Buyer Persona Insights

3 Ways to Enable The New Digital Buyer Journey

Image via Wikipedia

In Spain, for thousands of years Christian pilgrims have come to walk the Way of St. James where legend has it that the body of St. James is buried in northern Spain.  Today, many take this journey which has several different routes and has different degrees of difficulty.  It can take weeks and some say even months if you take such a spiritual journey.  For many, it is a spiritual renewal that is life changing.

In our 21st century, the buyer journey is undergoing a transformation and renewal with the advent of digital marketing.  The route the digital buyer persona takes today towards making a purchasing decision is a myriad of new paths along the journey brought on by traditional, digital, and social media avenues.  Organizations today also are attempting to understand the best mix to offer with many resorting to trial and error.    Here are three ways to create a favorable digital buyer journey and mitigate trial and error:

One: Understand end buyer goals

As with the Way of St. James, buyer’s have an end goal.  Without understanding the end goals of its buyers, organizations will be hard pressed to lay out the best paths for buyers to reach their end goals.  There are plenty of paths that are formulating as a result of digital and social media technology.  Understanding your buyer’s end goals will stop the proverbial runaway train of trial and error in trying to connect with buyers in the digital world.

Two: Help buyer’s to navigate the journey

Along the journey in the Way of St. James, there are markers and signs that indicate you are on the right path.  Similarly, organizations today need to help buyer’s navigate the digital and social way with key markers and signs.  They must provide a sense of direction that a buyer’s goal can be accomplished if they stay engaged during the buyer journey.  In the digital and social media journey, engagement in of itself may not be enough.  When engaged, buyers must have a sense of navigation.

Three:  Provide relevant information at the right moments as a way of refreshing buyers

Pilgrims who take the journey of the Way of St. James encounter townspeople along the way who provide them with hospitality. The pilgrims are greeted and offered refreshments of food and beverages.   Others offer small clues where small tokens and gifts can be found by those willing to take a more difficult path.  Businesses today must refresh the buyer along the journey to keep them engaged.  There are numerous ways to refresh a buyer whether it is through content or other forms of media engagement.  The point is that a buyer’s journey can be complex and long. Recognizing when buyer’s need “refreshments” along the way can make a meaningful difference in the long run. 

The new digital buyer journey and the rise of the digital buyer persona means companies today must rethink how to help buyers in the journey experience with their organizations.  The road to understanding these themselves can be hard and arduous as well.  For those who stick with it and climb every hill, the end goal of customer loyalty in the digital world can be a mighty reward. 

 

How to Focus on Buyer Goals to Grow Top Line Revenue

Image via Wikipedia

Recently, I watch the HBO documentary on the legendary UCLA Dynasty where UCLA won ten NCAA basketball titles in twelve years between 1964 and 1975.  Led by John Wooden, a legend amongst coaches in general pursued an unmatched focus on excellence and achieving a goal of winning the NCAA championship consistently.  A few years ago, I had the chance to meet John Wooden and engage in a brief conversation with him.  It was a treasure trove of imparted wisdom I will never forget.  To this day, I marvel at his quietness yet the focus was clearly present at every moment.

To pursue excellence in building top line revenue growth takes a high degree of focus.  If an organizations hopes to accomplish a business level feat akin to UCLA’s basketball dynasty it will need to have a consistent focus on understanding the goals of its buyers.  John Wooden established a disciplined process to impart among his players how to achieve this focus and accomplish many step-ladder goals towards the ultimate goal of winning the championship.  What does this look like in a business context?

One: Focus on listening to customers

In John Wooden’s world, focus was a labyrinth of fundamentals and plays.  There was a process where each season began with a concentrated focus on fundamental skills and a core set of plays.   Organizations today in their pursuit to get more leads, grow more revenue, and close more deals can lose sight of the fundamental process of listening to customers and being attentive to nuance changes in their goals.  Implementing and moving from one tactic to another in a search for the latest trick to create a spurt of growth.  Consistency in listening to customers and determining their goals is the hallmark of excellence.

