Use Personas to Engage Your Target Markets

A persona pulls the traits of a group of people together so you can make certain assumptions about them and determine the best way to engage them—and this is very important—before they get locked onto a preference for some other vendor. The best way to get close enough to your target is to know enough about them to craft messaging so relevant that putting your organization on their list of vendors under consideration is a given.

Consider this example of a persona and the applicable insights that can help you get closer to your target market, as excerpted from my book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale:

Gloria is the manager of product development for the Whiz Bang 3X product at a midsize technology company. She’s three months from the product’s launch and has the weight of the company’s belief—that this product will be critical to their future success—riding on her shoulders. She’s working 18-hour days and has just discovered that the delivery system the product team had selected isn’t going to be able to scale to meet projected volume needs.

Gloria’s status quo is that her company is conservative and generally moves slowly. The company has taken a big risk on the Whiz Bang 3X and has reached its tolerance for stepping out to the edge. No one is willing to stick his  neck out much farther for the Whiz Bang 3X, preferring to cover their backsides in case the product doesn’t garner the forecasted market share. Gloria needs to find a champion quickly to help her ensure she’s got all her bases covered with that delivery system.

If Gloria pulls off the successful launch of the Whiz Bang 3X, she has the real potential of taking over the position of vice president of product development that will be open when Pete retires next year. She’s yearned for this opportunity to expand her career for the last five years and has steadily taken on more and more responsibility to become the primary candidate for succession.

Rather than viewing the delivery system discovery as a crisis, Gloria sees the opportunity not only to handle the volume issue but also to preempt the scalability issue the company would face as a fast follow-on when the Whiz Bang 3X is successful. She’s hoping her forethought and vision will help to ensure she’s selected as the next vice president. She also knows if it doesn’t work, she’ll likely be looking for a new job because the Whiz Bang 3X is coming to market only months before a competitor’s product that claims to answer the same needs in the marketplace.

The rumblings she’s hearing from her company’s current customers tells her that the Whiz Bang 3X is definitely what they need. And the new compliance regulations under government review will cause added market urgency if they are approved—and that outcome seems likely. In order to move at the speed necessary to meet project timelines, Gloria has to get consensus with a number of influencers fast. She needs a delivery system vendor who can help her gain knowledge quickly, as well as the confidence to step out on the ledge and do the right thing for both her company and its customers.

Can you see how you’d be able to help Gloria if you knew all about her situation and offered a delivery system that would match her goals? Before you think, “yeah, but I’ll never get close to knowing Gloria’s situation,” consider the following possibilities for how you might know enough to get a good handle on this information.

[Below are a few examples from the book.]

• The need for a product like the Whiz Bang 3X has been discussed on industry blogs, articles about the subject have appeared in industry e-zines, and several analysts have predicted its development by a company’ like Gloria’s.


• The new compliance regulations have been dissected in the business press, so you know that the challenge of addressing the changes they mandate is going to become a high priority for the existing and potential customers Gloria’s company serves, as well as companies like hers.


• You are a member of a social network that includes companies like Gloria’s and see comments and questions that indicate the need for higher volume capacity in delivery systems is increasing.

This type of information is available. The challenge is connecting the dots. However, it’s exactly the type of information you need to get started in defining a niche that helps you to create a persona that likely will come very close to addressing Gloria’s scenario. Alternatively, input from your salespeople can help you to create a persona similar to Gloria’s based on what they’ve learned during recent wins and longer-term customer relationships.

It’s important to remember that personas evolve and change along with their environments. You cannot create a persona and then never revisit it for tuning and tweaking. You must be diligent about monitoring related changes and advances and updating your company’s personas as warranted. [End of book excerpt.]

We need to get creative and thoughtful about what we can glean from the intelligence we gather. Especially with social media encouraging people to share more insights about themselves that you've never had access to before.

Engaging your target markets requires continuous refinements over time to match their shifting needs and preferences. The example above only scratches the surface of what’s possible. You’ll have to stretch your thinking to discover which details can be used to generate that extra relevancy which could mark the difference between getting your foot in the door or being ignored at "hello."

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Ardath Albee is CEO and B2B marketing strategist for her consulting firm Marketing Interactions, Inc. Ardath is an expert at creating contagious content and e-marketing strategies that engage prospects-from initial attention until they're sales ready. She has a unique ability to develop content strategies that work hand-in-glove with overall corporate and product positioning to deliver hard hitting e-marketing programs and tools that compel customers to buy. Her new book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale, was released in October, 2009 by McGraw-Hill.