Marketing Interactions

What Purpose Do Your Buyer Personas Serve?

In every project I work on, some version of buyer personas are involved. Sometimes I'm given personas (usually "profiles") to work with and sometimes developing them is the first step in the project. Let me tell you that I've seen a lot of personas - or what passes for them.

What I have noticed is that there seems to be two types of personas: those suited for marketing and those better suited for salespeople.

For example, I recently saw a collection of personas that were labled with titles such as The Forward-Leaning Buyer, The Risk-Averse Buyer, and The Jock Buyer (yes, I'm making these up for demonstration). The kicker is that each of these personas could be representative of the same title, roles, and responsibilitites as the others.

These personas went on to detail the personal lives and attributes of the personas including marital status, number of kids and even the breed of the family dog. And let's not overlook sports and entertainment preferences. (Yes, I'm still talking about B2B personas)

There were some useful details for marketers, but my first thought is how the heck would marketers begin to figure out which one of these personas were representative of their prospects in order to segment their databases appropriately?

Perhaps these personas are indicative of the need to develop content about how to train your Australian Shepherd to play frisbee or how to improve the efficiency of shuttling your kids to after-school activities. Then we could postulate that anyone responding to the content is related to the corresponding persona.

Okay - all joking aside - Buyer personas must serve the purpose they are designed to address.

From a B2B marketing perspective, this means that a buyer persona should:

• Serve as a tool that can be referenced easily to help guide the development of relevant marketing programs for the market segment represented by that persona.


• Point to specific topics of content as related to priorities defined as important to the persona.


• Reveal the circumstances of what could derail the deal (or the championing of the deal)


• Be unique from all other personas to indicate a truly definable market segment.

The purpose for a B2B marketing persona is to have a tool that defines and guides the marketing programs developed to engage a specific market segment. Never forget that a persona is similar to a composite sketch. It must help you to get close enough to the business interests of the actual humans involved in the process to create the opportunity for marketing programs to reach the goals set for them.

Personas that are based on personality traits or personal situations will not help as there are just too many variables to address to roll them up into a useful set of guidelines that have any traction with a market segment. This being said, these personality-driven profiles may be useful conversational tools for sales reps who are in conversations with a Director of Customer Service who they learn has an Aussie who won't return the frisbee.

Do you see the difference?

BTW - the picture is my girl, Bella, who absolutely LOVES to play frisbee.

 

Convince Execs to Convert to Content Marketing

The way marketing has always been done will not produce the results B2B marketers need to grow their businesses today. You know it, you've heard it — haven't we all? The question that remains is often about how to get executive buy-in and support to shift dollars?

Many channels and methods that have historically good performance may be slowing, but executives presented with new and unproven channels (for your company) can be hard to convince. Unless presented with proof and validation, perception can be that of more spins on fluff rather than a sound strategy that will lead to future business success.

Here are several reasons and ideas to help you convince your company to convert to content marketing strategies:

Historical performance is no longer a barometer for future success.

Buyer preferences are changing faster than ever. Perhaps it's not so much that their preferences are changing, but that they can now avoid having to interact with any content they consider sub-par. Channels are exploding and access to them has never been easier.

This doesn't mean you should rush out and incorporate all of them into your marketing mix, but it does mean that you need to listen and test the waters to find out where your buyers are spending time, what topics they're interested in and how you can achieve better results than "the way you've always done it" is producing.

One benefit from historical performance is to use those benchmarks to show declining or stagnant returns. Then do some listening and show your executives what's getting response in digital arenas that's relevant to your target markets. The point is to prove that those who could be your buyers are there and engaging with competitors because your company isn't present. Lost revenue opportunities can be very persuasive.

Controllling the conversation in a digital age is a pipe dream.

An argument often made by corporate executives is that they need to maintain control over their message and brand positioning. Although this is silly given that what others say about your company is your brand positioning, you can guide the conversation and reinforce it through participation and contagious content distribution that buyers will actually seek out, share and use.

If you don't play, you can't win — it's that simple. Refusing to participate where your buyers are by providing information they are interested in is the equivalent of choosing to be invisible. In today's age of transparency, choosing to keep your toys under lock and key in your own sandbox is self-defeating.

To sway opinion, choose some examples of companies that have taken the lead to provide innovative thinking and ideas that their audiences are embracing. Heck, there are plenty of case studies out there today with impressive results. Show your execs the money and you're more likely to gain support for content marketing initiatives.

One example is Kelly Outsourcing & Consulting Group as covered in BtoB Magazine's latest edition. Kelly OCG is spending 60% of it's B2B marketing budget on content marketing. That's a pretty impressive investment. I know Todd Wheatland, their VP of Marketing. He's a very astute marketer who gets it. Also in the issue is the CMO Closeup of Russ Fujioka from Dell, discussing how the company is using custom content.