Two: Have a game plan for aligning with buyer goals

Many organizations have a game plan for demand generation, lead nurturing, sales promotions, marketing tactics, and the likes.  Many organizations surprisingly do not have a game plan for understanding and aligning with buyer goals.  Buyer persona development, as I have made the case often recently, is not an exercise in profile building.  Essentially, it is a consistent game plan for understanding buyer goals that creates a focus platform for customer strategy building.  Developing a consistent flow of qualitative and experiential analysis that allows for deeply understanding goals requires a game plan.  John Wooden never said “just play ball”.  Likewise, companies need to elevate from saying “we need to listen to our customers” to having a game plan for understanding buyer goals deeply. 

Three: Give your teams playbooks

Unprecedented at the time for the collegiate level, John Wooden gave his teams’ detailed playbooks on how to execute game plans.  Enabling his teams to familiarize and immerse themselves in the plays.  Thus, helping them to achieve that unparallel focus needed to win.  To drive top line revenue growth, organizations must enable their teams with playbooks that not only inform them about buyer goals, via buyer personas and detailed depictions of relevant customer interactions in their areas, but also about the tactics and strategies designed to align with buyer goals.   The buyer persona development process is very much about achieving an organizational transformation around the buyer and buyer goals. 

For the past 11 years, my colleague Angela Quail and I, through our firm Goal Centric, have been fortunate to work with several Fortune 100 companies who have this transformation underway in portions of their global businesses.   These organizations helping to make Goal Centric the leading pioneer in buyer persona development with a body of work that dates back to over a decade.  Each has started the transformation with the fundamental process of first listening to customers and having a focused pursuit to understand buyer goals to shape customer strategy.  Several senior leaders we worked with embraced buyer persona development as a transformative process versus viewing the effort as a tactical profiling means.  As a result, each built fundamentally sound and focused customer strategies that have withstood the test of time.  Just as John Wooden’s legendary methods of enabling a focused pursuit of a goal has withstood the test of time. 

 

3 Pillars for Aligning B2B Marketing Content with Buyer’s Goals

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

In sports today, there is plenty of talk about parity in teams for such leagues as the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL.  To some sports writers, this has not been a good thing and they long for the return of the dynasty teams to love or hate.  Such teams not only dominated but stood apart in their appeal to both the avid and the average fan.  Creating a national following that rivaled some of the best marketing and advertising prowess dreamed up by Madison Avenue.  The New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, and Chicago Bulls all have had dynasty years which extended their marketing advertising reach far beyond their geographic regions.

Similarly, the world of B2B Marketing and Content Marketing must contend with parity.  Businesses continue to be in receipt of multiple waves of marketing messaging, email marketing, demand generation, pay per click, and many new forms of social networking oriented content.  The stream of messaging and content is surely to rise as marketing automation weaves its way into the fabric of marketing tactics.  The challenge of standing out above the parity that exists in B2B marketing messaging and content will become increasingly difficult.  

How can B2B businesses achieve more efficiency as well as effectiveness in their content marketing initiatives?  An important means of doing so is to understand how and why buyers make buying decisions. Aligning B2B marketing content with this understanding is a critical difference maker in standing apart from the parity that exists in the literally thousands and thousands of messaging that businesses are presented with daily.  There are three pillars by which businesses can achieve alignment in their content marketing:

Pillar One:  Gain Deep Understanding of Buyer Goals

Buying decisions made by B2B businesses are ultimately made with accomplishing goals as the focal point.  In my previous articles Understanding Buyer’s Goal Orientation Key to Understanding Why Buyers Buy and Buyer’s Goal Orientation Make Decision More Than a Matter of Choice, I focused on how a buyer’s goal orientation help determine how buyer’s buy and how it affects decisions.  Content that is tailored to the understanding of your target buyer persona’s goal orientation will have much more impact.  There is a direct correlation to the depth of understanding buyer’s goal orientation to the effectiveness of content marketing.  Companies that are willing to make the needed investment in qualitative and experiential analysis to achieve such understanding will reap the reward of getting above the noise of parity.

Pillar Two: Gain Deep Understanding of How Content is Consumed in the Buying Process

Gaining a deep understanding of how content is consumed and for what purposes during the buying process contributes toward getting beyond parity.  Early and late stages of the buying process may have not only different requirements but also clearly distinguishable goals that a group of buyer personas are attempting to accomplish.  Whether they are informative or evaluative type of requirements and goals, B2B Marketers will need to understand how and when content should be readily accessible and consumed at each stage of the buying process.

