The Marketers Guide To Persona Building

The Marketers Guide To Persona Building

Personas are critical for connecting with your customers – to better your pipeline, to improve efficiency in acquiring and closing deals, and to drive greater value.

Persona building can be a daunting task and not everyone is entirely clear on the optimal approach – or what goes into building effective ones.

Activate has built personas for several leading tech companies, and we thought we’d share a mini guide that covers the fundamental building blocks of persona development

Buyer Stages:

In order to build personas, you actually need a clear understanding of the classic sales funnel: top, middle, bottom. Who are the players at each stage? What do they care about – what drives them to purchase? Are we asking the right questions to build a solid understanding of our buyer’s journey? More importantly, are we able to extract relevant answers from our product marketers, sales teams and customers, and drive intelligence that will inform personas that perform?

Pain Points:

What are the pain points, the triggers, the events that create an entry point to the purchase process for your buyer? Is it the looming threat of a security breach, or a compliance issue perhaps? Document these events. Create a message map that address these issues by persona, by buying phase. Persona building is really a game of Q&A. Ask the right questions, extract answers that address the questions, and you are on your way to the next step – leveraging content that will realize your persona dreams.

Content:

Now that you’ve built clear personas by interviewing internal experts and customers around the various products you are responsible for, start the content audit process. Classify your content by buyer persona, by buying stage to help you find the right content for your marketing task (or find gaps where none exists). This is where most companies fail. Personas as stand-alone theory provide no practical advantage – but as a framework for mapping and planning your content, they’re invaluable. Channel your content and leverage it to address pain points.

With the above steps you have a strategy and plan to build personas, plan content, and to create pipeline with buyer-focused campaigns that are more informed than they have ever been.

We have a special list of gotcha’s to avoid in content auditing and persona building that we can share with you – feel free to call or email Activate for your copy.