Details

Buyer Personas

How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business
1. Aufl.

von: Adele Revella
17,99 €
Verlag:	Wiley
Format:	EPUB
Veröffentl.:	24.02.2015
ISBN/EAN:	9781118961667
Sprache:	englisch
Anzahl Seiten:	240

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Beschreibungen

Titelbeschreibung

Named one of Fortune Magazine’s “5 Best Business Books” in 2015 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. <ul> <li>Learn who buys what, and why</li> <li>Understand your buyer's goals and how you can address them</li> <li>Tailor your marketing activities to your buyer's expectations</li> <li>See the purchase through the customer's eyes</li> </ul> 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.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Foreword David Meerman Scott xiii Acknowledgments xvii Introduction: Listen First, Then Speak xix Why Is Everyone Talking about Buyer Personas? xx Will This Approach Work for You? xxii Part I Understanding the Art and Science of Buyer Personas 1 Chapter 1 Understand Buying Decisions and the People Who Make Them 3 Why the “Know Your Customer” Rule Has Been Redefined 5 A Clothes Dryer’s Extra Setting Made All the Difference 6 Will You Understand Your Buyers’ Decisions? 7 Relying on Buyer Demographics and Psychographics 10 How Marketers Benefit from Buyer Profiles 11 Buying Insights Complete Your Persona 12 High-Consideration Decisions Reveal the Best Insights 13 Buying Insights from a Quick Trip to London 15 Chapter 2 Focus on the Insights That Guide Marketing Decisions 19 Listening to Kathy 20 Frustrated, A Newly Minted Consultant Invents Personas 22 Buyers Have Distinct Expectations 23 The 5 Rings of Buying Insight 25 Give Your Buyer a Seat at the Table 27 Buying Insight Opens Doors to C-Level Executives 31 Chapter 3 Decide How You Will Discover Buyer Persona Insights 35 The Most Important Nine Months of My Career 36 How Interviews Reveal Insight 38 Is This Another Kind of Qualitative Research? 39 Crafting The Low-Consideration Buyer’s Story 41 Using B2B Salespeople to Build Buyer Personas 42 The Pros and Cons of Buyer Surveys 43 When to Use Focus Groups 44 Will Big Data Deliver Insights? 45 How Social Media Contributes to Buyer Personas 48 SAP Gains High-Value Insights through Web Analytics 49 Part II Interviewing for Buying Insights 51 Chapter 4 Gain Permission and Schedule Buyer Interviews 55 Persuade Stakeholders That You Need Buying Insights 56 Overcome the “We Know Our Buyers” Objection 57 When You Don’t Have Time for Buyer Persona Interviews 59 Use Your Sales Database to Find Buyers to Interview 60 Sometimes You Want to Avoid Your Internal Database 61 Using Professional Recruiters to Set Interview Appointments 62 Which Buyer Should You Interview? 64 Interview Buyers Who Chose You as Well as Those Who Did Not 66 Contacting Buyers to Request an Interview 68 Chapter 5 Conduct Probing Buyer Interviews 73 Who Should Conduct the Interview? 74 Prepare for Your Buyer Interview 75 Getting It on the Record 77 “Take Me Back to the Day . . .” 78 Use Your Buyer’s Words to Probe for Insight 80 Go Slowly to Capture the Whole Story 81 Questions That Keep the Conversation Flowing 82 An Example Interview with Tim 84 Look for Insight When Buyers Use Jargon 86 Make Your Questions about Your Impact Count 88 Probing on Who Influences This Decision 90 Asking about the Perceived Value of Your Differentiators 91 When Features Affect Decisions, Look for Insight 92 First and Foremost, Be a Respectful Listener 94 Chapter 6 Mine Your Interviews for Buying Insights 97 You Need Fewer Interviews Than You Expect 98 Step 1: Mark Up Your Interview Transcript 99 Step 2: Organize the Story Based on Buying Insights 103 Step 3: Write a Headline for Each Key Insight 106 Chapter 7 Determine How Many Buyer Personas You Need 111 Segment Buyers Based on Insights, Not Profiles 112 Conduct More Interviews to Test Segmentation Options 114 Analyze Insights to Decide How Many Personas 117 Will Two Buyer Personas Help You Win More Business? 118 Presenting Your Buyer Persona 123 Copywriting Your Buying Insights 127 Building the Buyer Profile 128 How to Find Buyer Profile Information 129 Part III Aligning Your Strategies to Win More Business 131 Chapter 8 Decide What to Say to Buyers 135 Will Your Current Approach Work? 136 Set the Agenda, and Invite the Right People 138 Ask for Premeeting Contributions 139 Develop a Complete List of Capabilities That Matter 140 The Moderator Is a Proxy for the Buyer 142 Apply Two Filters for Short Messaging 143 Evaluate Your Competitive Ranking 144 Assess Relative Value to Buyers 145 Bring in the Copywriters and Creative Teams 150 Chapter 9 Design Marketing Activities to Enable Your Buyer’s Journey 151 Understand the Buyer’s Journey 153 Patrick’s Journey for an Employee Benefits Decision 154 Prioritize Assets That Align with the Buyer’s Journey 156 Prepare to Be Surprised 157 How Buyer Personas Affect Industry or Solution Marketing 158 A Global Perspective on Buyer Personas and Campaigns 160 Can You Be Useful to People Who Aren’t Buying? 162 Educate Buyers That Success Is within Reach 163 Autodesk Helps Buyers Achieve Their Top Priorities 164 Chapter 10 Align Sales and Marketing to Help Buyers Decide 171 Changing the Conversation with Salespeople 173 Share Insights, Not Buyer Personas 174 Deliver Buying Insights through Sales Playbooks 175 Enabling the Challenger Sale 176 Helping Salespeople Break into the C-Suite 177 Insight into the Nurse’s Emotions Halts Sales Losses 179 Sales and Marketing: Vive La Différence! 183 Chapter 11 Start Small, with an Eye to the Future 185 Where to Begin Your Buyer Persona Initiative 186 How to Earn Your Stripes as a Strategic Resource 188 How Buyer Personas Benefit Product Strategy 190 Building Buyer Personas for New Products 192 Communicating Insights That Affect Other Teams 193 Using Buyer Personas to Guide Strategic Planning 194 Start Small and Make a Big Difference 198 Bibliography 199 Index 203

