Solving for Poorly Defined Audience Personas
Solving for Poorly Defined Audience Personas
Symptoms of Poorly Defined Audience Personas:
• Poor Conversion Rates
• Difficulty Defining the Buyer’s Journey
• Content that is All About Your Product or Services
Understanding the Problem
Weak personas are absolutely the most common problem facing marketing teams in the United States. Many marketers are so busy doing marketing that they forget whom they are marketing to.
As marketers, we understand everything we do is about getting the “right message to the right person at the right time.” We know that buyers go through numerous stages before they’re ready for a sales conversation, and we have to align our message touchpoints to these stages or we will lose their attention entirely. However, it is distressingly common that marketers are so far removed from our buyers that we forget what is important to them, and then our message doesn’t land.
The Solution: Define and Document Your Personas
Regardless of your industry, there are a few tried-and-true practices that always form the foundation of our work. One of these is persona building.
Getting to know any new person means asking questions. Defining buyer priorities is all about asking the right questions and prompting insight into the “why” behind buying decisions. I strongly recommend documenting buyer personas using open-ended questions.
My personal favorite two-part prompt is, “What problem does this person have, and how do we help solve it?”
If you need help, Tactical Marketing’s Buyer Persona Worksheet is a free resource available to anyone looking to improve their Persona Development!
Download the Persona Worksheet below.
If you’re looking for more quick fixes to big problems like these, check out other articles like this:
Lack of Processes
Unpredictable Lead Gen
Put the method on paper: the Tactical Marketing Workbook.
The full methodology converted into working sessions - eight phases of fill-in worksheets, exit checklists, and one-week action steps. Print it, work one vertical at a time, and turn the framework into decisions your team has actually made.
Philip Easley-Bosley is the founder of Tactical Marketing and a thirty-year expert marketing consultant. His path to founding the firm ran through sales and marketing leadership, years inside Act-On Software consulting with thousands of clients as Lead Marketing Automation Strategist, and a consistent priority on training and team building that a linear career could not have produced. He sets strategy, owns the architectural calls on every engagement, and writes about marketing operations, automation, and the discipline of building systems that hold up on Monday morning.