Pillar Three: Gain Deep Understanding of How to Design Content Aligned with Goals

Along with parity, there can be surprising uniformity in how content is designed.  Without a deep understanding of your buyer persona’s goals as well as how content is consumed in the buying process, you are left with the proverbial common denominator of touting features and benefits uniformly across the buying process.  The mix of content design aligned with buyer’s goals and their buying processes is becoming critical to offering freshness in content as well as relevancy at the right moment.  Determining the mix of content can no longer be a guessing game.

To rise above parity, B2B marketing can become more relevant to their target buyer personas by gaining a deep understanding of buyer goals and aligning content with these goals.  Translating the uniform understanding of needs and wants into precise understanding of goals during the buying process will give B2B organizations the means of achieving efficiency and effectiveness in their content marketing efforts.  With businesses being inundated with every form of content and messaging imaginable on a daily basis, becoming relevant to a buyer’s goal orientation is one way to get above parity and perhaps create a dynasty of your own.   

 

Buyer’s Goal Orientation Make Decisions More Than a Matter of Choice

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

When we are faced with choices, sometimes they can be gut wrenching.  There are choices we have to make that can be especially personal as well as heart breaking.  History has recorded good choices as well as bad choices throughout time.  Imagine that you are President Truman and you are faced with the choice of using the Atom Bomb to end the war against Japan.  President Truman must have been confronted with many sleepless nights as he wrestled with the fate of such a choice. 

Fortunately, in B2B marketing and sales, we do not have to make such choices on this level or order of magnitude.  Getting a glimpse into how buyers make choices though can make a difference in success or failure.  Gaining insight into how these choices are aligned with a buyer’s goal orientation becomes a marketing and selling imperative for high stakes business model shifts, strategies, and new initiatives.  In a B2C market, understanding persona goals and aligning strategies to help consumers accomplish their goals determines how a product or service is positioned. 

A simple example could be stereo equipment.  The motivations, needs, and want of a good sounding system can be similar for the home theatre enthusiast and the stereo equipment aficionado.  However, each will have a clear set of distinguishing goals as they attempt to make a choice on equipment.  Understanding each set of goals can clearly make a difference in how a product is positioned and where it is placed for distribution.  The home theatre enthusiast may find that Best Buy personnel and carried equipment will help to meet his or her goals whereas the aficionado might require a specialty shop with brands that are not carried by Best Buy to meet his or her goals. 

In the B2B marketing and sales strategy environment, the degree of complexity surrounding buyer’s goal orientation and choices is significantly higher.  The degree to which a B2B entity can analyze and determine buyer’s goal orientation can spell the difference in formulating successful customer strategies around buyer’s choices.  What makes this complex in the B2B marketing space is that saucy mix of three ingredients:

• Identifying the buyer’s individual goals
• Identifying the organizational goals
• Identifying the market goals

And the blended saucy mix is the key.  They are not always clear and take some in-depth qualitative and experiential analysis to arrive at.  The correlation between choices and goal orientation has been established in both academia and in research.  What we are seeing is the application, through a goal-centered buyer persona approach over the last eight years, of gaining insight into buyer’s goal orientation to determine customer strategies related to B2B marketing, content marketing, demand generation, and innovation.

As we learn more about the advent of digital marketing and social media marketing, we will learn more about the impact on buyer’s goal orientation and the means and methods used to accomplish goals.  It is clear though that the status quo with respect to choices will undergo changes.  We can no longer be certain as to how buyers may make choices with such changes afoot and adjustments are made to goals by both individuals and organizations in a B2B context.  Developing internal competency in this area appears to be an important mandate for organizations in 2010 and over the next couple of years. 

 

Understanding Buyer’s Goal Orientation Key to Understanding Why Buyers Buy

Image via Wikipedia

The concept of goals has been around for centuries.  Humans have endeavored to achieve goals for a variety of mundane pursuits to noble purposes.  Here is what Aristotle had to say over 2,000 years ago:

“All men seek a goal—success or happiness.  The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. First, have a definite, clear, practical idea—a goal, an objective. Second, seek the necessary means to achieve your ends—wisdom, money, materials and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.”  - Aristotle

Today, in B2B marketplaces, we are seeing the rise of social media expand at a rate unexpected as we climb out of the financial crisis stupor markets found themselves in the past three years.  Amounting to as perhaps Aristotle might say if he were present today – a new means for people to achieve goals.  With all the chatter about social media, have we lost sight of this important and consistent fact about human behavior and choices?

