Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

by Adele Revella
Released March 2015
Publisher(s): Wiley
ISBN: 9781118961506

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Book description

See your offering through the buyer's eyes for more effective marketing

Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this book provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes. Readers will learn how to segment their customer base, investigate each customer type, and apply a radically more relevant process of message selection, content creation, and distribution through the channels that earn the buyers' trust. Rather than relying on generic data or guesswork to determine what the buyer wants, the buyer persona approach allows companies to ask the buyer directly and obtain more precise and actionable guidance.

Buyer personas are composite pictures of the people who buy solutions, services or products, crafted through a unique type of interview with the people the marketer wants to influence. This book provides step-by-step guidance toward implementing the buyer persona approach, with the advice of an internationally-respected expert.

  • Learn who buys what, and why

  • Understand your buyer's goals and how you can address them

  • Tailor your marketing activities to your buyer's expectations

  • See the purchase through the customer's eyes

    • A recent services industry survey reports that 52 percent of their marketers have buyer personas, and another 28 percent expect to add them within the next two years - but only 14.6 percent know how to use them. To avoid letting such a valuable tool go to waste, access the expert perspective in Buyer Personas, and craft a more relevant marketing strategy.

    Table of contents

    1. Cover
    2. Title Page
    3. Copyright
    4. Dedication
    5. Foreword
    6. Acknowledgments
    7. Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak
    8. Part I: Understanding the Art and Science of Buyer Personas
      1. Chapter 1: Understand Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them
        1. Why the “Know Your Customer” Rule Has Been Redefined
        2. A Clothes Dryer's Extra Setting Made All the Difference
        3. Will You Understand Your Buyers' Decisions?
        4. Relying on Buyer Demographics and Psychographics
        5. How Marketers Benefit from Buyer Profiles
        6. Buying Insights Complete Your Persona
        7. High-Consideration Decisions Reveal the Best Insights
        8. Buying Insights from a Quick Trip to London
      2. Chapter 2: Focus on the Insights That Guide Marketing Decisions
        1. Listening to Kathy
        2. Frustrated, a Newly Minted Consultant Invents Personas
        3. Buyers Have Distinct Expectations
        4. The 5 Rings of Buying Insight
        5. Give Your Buyer a Seat at the Table
        6. Buying Insight Opens Doors to C-Level Executives
      3. Chapter 3: Decide How You Will Discover Buyer Persona Insights
        1. The Most Important Nine Months of My Career
        2. How Interviews Reveal Insight
        3. Is This Another Kind of Qualitative Research?
        4. Crafting the Low-Consideration Buyer's Story
        5. Using B2B Salespeople to Build Buyer Personas
        6. The Pros and Cons of Buyer Surveys
        7. When to Use Focus Groups
        8. Will Big Data Deliver Insights?
        9. How Social Media Contributes to Buyer Personas
        10. SAP Gains High-Value Insights through Web Analytics
    9. Part II: Interviewing for Buying Insights
      1. Chapter 4: Gain Permission and Schedule Buyer Interviews
        1. Persuade Stakeholders That You Need Buying Insights
        2. Overcome the “We Know Our Buyers” Objection
        3. When You Don't Have Time for Buyer Persona Interviews
        4. Use Your Sales Database to Find Buyers to Interview
        5. Sometimes You Want to Avoid Your Internal Database
        6. Using Professional Recruiters to Set Interview Appointments
        7. Which Buyer Should You Interview?
        8. Interview Buyers Who Chose You as Well as Those Who Did Not
        9. Contacting Buyers to Request an Interview
      2. Chapter 5: Conduct Probing Buyer Interviews
        1. Who Should Conduct the Interview?
        2. Prepare for Your Buyer Interview
        3. Getting It on the Record
        4. “Take Me Back to the Day…”
        5. Use Your Buyer's Words to Probe for Insight
        6. Go Slowly to Capture the Whole Story
        7. Questions That Keep the Conversation Flowing
        8. An Example Interview with Tim
        9. Look for Insight When Buyers Use Jargon
        10. Make Your Questions about Your Impact Count
        11. Probing on Who Influences This Decision
        12. Asking about the Perceived Value of Your Differentiators
        13. When Features Affect Decisions, Look for Insight
        14. First and Foremost, Be a Respectful Listener
      3. Chapter 6: Mine Your Interviews for Buying Insights
        1. You Need Fewer Interviews Than You Expect
        2. Step 1: Mark Up Your Interview Transcript
        3. Step 2: Organize the Story Based on Buying Insights
        4. Step 3: Write a Headline for Each Key Insight
      4. Chapter 7: Determine How Many Buyer Personas You Need
        1. Segment Buyers Based on Insights, Not Profiles
        2. Conduct More Interviews to Test Segmentation Options
        3. Analyze Insights to Decide How Many Personas
        4. Will Two Buyer Personas Help You Win More Business?
        5. Presenting Your Buyer Persona
        6. Copywriting Your Buying Insights
        7. Building the Buyer Profile
        8. How to Find Buyer Profile Information
    10. Part III: Aligning Your Strategies to Win More Business
      1. Chapter 8: Decide What to Say to Buyers
        1. Will Your Current Approach Work?
        2. Set the Agenda, and Invite the Right People
        3. Ask for Premeeting Contributions
        4. Develop a Complete List of Capabilities That Matter
        5. The Moderator Is a Proxy for the Buyer
        6. Apply Two Filters for Short Messaging
        7. Evaluate Your Competitive Ranking
        8. Assess Relative Value to Buyers
        9. Bring in the Copywriters and Creative Teams
      2. Chapter 9: Design Marketing Activities to Enable Your Buyer's Journey
        1. Understand the Buyer's Journey
        2. Patrick's Journey for an Employee Benefits Decision
        3. Prioritize Assets That Align with the Buyer's Journey
        4. Prepare to Be Surprised
        5. How Buyer Personas Affect Industry or Solution Marketing
        6. A Global Perspective on Buyer Personas and Campaigns
        7. Can You Be Useful to People Who Aren't Buying?
        8. Educate Buyers That Success Is within Reach
        9. Autodesk Helps Buyers Achieve Their Top Priorities
      3. Chapter 10: Align Sales and Marketing to Help Buyers Decide
        1. Changing the Conversation with Salespeople
        2. Share Insights, Not Buyer Personas
        3. Deliver Buying Insights through Sales Playbooks
        4. Enabling the Challenger Sale
        5. Helping Salespeople Break into the C-Suite
        6. Insight into the Nurse's Emotions Halts Sales Losses
        7. Sales and Marketing: Vive La Différence!
      4. Chapter 11: Start Small, with an Eye to the Future
        1. Where to Begin Your Buyer Persona Initiative
        2. How to Earn Your Stripes as a Strategic Resource
        3. How Buyer Personas Benefit Product Strategy
        4. Building Buyer Personas for New Products
        5. Communicating Insights That Affect Other Teams
        6. Using Buyer Personas to Guide Strategic Planning
        7. Start Small and Make a Big Difference
    11. Bibliography
    12. Index
    13. End User License Agreement

    Product information

    • Title: Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business
    • Author(s): Adele Revella
    • Release date: March 2015
    • Publisher(s): Wiley
    • ISBN: 9781118961506