New Rules of Marketing and PR | Buyer Persona | Public Relations | Marketing | Advertising
As I've said many times on this blog, smart marketers understand buyers, and many build formal buyer personas for their target demographics. It can be daunting for many of us to consider who, exactly, is visiting our site. But if we break the buyers into distinct groups and then catalog everything we know about each one, we make it easier to create content targeted to each important demographic.
Adele Revella, who is the leading worldwide expert in buyer personas has just launched the Buyer Persona Blog. It is great. She uses buyer personas as the cornerstone of her clear vision and convincing action plan for companies that believe marketing can contribute to highly successful products and services.
I recently interviewed Revella for the buyer persona section of my book The New Rules of Marketing and PR which comes out in June, 2007. "A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description," says Revella, who has been using buyer personas to market technology products for more than 20 years. "The buyer persona profile gives you a chance to truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers' eyes, the circumstances that drive their decision process. The buyer persona profile includes information on the typical buyer’s background, daily activities, and current solutions for their problems. The more experience you have in your market, the more obvious the personas become."
Often times, marketers and PR pros are amazed at the transformation of their materials and programs as a result of buyer persona profiling. "When you really know how your buyers think and what matters to them, you eliminate the agony of guessing about what to say or where and how to communicate with buyers," says Revella. "Marketers tell me that they don't have time to build buyer personas, but these same people are wasting countless hours in meetings debating about whether the message is right. And of course, they’re wasting budgets building programs and tools that don’t resonate with anyone. It's just so much easier and effective to listen before you talk."
If you believe in buyer personas like I do, you should be following the Buyer Persona Blog.
Disclosure: Revella and I are both instructors for the Pragmatic Marketing Effective Product Marketing course.