Understanding buyer’s goal orientation has become even more critical as the means and methods to achieve them expand and diversify.  This is made more difficult for buyer’s articulation of goals is often times not precise or clear.  Here’s why:

• In a business and organization context, the ability to express motivations, needs, and wants are based on current knowledge and experiences and thus much easier to express
• Goals are bound in a future context and require that motivations, needs, and wants be translated into a goal orientation

Distinguishing a set of motivations, needs, and wants from a buyer’s goal orientation can make a significant difference in not only innovation but in aligning customer strategy with buyer goals.  Over the years, businesses have come up with many means and methods to attempt to understand buyer’s current status of motivations, needs, and wants.  Focus groups, online surveys, customer satisfaction questionnaires, win-loss analysis, needs analysis, customer advisory groups, user groups, competitive intelligence, and more to name a few.  All can offer helpful information and insight into how to better meet the needs of customers.

To deeply understand why buyers buy requires a deep understanding of buyer’s goal orientation.  Attaining such a deep understanding is no easy task but the use of qualitative and experiential analysis rooted in anthropological principles offers the best means for this understanding.  Buyer personas - more importantly the buyer persona development process versus buyer persona profiling - are a means for acquiring this understanding of buyer’s goal orientation and serving as a means to help businesses understand why buyers buy.  Enlightened with this deeper understanding, B2B businesses are enabled to develop customer strategies that are aligned with buyer’s goal orientation.

As we see the rise in different means and methods, such as digital and social communities, understanding buyer’s goal orientation not only will become increasingly important but will be increasingly difficult to understand.  The buyer persona development process is a means for conducting sound experiential analysis with buyers that reveal the deep insights into buyer’s goal orientation.   In turn, businesses will be able to make sense of the many new means and methods evolving today and determine how to produce the appropriate mix that best meet their buyer’s goals. 

 

The Pull of the Digital and Social Media Storm

Image by HubSpot via Flickr

The CMO Council Marketing Outlook 2010 Report, published April 19th, points to the digital transformation of marketing.  This annual report serves as a reliable bellwether of trends as indicated by approximately 600 senior marketers surveyed from a cross-section of industries.  Most striking to me is this commentary:

“Globalization of markets and new channels of digital engagement are causing senior corporate marketers to seek new internal skills and capabilities, and re-direct spend towards more inventive and localized go-to-market programs,” notes Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council.  “The transformation of marketing organizations, practices and functions is well underway. This is being driven by the need to engage at an individual level, create more content relevance, and leverage a new world of crowd-sourcing Internet communities, omnipresent connectivity, and pervasive mobile device ownership.”

Granted, there is much being said here.  One thing is clear though.  The transformation of marketing organizations is picking up pace this year.  Thirty-five percent of those surveyed indicated they had plans for transformational initiatives.  Of this 35%, 46% indicated they had a digital marketing makeover project underway.  The investment in digital marketing makeover is consisting of platforms, programs, and people.  Accompanying this makeover is not necessarily additional spend but a re-direct of spend towards digital marketing.  As we have seen this year, companies are being awakened to the fact that the digital and social media storm has some jet stream wind behind it and is all the rage at the moment.  Perplexing to many is how to gauge this so called storm and how to adapt to the aftermath.  This year we’ve seen the advent of social media analytics beginning to surface.  Activity levels are being measured and monitored by analytics software however deriving meaning from the output will be a significant challenge.

The report also indicates that traditional agencies are being threatened as more in-house competency is created as well as a re-direct in spending towards specialists in digital media creation takes hold.  What we will see this year is a rapid makeover of traditional agencies to digital agencies.  I do not think the threat noted in the report is a threat unless the traditional agencies stand pat.  This I doubt will happen with those who have the resources to make a transformation rapidly.

