Do buyer personas help?

There have been some interesting conversations out there about buyer personas.  There's some real sense in this - after all, buyers are people, and thinking about the person at the other end of the wire is a great way to focus communications.  It's also a great way to get different players in a marketing team reading off the same script.

There are dangers as well, of course.  The problem is that personas can be taken too literally, and can lead us to know more about our prospects than we actually do.  Deterministic models tend to limit our our view of reality.  Perhaps we should establish a rule that says that personas become stale after, say, 30 days, and need to be refreshed.  This would force team members to spend more time creating personas based on their experiences with real people. 

Unleashing the real power of the web

The interactive web has given us two things.  On one hand it has made it much cheaper to start conversations.  On the other, it has made it possible to listen to customers in a way we never could before.

Looking at the web today, it's clear that many are talking more but few are listening.  This is no surprise - when a transforming technology comes along, people initially try to use it to support existing processes.  The term for this in the business re-engineering days was "paving cowpaths".

Yes, marketing will always involve crafting compelling messages.  But the unprecedented ability we now have to find and join buyer conversations should cause people to take a more balanced approach.  The sales profession learned, over a half a century ago, that listening, not talking, was what separated the top performers from the rest of the pack.  It's time for the marketing profession to follow suit.

Selling to Professional Buyers

There's something fundamentally different about selling to professional buyers compared with selling to personal buyers.  When an employee is buying on behalf of a company, it's reasonable for the company to expect that person won't be easily misled by  persuasive tactics.  B2B marketing should reflect this by giving the buyer the information that he or she is expected to gather in the purchasing process.  By becoming better information providers, we can build better relationships by helping the buyer do a better job. 

Content Strategy - Step 4 - Telling your Story (continued)

Now that you've got your interview done, transcribe it in its entirety.  Do this manually, at least on the first go-around.  This will force you to listen carefully to exactly what your customer said, and to start your own thought process on how to tell the story.

Having completed that, you should conduct an internal interview to get some comments from somebody who can give your company's viewpoint on the story.  Your source(s) should be either your senior executives, or employees who have worked directly with your customer.  Use this internal interview to fill in some of the factual gaps that your customer interview may have left out.  In the customer interview, you may not have picked up details on the preparation your company did, or a comparison between this and other engagements.  It's also great if your internal person can serve as a cheerleader for your customer, pointing out how well they moved forward.  People love to read about success of peers they can identify with.

Next, select a good sample to use as a model, even if you're a professional writer.  (Remember, you aren't going to be using one of those marketing case study templates.) A good place to look is in magazines and publications that your customers are frequenting.  The main idea is to put your story in a format that you know is suitable for your customers and people like them.  I find that in many cases, a news story format is most familiar to readers, and therefore most effective.

Here are some tips for writing your story:

• Start with a lead that captures the essence of the story in a single paragraph.  Your opening sentence often determines whether your reader will go further.

• In your narrative, tell the story about how the customer identified and solved a problem using your company's products / services.

• Use your customer's language to describe what was done.  This is what readers will understand.

• Include direct quotes in your story - this helps give the story a conversational feel, and makes readers feel that they are "there".  Use quotes like illustrations to emphasize points you have made in the narrative.

• Make sure that your customer is the hero, and your company is the supporting cast. This is what readers will identify with.

• When possible, show results, such as financial savings, quality improvements, better morale, etc. 

• End your story with a conclusion that points to the future.  Real improvement is an ongoing process, and nobody "lives happily ever after".  Leave your audience hoping for a sequel.

In our next post on this subject, we'll offer some tips on publication.

Content Strategy - Step 3 - Telling the Story

For reasons given in the last post, good customer stories are absolutely central to a content strategy.  This might sound like bad news if you've struggled with consent around this, but if you go about this properly, you will have a much better chance of getting the cooperation you need.

The problem is, customers have seen the phony, template-bound approach that marketers often use for "case studies", and they generally don't want any part of it.  They don't want to support any implied conclusion that your solution saved them zillions of dollars when this is not true, and they don't want to look like they were hopeless until you came along. 

How you position the interview is critical.  Point out that your source will be free to describe the situation in their own way, and will be allowed to see the story and make corrections before it is published.  If necessary, offer to let the customer tell the story off the record - a story without a name is far better than none at all, and in some industries, this is normal.

