Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas

Bulldog Solutions
Defining Your Audience:
A Step-by-Step Guide to
Creating Buyer PersonasBy Ahmed Taleb, Director of Strategic Planning, Bulldog Solutions
www.bulldogsolutions.comAudience_Segment 10/24/2008© 2008 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.Bulldog Solutions Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas
Executive Overview
BtoB marketers are under increasing pressure to provide accountability for their marketing spend. To that end, audience focus is more important than it has ever been. While there are many audience targeting methodologies, creating buyer personas is one of the most common. Personas have received a lot of press recently-both favorable and critical-but until now, their use has been much more prevalent in BtoC organizations. Recently, BtoB marketers have begun to embrace personas, and in that arena, there has been much consternation over the level of effort required to build them and the anticipated return to the organization. Bulldog Solutions' approach to creating buyer personas can help simplify the process and provide more directly actionable insights to help bridge the gap between buying behavior and successful sales engagements.
In this first of a four-part series on strategic planning, I will walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to uncover the key attributes of your most valuable customers-and then how to create buyer personas to help focus your marketing efforts on finding more of them.
www.bulldogsolutions.comAudience_Segment 10/24/2008 © 2008 Bulldog Solutions, Inc.Bulldog Solutions Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas
Table of Contents
Executive Overview..............................................................................................................................................................2Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Buyer Personas....................................................................3What Buyer Personas Are Not: A Definition........................................................................................................................4First Step: Build Acceptance by Choosing the Right Team................................................................................................4Words to the Wise Before You Begin..................................................................................................................................5Getting Started.....................................................................................................................................................................5Who Are Your Future Customers?.......................................................................................................................................5What Makes Your Prospects Tick?......................................................................................................................................6Follow Your Prospects' Eyes and Ears................................................................................................................................9Building an 'Always-On' Engine: Lead Scores....................................................................................................................9

Defining Your Audience: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating
Buyer Personas
Strategic planning is the process by which an organization envisions its future and develops strategies, goals, objectives and action plans to achieve that future. This planning process includes four key steps:
1. Identify your audience2. Develop an effective message3. Choose relevant channels for promotion4. Plan for future lead conversion
Creating an effective and actionable audience segmentation strategy can be a daunting task for many BtoB organizations; however, if they approach this strategy with the right organizational expectations and a systematic process, they will be well on their way to creating a blueprint for internal planning of lead optimization and nurturing programs.
Much has been written about the use of personas to guide the creative design process. In recent years, BtoB marketers have begun adopting the practice of using personas to identify key customer segments and to drive marketing communication strategies to better engage those segments. Despite these early successes... [download for more]