Autorenportrait

ADELE REVELLA is the CEO and Founder of Buyer Persona Institute and a leading authority on buyer personas. Through her company’s research and workshops, Adele’s buyer persona methodology has become the gold standard for thousands of marketers in hundreds of global companies. She is widely recognized as a marketing and business leadership speaker, consultant, blogger, and workshop facilitator. In her decades-long marketing career, Adele has seen the discipline from all sides: executive, consultant, trainer, and entrepreneur.

Back cover copy

The best way to understand what people want is to get to know them. Businesses are beginning to re-embrace this truth, and to realize that Big Data reveals only part of the customer’s story. Marketing surveys have indicated that, within the next couple of years, at least 80 percent of all marketers will be using buyer personas to define their audiences and guide business strategies. Those who have already tried the technique have been amazed by its ease and value, yet, for many, buyer personas are still not translating to increased business. Buyer Personas is a long-awaited how-to guide for marketers who want to implement buyer-expert marketing effectively. Creating buyer personas is the process of conducting one-on-one interviews with customers to get a handle on their mind-sets, understand their purchasing decisions, and build three-dimensional profiles of real buyers. But how are these interviews conducted? And then what? Buyer Personas addresses these questions in a concise and refreshingly relatable way. Adele Revella hopscotches over fads and hysteria to prove that asking customers about their decisions—and then systematically analyzing their answers—is one of the most powerful strategies around. “Know your customer” is an adage as old as marketing itself, but, in the digital era, many are forgetting this timeless truth. Although it’s possible to gather mountains of information on just about anything, no amount of data will help marketers understand customers as well—or as quickly—as simply listening. Interview a customer tomorrow morning, and by tomorrow afternoon you will have robust new knowledge of how your buyers think, without any of the pitfalls that accompany less people-centered approaches. Buyer Personas provides immediately actionable, step-by-step procedures and answers to the questions that marketers ask as they begin to build and use buyer personas. Beginning with the principles of buyer persona marketing, then proceeding to a practical method for contract or in-house buyer persona development, the book concludes with the most crucial element—making use of buyer personas once they have been generated. Countless examples show that this last step is where too many marketing executives fall short. They focus on the goal of creating buyer personas without a clear plan that guarantees a useful outcome. The third section of Buyer Personas assures that the buyer persona initiative leads to sales and marketing activities that measurably impact business goals.