What is interesting to me in this transformation is that we have the pull of a digital and social media storm; an inertia that is mudding the water somewhat.  As the storm of social media rages on, more and more people are responding to it.  We have more and more participants “engaging” in digital activities and communities that are “pulled” in by the storm.  As a result, the new analytics see increasing upticks in activity in social media and digital communities.  What is really going on is hard to say at the moment.  For example, how do you distinguish meaningful from non-meaningful tweets or Facebook page views?

In parallel to the digital marketing makeover is the digital buyer persona makeover.  The buyer persona is undergoing a transformation to a digital buyer persona due in part by the pull of the digital and social media storm and in part by the necessity to adapt to the increasing capabilities digital media offers.  This is creating new means of digital engagements and new patterns of digital buying.  For B2B, it is proving to be both confusing and challenging as B2C methods crossover in significant ways.  These two tracks of transformations under way – the digital marketing and the digital buyer persona makeovers – will most likely result in an unforeseen third plane of engagement that no one can predict - yet.  As is usually the case with a storm that affects markets, there are those who cannot escape the damage of the storm and those who survive them.   

History does have that uncanny way of repeating itself.  Throughout the recent modern times, we’ve seen markets and companies get caught up in a storm.  Most recently, the run up of the Internet and eCommerce had a similar pattern and as the dot.com bubble burst proved there are losers and winners.  The winners providing us the platform to reach a purer form of transformation that proves to be enduring.  It is going to be an interesting story over the next few years as we see the storm past - and see who is left standing. 

 

 

3 Not-So-New Social Behaviors of the Digital Buyer Persona

Image by luc legay via Flickr

I was in a mall recently and couldn’t help notice the banners boldly announcing to follow the mall on Facebook and Twitter.  Social communities are ebbing their way into the conscious minds of all buyers in many facets be it consumer or B2B.   I have to admit, I stared at the banner incredulously.  As in – why would I ever want to “follow” the mall?  The lures of coupons were proclaimed.  Another was to find out what was happening at the mall.  In a funny way I began to wonder if anything new was really happening here and the fixation on social communities perhaps making us miss something. 

It prompted me to think of three buyer behaviors that social communities are making more transparent today:

1. Deal checking:  Social communities are becoming another place to check for deals.  I believe this is the type of behavior that companies jumping on the bandwagon are actually encouraging.  Not sure what to really do with social communities but feeling the pressure to do something, coupons are becoming a prevalent part of social communities like Facebook.  They may be in printable form or as simple as come into our location and mention you saw it on Facebook.  Communities like Facebook are becoming another place for consumers and buyers to “check” for deals, discounts, savings, and etc.
2. What’s happening:  I’m sure you’ve seen those sneakered walkers at the mall blazing through laps around the entire mall.  A community among themselves walking past shoppers without a blink of the eye.  On this particular day at the mall there was an arts and craft show going on.  Communities like Facebook are becoming a hub for finding out what is happening at a place of interest.  In the B2B world, there are many conferences I would love to attend.  Although I am missing the opportunity to interact directly with people, social communities and blogging has made it possible to “attend” these conferences virtually.  As people, we generally like to know what is happening and what people are doing.  If I am a “mall blazer”, I just might like to find out when the group of people meet up to start tearing up laps around the mall.
3. What people are saying:  We like to know what people are saying.  We may not think of Amazon as a social community but I think it is.  I was on the site recently to purchase a gift in electronics.  Of course I looked at most of the comments, what people had to say, Amazon’s charts, comparisons, and etc.  Social communities are becoming another source to get a sense of what people are saying.   People search for reasons to “like” or not “like” what they may be considering based on what people are saying.

These behaviors are not-so-new.  Since the early days of the marketplace, people have gone to bargain for deals, find out what is happening in the community, and to hear what people are saying.  These thoughts as I write evoke the memory of my mother who laboriously scoured the newspaper and cut out every available coupon before heading out to go shopping.  And, shopping was an event for us.  We would meet neighbors, talk, go to the bakery for a treat and etc.  Other words to use one of the new descriptors in social media conversations these days – we would “engage” with the community.

What social communities have done for the digital buyer persona is make these behaviors more transparent and accessible.  These behavioral factors in of themselves will not make a complete holistic picture of a digital buyer persona but they will contribute to the understanding that can accompany qualitative and experiential analysis.