Buyer Persona is an often-talked-about phrase in digital and online marketing (or inbound marketing, as HubSpot phrased it). But what exactly are buyer personas? You are likely to hear very different versions of this as well. But here in this blog, we'd like to introduce you to a buyer persona methodology that can actually help your business grow.
Buyer Persona is a representation of a group of people (in a business or consumer setting) that exhibit the same kind of behaviour, habits, trust-building and decision-making process.
So first of all, a buyer persona is not one person, or a few people, it's a conceptual representation group of people that have enough similarities that it makes sense to group them during marketing research, strategy and execution, to treat them in the same way to maximize the return on investment from your marketing efforts.
Traditional Buyer Persona Segmentation
In the early days of modern digital and online marketing (inbound marketing) (here I put "early" to differentiate personalized or big-data-driven marketing from the old "if you send emails, you are doing digital marketing" era), buyer personas were typically built by considering people's "hard qualities". A few examples are:
Job titles
Age
Cars they drive
Daily schedule
Hobbies
etc.
There are definitely some good reasons behind this methodology 1.0, namingly if people have the same title, they presumably have the same responsibility, which could result in their similar needs of certain things; if people are of similar ages, there is a chance that they grew up in the same era or even environment, which makes certain messaging more relatable to them, etc..
This methodology 1.0 is not necessarily wrong to segment Buyer Personas, but it's inaccurate, and takes too many unnecessary inductions, rather than trying to hit on the spot quickly.
Introducing The Five Rings Of Buyer Insight
This concept, or Buyer Persona methodology 2.0, was introduced by Adele Revella from the Buyer Persona Institute, and it's not trying to decipher and take advantage of people's "hard qualities", but rather target at people's "soft quality or soft needs", which further evolves your data driven decision making.
The Five Rings Of Buyer Insight (Buyer Persona 2.0) looks at the below
Priority Initiative
Success Factors
Perceived Barriers
Decision Making Criteria
Buyer's Journey
Let me explain what these five rings mean.
Priority Initiative
The reason why your buyer is looking for a different solution
Success Factors
What do your clients see as success? Process, results, or customer service, etc.
Perceived Barriers
Why would your lead potentially say no.
Decision Making Criteria
What standards are your potential buyers using when deciding on vendors
Buyer's Journey
What persuades your buyer? Where are they usually active?
All these factors combined portrait a great framework your marketing campaigns should be referencing. These Five Rings Of Buyer Insight make irrelevant the buyer's age, job titles, etc., but build segmentations based on behavior patterns. As long as a certain group of people exhibit the same behavior, they belong to the same buyer persona, as far as digital or online marketing is concerned, therefore they can be treated equally in your marketing strategy and marketing activities.
Your buyer persona strategy should not only exist in your email marketing or content marketing campaigns, it should be well strategized in your website design and development process, your SEO strategy, etc..
Dali Marketing has developed a methodology to approach different buyer personas with a well calculated marketing funnel strategy. Connect with us to schedule a free consultation.
