Buyer Persona | Case Studies | Brand Journalism | Best Practices
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.
