getAbstract Marketing
Buyer Personas
Book

Buyer Personas

How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Adele Revella
Wiley, 2015
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8

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Recommendation

To find out what your customers want, ask them. Consultant Adele Revella argues that too many business-to-business companies base their marketing efforts on guesswork and intuition. Instead, they need in-depth knowledge about their customers. She recommends constructing “buyer personas” of your B2B buyers and refocusing your marketing messages on their priorities. A buyer persona is a composite portrait of a segment of your market that represents a large group of customers with similar attitudes, needs and goals. In this detailed manual, Revella shows how to create your own buyer personas. She skips theory to provide nuts-and-bolts instructions on conducting interviews, collating data into spreadsheets and turning the findings into compelling marketing messages. getAbstract believes her insights will benefit marketing strategists, sales managers and sales representatives at business-to-business companies.

Summary

What Do Customers Want?

Business-to-business marketing has changed. In the old days, customers couldn’t use the Internet to evaluate buying options. They went directly to vendors for information. A vendor’s sales representatives cultivated relationships with their customers, and crafted their pitch based on individual customer’s needs and goals. Today, B2B customers usually complete more than 60% of their product and purchase evaluation process before they ever contact a salesperson. By visiting vendor websites and reading online user forums, they eliminate many vendors without ever talking to them.

To reach customers who may be rejecting your company online, align your marketing message with their specific concerns. The challenge is learning what those concerns are without knowing the buyer. Don’t rely on intuition or guesswork. You’ll never win a B2B buyer’s attention with generalities like “flexible,” “scalable” or “easy to use.”

Instead, segment your market into “buyer personas.” Each persona is an “archetype,” a composite of many buyers with similar attitudes. Build these personas with data you gather during in-depth interviews with actual buyers. Once you...

About the Author

Marketing consultant Adele Revella founded the Buyer Persona Institute and blogs on its website.

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