By showing the success of other companies like yours, executives will become champions for your content marketing initiatives. One of my clients has a mandate from the C-level this year to turn marketing into a demand generation engine. To date they have always been a sales-driven organization. The need for change is a reality. There are plenty of proof points you can use to show that adopting a content marketing strategy is a sound business initiative, not more fluff.

Differentiate with interactivity for competitive advantage.

Let's face it, copycats are everywhere. Anything that is published digitally can be used as a model for other content development. What will set you apart is the way your company participates in interactive dialogues with your markets and how you apply innovative ideas to their business problems.

But the real payoff that results is permission. Interactivity will build opt-in and permission for you to continue conversations with an audience who is willing to and even anticipates receiving more valuable information from your company.

The biggest marketing challenge today is being found and then keeping that attention. The way your company chooses to interact with your prospects and customers is the biggest differentiator left.

Many B2B companies are still buying lists. What you need is opt-ins; people who have given you permission to communicate with them. Pit an opt-in list against a purchased list with the same content and emails and measure the interactivity that results. The opt-in list should blow the purchased list out of the water.

The thing is — you can't build an opt-in list without a content marketing strategy. No relevant, thought-provoking content, no reason to opt in, right? By proving that batch and blast lacks effectiveness, you'll likely gain approval to pilot a content strategy. Pick a project focus that can provide some quick wins and expand from there.

Finally, the best time to change your marketing strategy is before the existing one becomes defunct. To keep the momentum moving in your pipeline, you have to also apply momentum to the evolution of your marketing framework. Starting from scratch is painfully difficult.

Shifting while in motion is a much easier transition. Remember that you don't have to cast all traditional marketing to the curb. Some of it just needs a few tweaks to work well as a component in your content marketing programs. In fact, you may have a program that's successful, such as a webinar series. Take that program that serves as a stand-alone event today and incorporate a content strategy with it to improve conversions. Use that as your proof case.

What's helped you gain buy-in for content marketing at your company?

Does Your B2B Marketing Content Address Cause?

How deep does your marketing content dive into the problems and priorities your B2B prospects are facing? In B2B marketing, we talk a lot about addressing problems, but quite often we don't talk about what that really means or how to truly help our prospects solve the systemic issues that cause the problems in the first place.

This post is inspired by the following point in a list of reasons about why managers struggle on Leadership Now blog. This is reason #9:

They Fix Problems, Not Causes. Unless the manager fixes the cause of the problems they encounter, valuable time will be spent fixing the same problem over and over again.

How often do you think about why a problem exists for your prospects? As marketers we need to look beyond the obvious and get to the root of the issue to elevate the value our content provides. That's when we start to become interesting to our prospects — when we invite them to think.

I love blog posts about people who are representative of my client's prospects. Posts about managers and leadership are really good sources of information to help you help them by gaining a bit of insight to things they may be struggling with or how they view opportunities.

This particular insight can help us begin to consider the potential causes behind the problems that prospects say they want to fix.

Here's an example:

If your prospect says he wants to improve team productivity and collaboration, why might that be an issue? Some possible causes may include:

• Did the company grow too fast without the infrastructure in place to support it?
• Did the company expand via mergers or acquisitions and is trying to mesh cultures?
• Is the company's culture old school but the manager is trying to force the adoption of new trends?
• Was there insufficient onboarding to drive adoption of the last solution he tried?
• Is IT not responsive to resolving issues with the system reported by users?

Given whatever you determine might be the cause of the issue your prospect is trying to resolve, can you see opportunities to create content that helps them get to the root cause rather than just buying another bandaid?

I can see you reading this and thinking "Hey, how would I know which cause to focus on because I don't market to one prospect at a time!"

The trick to this is to figure out which are the most likely scenarios and create content that addresses those. Theoretically, in the scenario above, each of those causes may exist for some percentage of your prospects. Think about it this way, if you can validate that customers have addressed specific root causes and salespeople tell you similar stories, you know that content designed around the cause will be on target for some prospects.

Monitor who spends time with which "cause" content and continue nurturing them appropriately with extension pieces. There's always more than one angle to any story. Use as many as you think are relevant. It also makes sense to have salespeople ask what's behind the issue in their follow-up and share those insights with marketing as part of the validation process.

When marketers consider how they set up the problem-to-solution stories they share to build a buyer experience, they must also consider the longevity of customer lifecycles. After all, if the cause of the issue is addressed during the implementation of your solution, it's less likely to happen again. And that means higher customer satisfaction and adds to the value derived from each customer for your company.

Are you thinking beyond the surface of the problem when you design your content marketing programs?

Why Marketing Content Needs a Point of View

B2B marketing content is most useful when it serves as proof that you understand your target markets and actually know how to do what your company promises via it's products and services. Essentially, marketing content — and the experiences it creates — serves as a test drive of what it could be like to be your customer.

