Jun 8, 2014
In this episode, I’m in The Lab with Adele Revella, founder of the Buyer Persona Institute. She discusses how
business owners can use buyer personas to their advantage, how to
find insights to build your buyer personas when you don’t have a
customer base or existing audience to get information from, and how
to ask the right questions.
Discussion with Adele Revella:
- Building a buyer persona profile just describes the buyer, but
that is often not as useful as understanding what influences the
buyer's decisions. The Buyer Persona Institute focuses personas
around the Five Rings of Buying Insight. 1) Priority Initiatives
2) Success Factors 3) Perceived Barriers 4) Buyer's Journey 5)
Decision Criteria
- If you don't have customers to interview, start by defining a
buyer you want to target, what problem you want to solve for the
buyer, then one option is to hire a recruiter to develop a focus
group of people who are similar to your buyer. You can also attend
events (online or in person) and talk to people there. Offer them
an incentive though.
- Typically talk to approximately 10 people...give or take. You
don't need a large number of people to start to see patterns.
- During the interview process, you want the buyer to tell
their story. "Take me back to the day that you first decided you
needed a new ____." That is the only scripted question, from there
it should be structured but not scripted.
- Business owners and marketers use what they’ve discovered to
refine their content marketing, define their core message, develop
content that helps potential customers through the purchasing
journey and answers their questions.
Blog referenced during the interview: The 5 Marketing Lessons I Learned From My 5 Years
in Sales
The Buyer Persona Institute Masterclass.
This week’s Biz Hack: I’ve talked about
Boomerang for Gmail before, but wanted to delve deeper into some of
the ways business owners can use it.
- Scheduling emails to go out. Why this is
useful…say you’re working on the weekend or late at night and the
timestamp is important to you, you can schedule it to go out during
business hours. I use this is for media pitching to optimize when
my pitch will hit an editor's or reporter's inbox based on slower
news days or when I know their deadlines are or during slower
times. This allows me to schedule the email to hit their inbox at
the optimal time. This works for clients too - time your email when
you know you’re more likely to get a response.
- Recurring messages. Automate recurring
messages. If there’s a task you find yourself doing weekly, monthly
and so on, you can schedule a reminder email to be sent to you or
your team. Good for meeting reminders, status updates, and the list
goes on.
- Boomeranging or returning messages back to your
inbox. If there’s an email you don’t want to deal with
just yet, but it requires action, you can set it to return to your
inbox when you know you’ll have time to tackle it. This gets it out
of your inbox until you’re ready for it. Similarly, if you are
sending a message you can schedule it to return to your inbox to
remind you to follow up based on different triggers such as if the
email is not clicked, not opened, or if there’s no reply. I use
this again for media pitching. If I don't hear back on a pitch it
reminds me to follow up, or if I’ve requested something from a
client and they haven’t sent it to me.
- Notes. One final cool feature is the
ability to add notes to boomerang reminders. Basically you can
append messages to emails you’ve scheduled to return to your
inbox.
Some people are using Boomerang as a marketing automation tool
(great for those who may not have the budget for a marketing
automation platform). Say you have a prospect you are sending an
email to, you can schedule it to hit their inbox at the optimal
time, schedule a series of follow up emails (which you’ll have to
manage based on their response or lack their of), set the message
to return if they don’t respond to remind you to follow up.
Boomerang puts all of your scheduled, rescheduled and recurring
messages in one place so you can manage or cancel them if need be.
All of the features mentioned here are free, but there is a pro
version which unlocks a few other features and removes certain
limits.
Action Item: This week’s action item builds upon
last week’s goal setting. Determine what your One Thing is. "What's
the ONE THING I can do such that by doing it everything else will
be easier or unnecessary?" Check out "The One
Thing".
Quote of the week: It’s simple,
straightforward, and from Seth Godin: “Soon is not as good as
now.”
Next week we’re in The Lab with Tina Garza, owner of AccountingProse. We talk about what entrepreneurs need
to set their bookkeeping and accounting up for success or get it
back on the right track. Information every small business owner can
use. Be sure to tune! Until then, have prosperous week!