Increase the Quality of Your Leads with Customer Profiles & Buyer Personas

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

In last month’s newsletter, we looked at methods to integrate core brand messages with the core keywords that drive your website’s organic traffic.

Now that your brand messaging is spot on across all your channels, how could you benefit by combining that work with the data from an ideal customer profile or buyer persona?

Buyer Personas vs. Customer Profiles

Technically, an ideal customer profile and a buyer persona are different beasts.

An ideal customer profile is your best description of the type of company that would gain the most benefit from your product or solution. It covers things like company names and types, industries or verticals, company revenues or scale, the number of employees, location, and the titles of the decision-makers at the company.

Buyer personas (often called prospect personas by salespeople) are descriptions of your decision-makers, the people at those companies listed above, who need to be involved in the decision to purchase your product or service. A buyer persona may include demographic information, psychographic data (personality, values, opinions, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles), job key performance metrics (KPIs), and the pain points your product or service will help them to remedy.

In this article, for simplicity's sake, we are going to lump customer profiles and buyer personas together and call it CPBP (which is not as funny or interesting as C3PO, but you get the idea).

Sales and Marketing?

Combining ideal customer profiles–traditionally used by marketing, with prospect personas–traditionally used by salespeople, is also a good idea:

• 76% of content marketers forget sales enablement.*
• 65% of sales reps say they can’t find content to send to prospects.*
• B2B companies’ inability to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies costs 10% or more of revenue per year.*
• Sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals (Marketo)

*From Zoom Information, Inc.

However, creating customer profiles and buyer personas (CPBP) is a lot of work and requires an in-depth understanding of both marketing and sales. Many clients engage The Creative Company because of our 30 years of experience creating profiles and personas and the ability to reduce stress and anxiety while bringing expertise and timely resolution to this process. If you would like assistance in combining your brand messaging with CPBP, we are happy to help.

How about an example or two?

Once your CPBP is complete, we can apply your data in a real-world example.  One common way that leads are gathered is through a campaign with a landing page that includes a lead capture form on your website. With the data gathered in your CPBP, each item on the “best practices” checklist will be improved.

• One primary call to action headline. Use clear, action-oriented words, not vague language such as, “try it out”
• Use language that invokes interest. Examples include: 'are you ready to do x' or 'see how it works'
• Value proposition. Quickly get to the point with direct & compelling phrases
• Use imagery that resonates
• Include social proof/testimonials

In Part 2 of “How Will Creating a Buyer Persona Increase the Quality of Your B2B Leads?”, we will create an actual example of an optimized landing page for a technology service provider who is targeting a CIO or Director of IT buyer persona. Be sure to check back next month!

Does your business need assistance with improving its online presence? Let's connect and set up your free initial consultation to get started.