Record a 30-minute interview with the customer either in person or over the phone.  Questions should be open in nature.  Here are some examples:

-How did you first get started with X?
-What were the problems that you wanted to solve?
-Who was involved in your organization?
-What were some of your early uses of X?
-When did people first see positive results from X?
-What were some of the biggest challenges?  How did you overcome them?
-Were there any surprises?
-What measurable results have you achieved?
-What results to you hope for in the next two years?
-What advice would you offer companies like yours looking for a similar solution?

Note that these questions are very open.  We don't push them for ROI stats, kudos, or anything like that, but simply ask the customer to tell their story from their perspective.  If the numbers are good, or if they love your product or service, they will volunteer it, and it will sound way more natural than it would have if you had pushed them.  Trust me.

A final word on the interview process.  If you do it well, your customer will enjoy the process, and will thank you for allowing them to share their story.  Authentic interviews build relationships.

That's enough for one post.  In my next, I'll give you some tips for writing up your story.

Content Strategy - Step 2 - Finding your Voice

Finding your voice is really about learning how you fit into the conversation.  If you've followed  conversations in your customer communities for a while, you've seen that the language they use is different from what your company is used to.  Their main issues tend to be centered around their specific vertical - if they are a healthcare provider, for example, they will be talking healthcare problems.

Learning "customer speak" in this way is essential to establishing a voice that resonates in your customer community.  Publishing authentic customer success stories is the fastest way to establish this voice, and should be your number one content priority.

Such stories, however, are frequently mishandled.  Marketing writers try to put words in their customers' mouths, looking for ROI confirmation and other metrics.  As well, content is often force-fed into highly predictable (and boring) case study templates.  No wonder customers hesitate when asked to participate in a case study.

Let your customers tell the story their way!  Find out how they recognized a problem, how they selected your company, what they hoped to achieve, and what they have achieved so far.  If you use their terminology and their framing of the issues, your readers, who are also their peers, will become engaged in the content.

Marketers will ask, "okay, it's great to tell nice stories, but where do we fit in and how do we benefit?"

Good questions. The key here is that authentic customer success stories give you the opportunity to position your company in the manner that is most attractive to your customers - in a supporting role.  This is a little tough to swallow if you have visions of building a blockbuster image, but in the B2B world, how you helped other companies succeed is what your audience wants to see. 

Your voice, therefore, is all about how you support success.  Your readers should see you as promoter / coach / enabler who acknowledges that his or her customers are the real heroes.  What your audience will see is they too can become heroes if they work with you.

The customer success story becomes the main focus of your narrative.  From this base, you can create other materials such as news items, blog posts, tweets, brochures, etc.  If these address the same issues that are in the customer conversation, you can be sure that your voice will resonate.

Content Strategy - Step 1 - Finding the Conversation

Finding the conversation is the first step of your content strategy for one simple reason - people are already talking about the problems that your products or services can solve.  The quickest path to revenue is getting into that conversation.

The best way to find the conversation is to ask your customers where to look.  Make appointments with a few, and ask them which information sources they use to help them solve the most important problems in their job.  Their list may include traditional media, blogs, forums, industry associations, company websites, newsletters, and yes, even books.  After talking to, say, 5 customers, you'll see some patterns, and start to get a sense of where the conversations are happening.

Warning:  you may not like what you hear!  Customers may frequent information sources that you don't agree with, and you may also find your competitors' websites to be great sources of information.  So put your pride on the shelf and listen to what is really resonating for them.

Next, you want to spend some time reading through these information sources.  You'll find some of the discussions totally irrelevant, and some quite close to the problems you can solve.  Learn about how people frame the problems that your company is able to solve, and the language people use to describe them.

Once you're starting to get a sense of the conversation, you can start to research the web for additional venues.  Using keywords gleaned through your early research, search through Twitter, Squidoo, Technorati, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, as well as the major trade publications in your field.  If there are free newsletters out there, subscribe to them.  By reading up on a regular basis, you'll start to get a strong idea about the conversations your customers have before they seek out products such as yours.  The very conversations you want to be part of.

Next up:  Finding your Voice