Point of view is the perspective through which readers will experience your content (or story). For B2B content, the best way to explain this is that if your content is company focused, the perspective they experience will be you talking about yourself. And that's boring.

If your content is focused on their roles and the issues they deal with, they'll experience it much more personally. But they'll also experience your brand's orientation in regards to the issue the content addresses.

Marketers must always consider how the content they publish reflects upon the brand. Great marketing content will consistently provide a perspective prospects want to spend their attention on and be truly representative of the brand behind it.

The following checklist can help marketers determine whether or not the point of view of their content is hitting the mark every time.

Is your content generous?

Evaluate your content and identify what takeaway(s) it's giving to the reader. Giving should be more heavily weighted than getting.

Is your content helpful?

Is the content providing clarity about something that will be useful to your reader in how they address the issue they're dealing with?

Is your expertise showing?

Do you share information that's representative of the knowledge, methodologies and experience your company has in dealing with the issue? You need to do this. And, no, it will not keep people from buying your services. If it did, I'd be on the corner with a cup and a sign.

Does your content demonstrate flexibility?

There's one thing to be said about sharing expertise. It's another thing if your content comes off as so authoritative that there's no room for compromise. Every customer is different — or likes to think they are. You can be firm, but not dictatorial. It is never your way or the highway. Face it — business evolves too fast to take a hard and fast position you may have to swallow later.

Does your content provide attention to detail?

Make sure your content delivers on its promise. There's nothing worse than seeing a title and first few sentences that focus on just what you want to know only to read it and wonder why you bothered because there was no substance. If you read content that has no follow-through in the delivery, how confident will you bet that the vendor will treat you any better as a customer?

Is your content responsive?

Based on what is being said on the web (social media, forums, industry portals), is your content in tune? Or is it based on some internal agenda that has no evident and timely resonance with your target markets? This is why you always want to leave room for shifts in topics during the rollout of your content strategy. Interests can shift quickly. Priorities can change in response to regulations or in response to quarterly results, for example.

Is your content definitive?

Contagious marketing content defines its topic in context with prospect needs. It's never wishy washy or repetitive of what other content says. It showcases your brand's unique perspective as aligned with your audience. If this is true, your content will never reflect anyone else's content — unless, of course, they used yours as a template.

Does your content minimize effort?

There's a tendency to want demonstrative payback for sharing content, most often represented by putting it behind a form. But, in addition to thinking hard about how much effort you want to require from prospects for access to your content, think about how hard it will be for them to ingest and understand. Simplicity trumps convoluted complexity every time. Getting your content found by your prospects is only the first step. Getting them to stay and engage with it can be much more difficult.

If you evaluate your marketing content for point of view in relation to these points, you'll find that response to it will begin to increase and engagement will become more consistent resulting in an increase in momentum toward purchase.

Finally, remember that everything included in your content should have a purpose. This point gains importance when you consider the limited attention spans of today's buyer. Get rid of the fluff. Get rid of the jargon and buzzwords. Eliminate the extraneous stuff that serves as filler. Do not pussyfoot around in getting to the point.

Choosing the right point of view for your content can transform the results gained from content marketing programs. The reason is that it helps prospects feel like they "know" you well enough to want to get to know you better — which means they'll take the next step to engage in conversation.

What techniques are you using to develop the point of view for your marketing content?

Expectations and Experience are the New Competition

For years, B2B marketers have been worried about competitors' products and solutions. They spent a considerable amount of effort trying to differentiate their features and prove their offering is better than another company's version of something similar.

As technology continues to shorten product time-to-market and allow for rapid updates and improvements, it's also enabled marketers to become publishers, applying even more pressure to move faster to produce more information than competing vendors. Online publishing is the new version of one-upping. (Competitor A just published a cool infographic, we need one, too!)

The issue is that not much has changed in the way messaging is designed. Just today, I saw a template for a client to complete that was based on the premise of a persona message map. However, the columns requested information all about the products, unique product value proposition and product differentiators. Although there was an attempt to align these messages with the persona's goal, it was so high-level that the only real choice left is to talk about the products rather than what the persona really wants and needs.

Due to the ease of accessing information online, a big part of what's changed in the buying process are your customers' expectations about the experience they'll have along the way.

Because buyers can self-educate rapidly and much easier than the were able to in the past, they know more. In return for this education, they've raised the bar. They expect to continue to receive value each step along the way. And they expect it on their terms.

This is a big adjustment for marketers who are used to working on internal timelines and still believe they control the information flow. Or that what they want to say is what buyers want to hear.

What's important to note is that all this technology evolution and speed to market has also increased the complexity of solving problems. It's just not as simple as buying a product anymore. Education is the resulting mainstay. It will always be needed. Expertise is necessary beyond the product to help deliver on the promise made. Preparing for the future is no longer a next step down the road, it's an ongoing effort that needs to be incorporated as part of every purchase decision.

