Buyer Insights

buyer-insight

Buyer Persona and Positioning Research

Buyer Persona Research

How well do you know your buyers? Do you know why they chose your business over a competitor? What are they using to research their options? Who else had to approve their choice to buy from you? What alternatives did they consider instead of your solution? Who or which other companies influenced their decision to consider you? The list goes on and on...

What a Buyer Persona IS

The profile created by these questions and answers is called a buyer personas. The better you know your buyer persona, their concerns, their motives, and their decision criteria, the easier it is to create the content that will attract new prospects, educate them and build the trust that causes them to choose to engage with you in your sales process.

What a Buyer Persona is NOT

What these personas are NOT a smattering of demographic information about your prospects. While demographics are part of the puzzle, the most important information is based around the decision making process, from the moment they become aware of a problem, through researching solutions, to ultimately making a decision.

How we conduct persona research

We interview a portfolio of your current customers, lost prospects, and more to put together a comprehensive Persona Document that covers howwhen, and why they ultimately make a purchase decision.

Of course, to get true insight into how your potential buyers act, we also need to research how they evaluate and engage with your brand specifically to learn how do prospects position your company, product, or service?

 

Company Positioning Research

Why buyer personas aren't "enough"

Positioning research is complementary to our Buyer Persona work. Where Buyer Personas tell us what matters to your prospects and how they make decisions, positioning research tells us where you fit in that process.

Your brand position is what your prospects and competitors think of and say about your company, products and services.

Relying on buyer personas alone leaves blind spots in your marketing that make even the best content unbelievable and ineffective.

An example

Let's say your buyer persona wants to purchase from a global solutions provider. However, what you don’t know, because you’re only relying on by our persona research, is that your prospects and competitors position you as a boutique, niche provider. Your claims about being a global solutions provider are ignored when Google returns your blog posts in search results because the claim is not consistent with your position. Google records the fact that your prospect did not click on the search result with your content in it, not because the content was not of good quality, but because your position did not align with your claim, making it harder for you to gain top search position in the future.

Using your positioning research, you might instead have created a top-of-the-funnel case study for this particular persona where a current customer video describes how you solved a global supply chain problem for them, thereby bridging the gap between your perceived position as a niche provider and the need uncovered from your buyer persona research.

 

Creating an Informed Content Strategy

Until you can align your position with your buyer insights using the correct content at the correct stage of your buyer’s journey, you won’t be generating sales qualified leads on your website effectively.

At Innovative Marketing Resources we create comprehensive content marketing strategies for our clients based on the buyer insight we learn from evaluating your personas and brand position. Using both these research tools, our services team can identify the right content, delivered at the right time, to produce the results you’re looking for.