Buyer Persona Development
Creating accurate buyer persona cards helps marketing optimize its lead-generation and lead-nurturing programs by ensuring the right messages are sent to the right decision-maker or influencer based on their role, their challenges, their needs, and their personal demographics.
A buyer persona is a detailed profile of a type of prospective buyer. It’s an internal-use tool used by marketing and sales professionals to help ensure that all of your marketing and sales activities associated with generating and nurturing leads are tailored to the needs of your target buyers.
It’s not uncommon for tech vendors to have a half-dozen buyer personas for their various products and services. And they’re very granular, too. Typical buyer persona cards (sometimes printed as full-page “cards” for quick reference) include:
- Age range
- Gender mix
- Job title / role
- Reports to
- Years of experience
- Relevant industries
- Typical company size
- Professional goals
- Buying motivations
- Decision criteria
Buyer Persona Development is highly recommended as a prerequisite to Messaging Development. A typical LeadingEdge project entails a web-based survey to your existing customer base in an attempt to gain a baseline of buyer persona metrics. Then telephone interviews are conducted with veteran sales personnel to gain their perspectives on target buyers and how many buyer persona cards are necessary. Then finally, telephone interviews conducted with several of your customers – at least 2-3 interviews per buyer persona, preferably more.
The result is a set of very attractive, highly informative buyer persona cards that your marketing and sales teams can use to optimize lead generation / nurturing programs and activities. These buyer persona cards should be updated as your product portfolio changes and as the industry you serve changes – usually every 12-18 months.
Successfully creating buyer persona cards requires experience in your IT industry segment. Consultants speaking with your salespeople and customers should have underlying subject matter expertise to follow discussions wherever they may lead. That’s why tech vendors turn to LeadingEdge.
We’ve Got Deep Subject Matter Expertise
Unlike most buyer persona development firms that serve all kinds of companies (e.g., airlines, hotel chains, healthcare providers), LeadingEdge is laser-focused on serving the marketing needs of technology vendors. Our veteran product marketing consultants average 15-20 years of experience and have deep subject matter expertise in virtually every IT industry segment, including security, networking, ITSM, storage, virtualization, and more. Our consultants’ subject matter expertise enables them to participate in deep, thoughtful discussions with you and your colleagues and customers, ensuring that the buyer persona cards they create hit the mark.
We’re Technology Marketing Experts
All of the consultants who lead our buyer persona projects and who ultimately create the buyer persona cards are previous heads of marketing and/or product marketing for technology vendors. They have forgotten more about buyer persona development then most technology marketers will learn in their lifetimes. Your consultant will follow field-proven best practices to ensure your buyer persona cards are comprehensive, attractive, and well written.
Need help putting together a message map for your company’s product or service? Interested in learning other ways that LeadingEdge supports tech vendors with regard to marketing strategy and planning? Click on any of these related LeadingEdge services to learn more:
