The importance of buyer personas in web marketing

One of the simplest ways to build an effective website or to create great marketing programs using online content is to target specific buyer personas. Yet most websites are big brochures that do not offer specific information for different buyers.

A buyer persona is essentially a demographic group of buyers that you have identified as having a specific interest in your organization or product or a specific market problem that your product solves. By doing some basic research on your buyers (just listen to them!) and then creating content that appeals to them, your site will be much more effective.

For an example of this, consider the US Presidential elections of 2004. Marketers for the two major candidates segmented buyers (voters) into distinct buyer personas. Some of the names of the buyer personas were well known such as "NASCAR Dads" or "Security Moms".

When marketing with web content, think carefully how you can segment your buyers and then build content for each buyer persona. Examples:

1. A college or university that wants to generate more applications might have specific pages for prospective students (targeting high school students looking for schools) and another set of pages for parents (who are part of the decision process and often pay the bills). The content on these pages will be very different.

2. A B2B enterprise software provider's site might create content by the job function of the different buyers that contribute to making the buying decision for a large sale. For example, content would be different for a business buyer compared to a technologist compared to a user of the application.

3. A consultant might have different pages of their website that appeals to meeting planners that might hire him to speak vs. pages specific for companies that might hire him to provide advice.

In any business, a website will be more effective with targeted content by buyer personas. And done well, this more appropriate content will also be beneficial for search engine optimization because the words and phrases used in the copy is targeted specifically to real people with problems that your organization solves.

Comments

[gl hoffman]

JobDig is a unique free employment newspaper based in the upper midwest but about to start expanding nationally. I think your ideas are spot on for segmenting job opportunities as well. thanks!

[Michael Stelzner]

Hi David;

Speaking of targeting. It is also important to try and target down to the a specific job title if you are going after businesses. For example, the CIO or the admin.

I wrote about this yesterday on my blog.

I am surprised at how many businesses try to do all things to all people with the their marketing efforts.

Mike

[david Meerman Scott]

Micheal, I agree!

I think the best white papers (and blogs, and podcasts, and ebooks and speeches and webinars) target a specific buyer persona. I think if you try to target both an IT audience and a business audience, you will fail to reach either.

A white paper, in my opinion, is not a piece of “marketing collateral” and done well, it does not talk about a product at all. Rather, it focuses on a PROBLEM and provides a solution and is typically for a business audience. A white paper by a CRM vendor targeting business people might talk about how CRM can shorten the sales cycle, But the IT guy doesn’t give a rats ass about that. THe IT audience wants to know about bits and bytes and feeds and speeds and will this CRM system work on my network without making it crash. And if you address the IT guy’s concerns the business person will feel left out becasue of the technical mumbo-jumbo.

Target, target, target. 100 people really engaged in your white paper because the topic speaks directly to them is much better than 10,000 downloads with nobody reading beyond page 2 because it is too general.

David