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

9Design Marketing Activities to Enable Your Buyer's Journey

When you think about the best way to engage your buyers, you are likely to be confronted by a bewildering variety of options. In his book Youtility, digital marketing strategist and best-selling author Jay Baer suggests some simple but surprising guidance to anyone facing this quandary: “Your marketing should be so useful that people would gladly pay for it.”

We are not suggesting that your buyers should offer their VISA card information in exchange for your white paper or webinar. Rather that this value is one of the standards you should apply to every marketing decision. Focus on designing your lead generation campaign to make it more useful to your buyers.

Should you offer an extremely valuable asset before you ask your buyers to “pay” with their name and email address? Or should you forego the registration until you have given your buyers something useful for free? Would you describe yourself as the market-leading provider of flexible, scalable, compatible, easy-to-use widgets if you wanted to help your buyers evaluate your solution's applicability for their needs?

The perfect time to be useful begins when your buyer decides to prioritize an investment in a solution much like the one you are offering. At this moment, you don't have to be pushy or particularly clever to gain attention. Now your buyer is looking for the information to determine your ability to address his or her requirements.

If you have done your ...