Using Personas for Behavioral Marketing

by Anne Spradley, VP / Group Account Director

"How can we understand business decision makers?" I hear this question often because many of nFusion's clients seek to market to other businesses, and they are interested in knowing the most effective ways to identify, segment and court them. And with our client roster this interest is often focused on reaching small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Within the targeting and segmentation process there are several methods that a marketer can use. However, we have found that some prove more useful than others. This article explains how to build personas as a useful targeting tool and creative resource.

Traditional Segmentation Techniques

Historically, B-to-B marketers have used certain dimensions of their targets in segmentation. These dimensions include demographic information about a business such as region, revenue, number of employees, employee titles, staff functions or even staff involvement in company purchases. Other dimensions include industry (vertical) or attribute-based information such as inclusion in a regulatory environment or technical proficiencies.

While looking at these characteristics helps businesses understand target organizations, using them exclusively limits an understanding of the people behind the business — the people who actually make decisions. To reach these folks you need to understand their needs, their motivations, their preferences and their information consumption habits. Knowing and acting on behavioral information can make the difference between a marginally performing campaign and one that exceeds results.

Personas

What if you had a tool that helped you understand the behavior of the people who make purchase decisions for their businesses? The actual people inside the demographic numbers? This is where personas come in. Personas are composite profiles of individuals who represent a target. The person described in the persona does not actually exist but is created through research to typify some of the characteristics of a group of ideal prospects. Details are developed, even down to a photograph, so that the persona becomes so real that the organization starts to identify with it. These profiles facilitate a deeper understanding of the person you wish to reach inside the organization. Below is a standard segmentation profile. Compare it with the matching persona and get a feel for how behavioral characteristics create a persona.

Traditional segment:

&bull Executive at small-to-medium business
• o 50 – 499 employees
• o No vertical markets identified
• o Newer companies 1 – 10 years old

&bull Demographics
• o Male
• o 35 – 54 years old
• o Bachelor's and master's degrees
• o HH income: >$75,000
• o Married: 75%

&bull Roles/Titles
• o Owner and CEO
• o Chief Technology Officer
• o Chief Financial Officer

This type of segment helps for identifying lists for key media opportunities, but is limiting in determining what messaging or creative will be motivating and compelling.

Persona: Alan

Alan, 48, is the cofounder and CEO of a public relations group in Seattle. After graduating with an MBA he began his own firm that has rapidly grown to employ 55 people. His annual income is $250,000 and he is married with two children. When he's not traveling or busy at the office, he enjoys running, playing racquetball with his wife and spending time with his two sons.

Much of Alan's business success depends on keeping abreast of fast-changing information. He checks e-mail hourly via Blackberry and searches the Web daily. But he also relies on information that is hard to find, such as analyst reports on key verticals. To keep him up to date he regularly reads industry trade journals and industry-specific websites, discusses work with peers online and keeps close track of economic factors that could affect business activities.

Alan's most pressing concerns are staying current with the latest trends, news and media to remain competitive and grow his business, price to size and identify new revenue streams and emerging opportunities. He is also thinking about his firm's cost structure and profitability. At 55 employees the company is at a size where the executive team is deciding to hire full-time employees to replace current contracted services. They are also evaluating software tools to manage processes and support growth. Technology infrastructure needs are rapidly changing and his team is evaluating hardware suppliers based on cost and scale.

As a comparison of the two profiles shows, a persona fuses data into one actionable construct — one that works to alleviate some of the more difficult challenges of trying to identify and target the ideal contact within an organization based only on demographic information. With personas you can begin targeting your ideal customer based on individuals' self-identification with behavioral characteristics or signs that indicate that an individual is currently within the buying process for a specific product or service.

Developing Personas as a Tool for Behavioral Marketing: Benefits
So once you develop a persona, how can you use it to meet your business goals?

• 1. Personas help keep your team focused on the target during decision making
• In our persona example, Alan helps your entire organization understand his goals, motivations and behaviors. By using personas a team can avoid making decision that are influenced by internal group think. Instead of asking, "Why would I buy this product?" a team should ask, "Why would Alan buy this product?"


• Personas help teams understand and predict the reactions and desires of key prospects. They can be used to guide thinking on website design, ad design, positioning, messaging, product assortment and almost any interaction with your business.


• 2. Personas better address a message-based marketing strategy
• When organizations segment through demographics such as size, industry and geography it is usually because the target company's sales organization structure is apparent and easy to assess. Describing your target through these attributes hinders your team's ability to deliver an effective message-based marketing strategy. Through messaging an organization can address customer usage and expected benefits to connect with targets. And with the potential complexity of targeting multi-decision makers and influencers, an organization needs to understand the distinction between targets within an organization to ensure delivery of the right rational and emotional messages to the various contacts. This type of messaging resonates better than a static message directed, for example, at any executive in a small business in the financial sector.


• 3. Personas can focus a marketing team's efforts to drive ROI
• Personas are grounded in research that allows for a better understanding of prospects. And with more data an organization can employ more advanced test strategies that it can launch in market, which equates to fewer wasted dollars. With the wealth of data that a team can gather through in-depth purchase process studies, customer and internal interviews or surveys, focus groups, analysis of online marketing metrics and even blog monitoring, marketers can develop more robust personas than ever before. And these personas can better inform marketing strategies that deliver a better ROI.


• Organizations that use personas successfully are constantly evaluating, researching and adding information. Their goal is to continually understand who the targets are and what goals and motivations they have. They think of personas as living profiles that are ever-changing and developing. And they understand the importance of revisiting these profiles frequently.

To truly benefit from using personas, an organization needs to compile relevant and usable descriptions that accurately represent an organization's ideal target. In the second part of this paper I will go into more depth on the tools you can use to acquire the insights you'll need to develop personas. Good luck and happy persona building.