A focus on buyer personas helps Attivio generate more valuable leads

Creating content for buyer personas is essential to good marketing. Rather than creating gobbledygook-laden drivel about products and services, creating information for your buyers makes it important for them. A buyer persona is distinct group potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.

Attivio, an enterprise software company, uses a buyer persona approach on the company's site. While the different persona might actually all buy the same product, each one has different objectives, pain points and purchase drivers.

I connected with MaryAnne Sinville, vice president, marketing at Attivio to learn more.

In the B-to-B segment, the company targets what they they refer to internally as "tech-savvy" business champions and IT management.

Drive Insight, Innovation and Opportunity
Business champions care about new revenue sources, better customer relationships, regulatory compliance, competitive advantage and controlling costs.

Deliver Critical Insight
Information Technology buyers are responsible for getting and keeping their systems up and running, so they also want to hear about reliability, security, performance, scale and ease of integration. The IT buyer is more sensitive to marketing hype.

Improve Public Service, Enhance Collaboration, Detect Threats
The Government & Intelligence Agency customers don't want to hear about improving profitability, instead they care about sharing information amongst agencies, improving their ability to connect the dots and threat detection.

Increase Differentiation and Value
Attivio also partners with system integrators and value added resellers who want to know how the company can help them compete more effectively, enter new markets and sell more into their existing client base.

"None of this comes easy and we're doing ongoing refinement," MaryAnne says. "You find yourself constantly trying to highlight different things, in different ways on each persona landing page. But the reality is that you have to provide all the key points that are relevant to each audience. It can get a bit repetitive, though the order and priority will likely vary."

One of the challenges with a Buyer Persona approach is that it requires significantly more content development.

Video for each buyer persona

A particular focus has been on video. Each set of buyer persona pages has appropriate video made especially for that buyer.

"Video has been a particularly valuable tool in helping us convey the appropriate value proposition to each customer segment," she says. "When we do a video shoot, we often ask the same question 2-3 times, guiding the speaker to frame their answer with a specific audience in mind so we get relevant content to parse out to multiple persona pages. We also post partner testimonials on our partner pages, business people on our business champion pages, and so on."

One of the benefits of this approach is that salespeople know what a buyer is interested in and what persona they represent based on what page they were on when they express interest in learning more.

"When a visitor comes to the site, self selects a persona path and then converts to a lead, it's much easier for us to respond with additional information they're likely to find compelling," MaryAnne says.

Comments

[Reggie]

Using video on the buyer persona landing page is an awesome idea. I wonder what percentage marketing lift they obtained after adding video?

[David Siteman Garland]

Great to see the use of video. There is NOTHING on the web as humanizing as video...if done in an authentic way. Kudos.

[James M Cooper]

I think we'll see an explosion of video on sites over the next 12 months.

We are actually looking at improving the buyer persona pages on our own site, I think not only does it increase conversion by being more relevant, but it also could add some very targeted pages to your site which google just might like.

[Cliffpollan]

Another benefit of mixing the use of video into the persona pages is that people have different styles for absorbing information. Some find text preferable will others do better with video, which mixes text, images and sound, while also putting a human face on the company.

[Doug Brockway]

On any day that I feel confused and frustrated with the world, on any day that I wonder if there IS intelligent life on earth, I just read a WebInkNow post like this one and all is good again.

I just wish I could 'splain buyer personas and their import to my colleagues as well.

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks for the comments. MaryAnne and her colleagues have done a great job.

[MaryAnne Sinville]

Thanks for the kind feedback. Reggie's question gave me food for thought.

We obivously monitor growth in traffic, ratio of leads to traffic, etc., and they're all up significantly. Our videos include narrated demos and slide presentations, whiteboard sessions, and thought leadership pieces, but we also offer analyst reports, webinars, whitepapers ane other inventory.

What we hadn't done, that is until Reggie gave us the idea, was to add a catagroization of asset type so we can track which format is working best ...so Thanks!

What I can say is that our average time on site is way up, and we attribute that to video. And qualitatively, we have had tremendous feedback from visitors, as well as our sales staff.

[David Meerman Scott]

Thanks for stopping by MaryAnne. And thanks so much for sharing your story with us.

[Tatyana Gann]

Excellent post David. I love the idea of creating video for each buyer persona and page for it.. Make it so targeted and very focused.

Very good tips and explanation on buyer persona!

Tatyana

[Promotional Products]

This is something that can be an effective tool. I think J.Crew should invest asap. I subscribe to their email list and purchase clothes there at least once a month, yet I still get marketing material directed for womens clothing, something I could care less about...its quite frustrating.