Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers?
Personas are nothing new, but they seem to be popping up in conversation more often (I am curious why, how about you?). David Meerman Scott has been talking about personas for years (a whole lot of reading here!).
I would like to caution you that personas are not just good old-fashion market segmentation. Heck no!
If you purely slice and dice your market by demographics (B2C) or firmograhics (B2B) you will be missing out on a WHOLE lot of customer information that will affect your marketing efforts and not in a positive way.
The other mistake that marketers make is creating personas from the comfort of their cubicles, conference rooms and white boarding sessions. Sorry, but you are not the customer no matter how well you think you know your industry, products or services. To create proper personas you need to get out there and talk to you customers—a lot. Spend time with them, watch how they use your products or services, what issues do they have or even why did they stop being a customer.
The other challenge with creating personas is being open to expanding persona development well beyond the segmentation that you are comfortable with to the inclusion of:
- Psychographics,
- Sociographics and,
- Ethnographics.
In fact, I’d wage a bet that understanding ethnographics (especially in an online community setting) will give you all of the data you need to truly understand your customers and what makes them tick. But it’s going to take elbow grease and audience research.
Persona development (when done properly) is the one tool that organizations have to help them ultimately reach a position of customer-centricity. And what could be better than offering products and services that you know will be purchased by a market eager to have their needs and wants fulfilled?
So why do you think personas are popping back up again? I think it’s, as usual, because of social media and social interactions. A lot of marketers and organizations are struggling to get beyond themselves and their agendas to make sense of it all. But jumping on the persona bandwagon will absolutely NOT help if it’s created from the inside-out.
Is your organization using personas? Have you been successful with it? How has using personas helped your organization achieved tangible results?
The Pragmatic Marketer: The Power of the Persona (A Case Study)
“…the persona must be a well-described, archetype of a user group. You know you have a valid persona identified when you can imagine working alongside him, spending time with her, or encountering him while out shopping. In fact, you’ll know you have your persona nailed when you recognize her at a user function.”
Techno+Marketer: Developing personas for marketing strategy
“Personas remove the tendency to think of yourself as the customer. You have to step back and this gives you the structure to do so.
How people screw them up:
- Personas take time and research to get right.
- This includes some time in the field and meeting face-to-face with the customer.
- People think they know their customer without looking at data.
- Personas are often used up front in the marketing strategy process and don’t carry through the process.
Web Ink Now: How well do you know your buyer personas?
Basing your work on buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing.
Buy truly understanding the market problems that your products and services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, ego-centric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.
[Image: Web Ink Now]
Happy reading!
Even More Goodness! Related Posts:
Tags: Customer-Centric, Market Segmentation, Marketing, Social Media
10 Responses to “Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers?”
The Harte of Marketing by Beth Harte is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.theharteofmarketing.com. [If you have a question about what you can use from this blog, click on the above Creative Commons link to learn more.]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by bViral. bViral said: Harte Marketing – Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers?: Personas are not… http://bit.ly/f8Rwt1 [...]
Hey Beth
I’m so happy to see you write: “personas are not just good old-fashion market segmentation.” Indeed.
The other thing that is a huge difference from typical research is that you must interview your buyer personas to learn from them. What are their problems? It is NOT simply a focus group or a research questionnaire or a bunch of people from your company making stuff up. You need to do the hard work.
David
David Meerman Scott recently posted..11 Real Life Examples of Marketing Success
I do try to build personas into my marketing and PR materials for my clients. The challenge I face, though, is exactly that it takes time and effort… and for a struggling small company, that’s not always fast enough. In those cases I try to help the sales staff understand that I need them to find out what the customers’ problems are, then communicate with me. (I do my own interviews too, but would rather not duplicate effort.)
As for achieving results, I guess we will find out in a few weeks after we start the campaign we have in mind!
Christa M. Miller recently posted..Video as public relations — and education
David, Christa, thanks for making the time to pop by and leave a comment.
David, couldn’t agree more. The focus groups and primary research of yesteryear won’t help with personas building because of their often inherently leading and self-serving nature. That’s why I mentioned the audience research from an online/community perspective. If companies are open to truly listening and learning (way before engaging) to what’s going on online there’s a lot they can learn about their customers. While I think it’s a step in the right direction, it’s still not enough. One-to-one is the way to go.
Christa, I have worked for a lot of small companies, so I understand the time issue. However, I also truly believe that making the time and being patient will pay off in the long run with on-going revenue generation from loyal customers. Also, I am not sure I’d count on sales people. I have found in the past that sales folks are pressured to accomplish one thing–the sale. And from that regard, I haven’t found them able to truly bring back “customer reality” to the marketing team. I don’t mean to lump all sales people together, but from small to large F500 companies, that’s been my experience. That said, sales people will be the first to tell you why they lost the sale.
Beth, great post thanks for the rich resources along with the thinking. We through the term persona around, but your insight into the true meaning of the term is helpful.
Thanks for sharing.
Joe
@SMSJOE
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Joseph Ruiz. Joseph Ruiz said: Great persona insight & information/resources http://is.gd/Vkwl4n cc @ken_rosen @nickkellet @bethharte #usguys [...]
Good info on the persona, Beth. I doubt very many companies actually consider the impact of developing a company persona before tackling the idea. Thanks for the tip to David Meerman. Certainly we want don’t need to waste our time being ineffective with our marketing efforts. I think it would behoove any company using personas to really get out there and see what our customers and clients REALLY want.
Thanks for this post.
[...] 3 – The Harte of Marketing – Post: Saturday Morning Reads: Personas…Do You Really Know Your Customers? [...]
Great article! I suppose as the marketing world changes the actual marketers have to change with it, and I don’t think I am wrong in thinking that they probably haven’t…with the exception of some of the industry leaders with deep pockets and marketing dept. resources to burn.
[...] Saturday Morning Reads: Personas… Do you really know your customers? (theharteofmarketing.com) [...]