How do you use buyer personas to build strategy?

I recently attended a seminar put on by Pragmatic Marketing entitled “Effective Product Marketing”. The seminar came recommended to me by several colleagues and it did not disappoint.

One of the core learnings of the seminar was how to use buyer personas as the basis of your strategic planning. This concept is nothing new. I can still remember my Marketing 101 professor, Dr. Lauterborn, drill into our heads, "the only sustainable competitive advantage is a superior understanding of the consumer." Nonetheless, many marketers often forget this fact. We're busting tail trying to check off items on an ever-growing list of collateral to create and shows to attend. The end result is usually a focus on the product, not the buyer and what matters to them.

Most buyers place product capability low on the list of considerations when purchasing your product. I'm not saying it's unimportant, but it's rarely what motivates them to choose you over an alternative solution. What buyers want to know is if the product (or service) solves a fundamental problem they have.

Each audience has a different buyer persona, and your ability to grok, or profoundly understand, that persona will make or break your marketing campaign. The buyer persona reveals what problem is really keeping them up at night and why they haven't considered your product as the solution. It will also reveal how they influence the buying decision and why they haven't considered you yet. If the persona has a say in the buying decision they should be studied. Otherwise you are just guessing.

Be careful not to confuse a buyer with a user, also know as a customer. The two groups have very different personas and thus require different messaging and assets to satisfy. Customers could care less about the benefits of the product - they've already bought it and will glaze over any messaging that only reinforces what they already know. Customers care about user criteria - how the product functions and how they can fully exploit it to be more successful with less energy. Buyers still need to hear how your solution solves their problem.

So how do you go about building a buyer persona?

First, try to cast aside preconceived notions about who you think the buyer is. You'll often find it's not who you should really be talking to.

Second, keep personas to a minimum. Create separate personas only if you truly have to say something different to each group. Another rule is to segment as long as it is profitable to do so. More personas means more research, more messaging strategies and more marketing assets that have to be produced.

And third, get personal. Read what they read. Attend events they attend. Monitor topics and industry news that is important to them. Interview your sales people to get firsthand experiences of the people they talk to on a daily basis. Use your website to capture information or conduct interviews by phone or at conferences. And, the most insightful source of all - win/loss analysis. Nothing is more telling than knowing why someone chose you, or why they chose someone else. It's is essential you do this information gathering up front to avoid inaccurate personas. Inaccurate personas lead to messaging that misses the mark.

I challenge you to read through your current product collateral and see how you measure up. Are you listing product features, or how those features solve their problems? Are you spewing forth generic "saves you time and money" jargon (I can practically hear their eyes rolling), or are you solving a problem that keeps them up at night?