What marketers choose to publish online can no longer be "good enough" content. Instead, content has to play an integral role in facilitating the buyer's experience. And that's not best served by feeds-and-speeds content.

You know this, but it bears repeating: according to Selling Power, “Today, up to 70% of a customer’s buying decision is now made based on information he or she finds online well before a salesperson has a chance to get involved.”

What Buyers Expect:

• Educational information. 23% say there's not enough - IDG Connect


• Expertise. 48% said if the quality of thought leadership improved, it would influence their purchase decision - ITSMA and PAC


• Relevance. 39% say this key element is missing - IDG Connect


• Consistent Value. 43% of marketers say customers view their content as disjointed or hit and miss - Forrester Research

I read a lot of research that delves into the opinions and thoughts of B2B buyers. Not once have I ever read a statistic saying that they want more product or solution information.

What buyers are saying is that their expectations have changed. Their online behavior and engagement levels are barometers reflective of the experience provided to them by your content, web properties and social media dialogues.

Let's face it. The only true differentiators left are your expertise and the experience your company provides to help buyers achieve their goals. If it was just about products, it would be a hat toss.

You're no longer competing against the vendor with a similar product down the street. It's the ability to exceed buyer expectations and provide a valuable buying experience that will determine the winner when the time comes to make a purchase decision.

Marketing Cloud Computing to Non-Believer CIOs

Cloud computing is a pretty big deal. It's one of the top priorities for many CIOs. So, it should be a pretty easy process to build a B2B content strategy that helps CIOs make a purchasing decision.

Or is it?

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters and have a ton of Google Alerts to help me mine for information I use to learn more about the buyers my clients sell to. In my Inbox today was a bonanza of a resource. SearchCIO sent me a link to: Quick take: Why iRobot's CIO doesn't like enterprise cloud computing

This resource is a quick interview with Jay Leader, CIO of iRobot, in which he clearly distills exactly why he's not sold on cloud computing. He shares the questions he has and the obstacles he'd need to overcome to change his mind. This kind of stuff is uber helpful to constructing nurturing programs, as topics for blog posts and providing seed ideas for all types of content.

Take a look at all the great nuggets from this interview:

IT Projects Completed and Planned:

• Completed: Integration of ERP and Product Lifecycle Management systems to shorten product time to market
• Completed: A major upgrade to their collaboration portal
• Planned: enterprise architecture and business intelligence

Culture:

• The CEO has a degree in computer science from MIT
• The company's legal counsel has a degree in engineering from MIT
• The company is filled with engineers - according to Leader, "It's like having 700 CIOs"
• Actually, the company was a brainchild of MIT

Now, if you were pursuing this company as a named-account, you can do a lot with the above information.

But take a look at the questions Leader raises that can be applied to a campaign directed at CIOs in companies with similar characteristics, such as: High Tech Manufacturing, $500M revenues, 700+ employees

Objections and Obstacles:

• Show me an economic model that proves cloud computing is cheaper than how I manage my storage today.


• How do I get out of a cloud provider if I'm unhappy?


• What change in competency do I need to manage disconnected enterprises?


• I understand the potential, but how do I actually reap the value promised?


• Why would I pay to store documents somewhere else?


• If it isn't more secure, cost-effective and functional that what I have, why would I do this?


• I don't have an environment that needs burst resources, so the ability to scale quickly doesn't make a big impression on me.


• How do I integrate the data that is out in the cloud?


• I have a data center and staff, don't plan on getting rid of either.


• How will I really know where my data is being stored?

Leader also mentions a colleague who implemented Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) who has a staff of sysadmins when what he now needs are project managers and coordinators.

If you're selling cloud computing, how many of these questions and obstacles have you addressed in your content strategy?

Even if you're not selling cloud computing, the glimpse into the questions that come to mind for a CIO considering a technology purchase can help you dig deeper into your own content strategy to ensure that you're addressing the issues that come up for non-believers.

I'd also bet that even if your prospect is a believer, there are a few non-believers that must be brought around in order for the deal to move forward. The interesting thing is that cloud computing is being discussed all over the place. It's hard to go to any IT community or portal and not hear about it.

Don't let the hype about a solution serve as blinders. There are always objections to change that must be addressed. Interviews with people like your prospects can be terrific sources of insight for generating relevant ideas to weave into your content strategy.

NOTE: This is only one perspective, so don't base an entire strategy on Leader, but use it to assess your strategy and possibly fill any gaps that exist. Go talk to your salespeople to see if they're experiencing any of these objections and obstacles. Ask customers with similar characteristics if they had to answer any of these questions during their buying experience and how much importance was placed on those they did have to sort through.