There’s nothing more disappointing as a marketer than working hard on a campaign only to fall short on expected results. Actually, we take that back. The most disappointing thing is when that happens and you can’t seem to figure out why.
Failure is a part of marketing, and learning from failure is part of successful marketing. But when you can’t identify the reasons behind your shortcomings, you can’t learn from them, and you can’t make the changes necessary to achieve success in the next go-around. That’s frustrating as heck – so let us help.
If you feel like you’ve developed incredible content, but aren’t seeing results (be it demand generation, conversions, website traffic, or anything in between), the problem might lie with your user and buyer personas. Whether they’re out of date or completely ignoring a key audience, we’ve got some advice to get you back on track.
Back to basics
Before we blame your personas for a lack of results, let’s go back to marketing basics. Do a quick double check to make sure your campaign is hitting all these points:
✓ Your content is directed toward a specific audience or persona
✓ You’re speaking to their pain points and offering solutions
✓ You’re delivering content for the right part of the buyer’s journey
✓ You’re delivering content in the right place and in the right format
✓ You have clear calls to action (CTAs) to drive conversion
Nailed all the above? Ok, then it’s very possible that your personas are off. Perhaps they’re outdated. Or perhaps you’re missing a few. Let’s take a look at both scenarios and see what you should do about it.
Scenario #1: Your personas are outdated
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has likely altered the way your buyers and users live and work, which means their associated personas are probably in need of an update. You’d be in good company, as 25% of B2B marketers revisited their buyer personas in response to the pandemic, and 31% reexamined their customer journeys.
Take a fresh look at your customer data – what’s driving them to respond to your content lately? What does this reveal about their major challenges and worries? For more insight, tap into the wealth of knowledge your sales team has on your customers and users. They’ve been in the thick of it with them throughout the pandemic.
You may find, for instance, that right now your Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO) persona is less worried about attracting new talent, and more worried about retaining the talent they already have. In that case, your email campaign highlighting the new hiring features of your human resource information system software (HRIS) isn’t going to hit hard – no matter how epic it is. The better bet would be a webinar or blog series about how it can help you reduce turnover and improve employee engagement.
That’s just one example of how you can engage in more targeted lead nurturing by aligning your messaging and content with the needs of your buyer. By better understanding your users and buyers, and incorporating those learnings into your personas, you’ll be better able to market with success.
Learn more about how to recalibrate your buyer personas.
Scenario #2: You’re Missing a Persona
Given the global changes that have resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic, we wouldn’t be surprised if you have entirely new buyers or users that don’t align with any of your existing personas. Take Zoom, for example: they’ve got TV ads targeting grandparents now, not just business folk. That’s an audience with entirely different drivers, so it deserves an entirely new persona.
If you think it’s possible that you have new buyers and users of your product or service, then it’s time to build out a new persona (or two or three). Developing new personas can be quite the process, so we’d recommend you follow these steps to make it as smooth and easy as possible:
- Gather data. Use your CRM tool to scope out prospective buyers. Look for people who are engaging with your content but aren’t moving forward in the buyer’s journey (for example, they’re opening an email but not clicking through; or they’re navigating to your website’s contact page but not actually submitting a message). These folks have potential if you can develop the right content for them!
- Gather more data. Talk to your sales team. Are they getting passed along to new contacts within organizations that weren’t previously involved in buying decisions for your product? From our previous example, maybe a Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) Officer is now a critical buying persona for your HRIS software, not just the CHRO.
- Talk to customers. If you have the time and resources, set up interviews with customers who seem like they’d fit this new persona. Don’t limit yourself to just existing customers – talk to prospects if you can, and even folks who chose not to be customers. All will offer invaluable insight into this audience. Here’s a great list of questions (and a persona template!) from HubSpot to get you started.
- Identify patterns. Organize all the above input so you can identify patterns and generate your new persona(s). For buyers, we like to break it down into these buckets:
- Who they are. Their personality traits, motivators, and demographics.
- What they need. What are their pain points? What are their goals? This will help you position product-oriented solutions.
- Where they get their information. You’ll want to know where to disseminate content and who influences their purchasing behavior.
- Why they’re looking for a solution right now. This is beyond just what they need – it’s why the current state isn’t working anymore for them, and what makes this moment ripe for buying.
- Bonus: who kills the vibe. For buyer personas, we also like to figure out if there are any blockers in the buying journey. It’s really helpful to know this, so you have answers ready to address those pain points.
That should help you get started. Let us leave you with one last piece of advice, though: make sure to think critically about who’s a user, and who’s a buyer. In the Zoom example above, grandparents wanting to video chat with their grandkids may be the user, while their kids are the ones buying and setting up their accounts. This differentiation is incredibly important if you want to get your campaigns right.
31% of B2B marketers say that getting to know their audiences better will be one of the top areas of investment for their organization this year – will you be one of them? Contact us today and let us help you develop expertly curated, perfectly targeted content marketing.