Has your agency ever asked you to fill out a brief that contained questions such as:
- What are the needs of the target buyer?
- Who are all the individuals involved in the decision and what are their needs?
- Describe the buying process?
- Describe the tone of voice for the campaign?
Many years ago when I was planning for the following year’s campaign, I got asked these questions. I also remember staring at the questions blankly and wondering how I was going to answer, as I had never really stopped and thought about it!
Feeling a wave of panic wash over me as I realized that I did not know the most fundamental aspects of my target audience, I started writing down responses comprising of insights gained from talking to our salespeople and product mangers. I even went a little deeper and did some online research as well as racked my brain to recall any interactions that I had with the handyman in my condo, as we were targeting blue-collar small businesses. I knew the completed brief was weak. Needless to say the campaign results were tepid at best. Lesson learned.
The following year, we hired an agency to create personas for us. When I pulled out the persona summaries to fill out a brief, I felt like I was cheating – it was so easy and my answers were much more detailed. Needless to say the campaigns that year were much more successful with our prospects. What really won me over on the concept of personas was that our sales team also loved them and integrated them into their training. Imagine that…sales embracing a marketing initiative! Since then, I have become a huge believer in the effectiveness of personas.
SiriusDecisions recently published that 60% of B2b organizations report that their biggest barrier to creating relevant content is a lack of insight into and understanding of the buyer! In an effort to close this gap, we have decided to host a free webinar about B2B personas with Pat McAnally, Research Director at SiriusDecisions and Katie Martell, CMO from Cintell.
Our objective for the webinar is for people to walk away understanding:
- Why companies are adopting personas and the benefits they’ve realized
- The process of creating B2B personas and how to handle roadblocks
- How to get the most ROI out of your personas – getting them out of the drawer and into the hands of people who need them to make decisions.
I hope you can join us and that we can help ease the pain of staring blankly at a brief.