Buyer Profiling
Who Cares About What?Buyer profiling is an important part of your marketing strategy, this enables you to group buyers with common interests and needs.
Messaging and content is then defined to resonate with these interests and needs – ensuring relevance and value in your communications and content.
Buyer Profiling and the Buying Cycle
For any buyer profile, different messages and content items will be of interest at different stages in the buying cycle.
This may be buyers conducting initial research to better understand the challenges they need to address. Alternatively, they could be seeking a detailed understanding of licensing, to evaluate total cost of ownership. Either way, you need to talk to them in their language at every stage in this journey.
Understanding your buyer profiles and stages in the buying cycle enables you to map existing content to these.
Where content and/or messaging does not exist for specific profiles and stages, this needs to be created to ensure maximum success from your marketing efforts.
Selling to an Audience…
Buyer Dynamics
The more complex the evaluation and purchasing process, the more buying dynamics need to be taken into account. For example, with higher ticket price solutions/services/products, research teams will initially look at you and competitors from multiple angles.
Firstly, you need to help them find what they need quickly. Secondly, you need to help them articulate the value of your offering to decision makers, or other influencers in the buying process. Consequently, this requires a deep understanding of the buying cycle in your market.
Marketing messages to different buyers, or individuals in the buying process, need work together. High-level messaging needs to be available to the final decision makers in the process, but this needs to correlate with supporting messages used to target others in the decision-making process.
Personas, Buyer Journeys, Analytics and AI
Sometimes, it can be helpful to construct example personas to better understand the needs and likely interactions of your audience with your marketing. Persona-based marketing is simply another way of talking about ensuring your marketing activity has a sufficient degree of personalisation to address individuals’ needs and interests.
From personas, or broader buyer profiles, we can then define journeys we would expect the audience to take when interacting with existing or planned marketing content.
Defining journeys, which split and even loop, based on decision points, can prove complex. However, this ultimately helps shape marketing activities such as marketing automation programmes and signposting to improve website conversion rates.
Initial grouping and development of marketing messaging, content and engagement plans is only the first step in successful marketing to your audience.
Additionally, engagement with all touchpoints should be carefully analysed and used to refine what constitutes effective marketing messaging and content at each point, for each buyer profile. This can be a massive analytical undertaking.
Thankfully, solutions are emerging to assist in processing the vast range of data generated through all audience interactions with touchpoints. We expect AI solutions to transform our understanding of such data in years to come.
People Buy from People
An important aspect of buyer profiling is to understand the challenges, aspirations and general mind-state of the target audience. Subsequently, this enables more accurate use of emotive language to elevate the value of the brand and offering for each audience.
This aspect of buyer profiling should involve the sales team, who have direct contact with your audience across all buyer profiles. As a result, they should be able to validate and enrich statements made through this exercise.
The value of this is two-way, as ultimately many of these considerations and messages will support sales conversations when leads are passed through marketing and into sales.
It’s a Balancing Act
The more granular your buyer profiling, the bigger the range of messaging and content you will need to produce. Striking the optimal balance, creating the most appropriate groupings and attributing the correct priority to each requires a good understanding of your market.
Get In Touch
Glastonbury, Somerset, UK
+44 747 666 2948
marc@glastonbury-marketing.co.uk