Personas are a well-established marketing technique to help produce more customer-focused communications. They can be applied to both business-to-business and business-to-consumer markets. However taking a look at how marketers search for information about personas in Google Trends shows that there are a relatively low volume of searches.
You can see there is a clear up-tick in interest in personas over the last few years which I think is related to interest in content marketing for which personas are often recommended to generate relevant personas for different audiences.
In this article I will introduce the value of using personas which we’re big fans of using to create more personalised email and web-based conversations with prospects as part of marketing automation.
To support content marketing initiatives, personas are valuable since they can:
The main requirements of the buyer persona are that it is accurate and be believable by those using it. This means that the definition should not only include a simple visual summary of the persona, but also list the research used. For a B2B buyer persona I recommend it includes:
Often persona definitions end here, but we find it’s useful to relate personas to the buying journeys or stages and the actions or activities that the persona takes at each step. Then content can be developed to support each stage of the buyer journey as shown for these initial buying phases below.
To help create more realistic buyer personas we have created a buyer persona cheat sheet download which includes a template showing the questions to answer for each stage of the buyer journey.
I said something in a meeting this week, it’s pure opinion to be honest, but I think I can back it up and wanted to post about it this week:- “brands that can leverage real-time, visual content will find themselves market leaders.” Would you agree or disagree?
Ever since Pinterest and Instagram started to get traction with consumers (2012 I’d suggest?), we’ve seen pictures literally become a ‘thousand words’, and savvy marketers have been quick to get visual content to the front of their social media and search marketing agendas.
I also remembered a great Altimeter report, again from 2012 that revealed a deep confidence that marketers saw the importance of visual content, social and mobile. We’d have to say that was well founded as it turned out?:
Equally, this 2012 research revealed that, amongst a lot of other insight, 44% of users are more likely to engage with brands posting imagery in social channels, over those that don’t. That’s 2012, we’ve come along way in two short years. This quote is useful to summarise the case:
“Blogs were one of the earliest forms of social networking where people were writing 1,000 words… When we moved to status updates on Facebook, our posts became shorter. Then micro-blogs like Twitter came along and shortened our updates to 140 characters. Now we are even skipping words altogether and moving towards more visual communication with social-sharing sites like Pinterest.” Dr. William J. Ward, Social Media professor at Syracuse University (2012)
Since the observations above in 2012, we’ve seen visual content evolve faster than we’d imagined. Micro video through Vine and Instagram, and of course Snapchat, on top of the established might of Facebook and Twitter, all provide means of visual communication and social sharing, and with that behaviour change marketers are getting involved, albeit pretty slowly, considering?
So here I repeat my statement: “brands that can leverage real-time, visual content will find themselves market leaders.” All I’m saying in addition to the above is that the visual content needs to also be of the moment as well, real-time – that relevance requires visual content and also has a deadline. I’ll spare the repetition of Oreo’s 2013 ‘dunk in the dark’ masterclass, and link here if that’s new to you. If it is, where have you been for a year!?
Glad you asked, because that’s what we’ve been discussing this week, and I’d like to share our thoughts and hear your reactions:
What do you think, what would you challenge or add to on the list above?
