dealing with a new
competitor who has just
entered the market?
7. Validate and modify - Use
CABs and TABs
Creating Personas – Seven Steps
4. Describe the person and their
behavior: Give each persona
a name, a title, an age, and
describe how he or she looks.
How does he dress? What
kind of car does she drive?
What does he do in his free
time? What kind of
educational background
does she have?
5. Flesh out as many attributes
as you need to give a full,
rounded picture of who this
person is. Then, turn to your
persona's problems and
goals.

USING PERSONAS IN
MARKETING
What are the
marketing
implications
to the
following
personas?
 Use the persona to formulate
your marketing messages,
think about what path this
prospect or customer might
pursue to solve his/her
problem.
 Will he or she turn to white papers
or articles in trade publications or
Web sites?
 Would this customer or prospect
seek input from a speaker at a
networking group of their peers?
 Let the personas steer the route,
which you can pave with
information that can help your
prospect and customers move
forward in their consideration and
buying process.
Using Personas

FOUR SUCCESS FACTORS
Ground Personas in Reality
1. Base personas on real
marketing insights that are
relevant to the business.
 Personas take
profiles/segments and
put them into context;
context is the nature of
how your business
interacts with your target
buyer.
 “Personas that are more
rigorous and that are
communicated in the
language of business are
more likely to bring these
different groups together
and bring their strengths to
the table.”
 Steve Mulder, The User Is Always
Right
 “The power and danger of
personas is their realism.
Good personas use this
realism to drive authentic
understanding deep into the
heart of an organization.”
 Todd Wilkins, Adaptive Path, ATX

2. Align personas with
market/customer segments.
 Personas are not
hypothetical ideas about
who your buyer might be;
rather, they are defensible
descriptions of your actual
buyers … in the scenarios
in which these buyers
interact with your
organization and its
products/services.
 Combine the
demographics/explicit
/BANT criteria with your
analysis of
behavioral/implicit
factors.
 Segment Users by:
 Goals
 Usage
 Behaviors
Align Personas with Segments
3. Leverage both qualitative
and quantitative insights and of
both internal and external
perspectives:
 Persona development takes more
than a brainstorming session within
the marketing and sales teams.
Involve all KEY stakeholders and
Collect insights based on real-life
interactions and then go forth and
do your homework.
 Include product owners,
marketing design, customer
service, sales and so on —
everyone who interacts with or
serves customers and has a
take on the types of users who
are out there.
 Conduct rigorous data analysis
which provides a key opportunity to
blend personas with lead scoring
models.
 Basic correlation analysis, which
can be couched in basic cross-
tabulation of data
 Statistical analysis. To really boil
things down and gain more
fine-tuned and measurable
insights,
Leverage Data

Keep It Simple
4. The point of defining and
using buyer persons is to
enable you to scale by
getting your hands around a
discrete number of segments
and critical paths that matter
— not to create infinite
complexity.
“Think of segmentation as the
art of finding patterns and
stories in the data,
whether your data
comprises qualitative user
interviews or quantitative
survey results.”
Steve Mulder
Personas Help Us - Summary
 Characterize, personify and empathize with users/buyers in
order to develop products and go-to-market strategies
that are appropriate to their needs and buying patterns.
 Take planning steps such as basic market segmentation to
a much more useful level by putting them into context.
 Create a tool for re-focusing company attention and
resources on what matters — the buyer and his/her needs
— especially at a time when buyers have more power
than ever and are tougher to reach than ever.
 Conceptualize our buyers in terms of how we actually
interact with them — important for developing campaign
logic and content in terms of a dialogue, rather than a
traditional definition of a static campaign.

Thank You and Questions
What is one take
away from
today?
What will you do
differently?
Workbook available in the VEM store

The Value of Making Personas

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