Welcome Back to the Marketing Strategy Show. In this episode Stacie Chalmers (founder of the Inbound Marketing Company – based in Australia, one of the original inbound marketing and Hubspot partner agencies) to discuss the importance of understanding your buyers and where they stand along their buyers journey.
- One of the key elements of your marketing plan is understanding who your buyers are, knowing who you are selling to and where they are in their buyers journey. A buyer persona can help fill in some of these blank spaces.
- Therefore, having multiple Buyers Personas are critical to better help you understand your buyers, this is also why it is important to unpack your customers to understand what they want
Stacie Chalmers Background
- Stacie has been in marketing for over 20 years
- Has more than 10 years’ experience in Inbound Marketing
- While working at Hubspot Stacie learnt how the internet is changing in sales and marketing and was really the birth of inbound marketing
- The old marketing model used to be when people see an add they would go and check out a product & then buy it
- There’s a video called ZOMT by google which explains this concept really well
- To stand out with so much content on the internet you really need to understand your customer
- People are now 2/3 of the way through their buying journey before they contact the company or even see a sales representative
- People in general will do loads of research before contacting a company including reading blogs, attending webinars, listening to podcasts, reading e-books or talking to people online
- You need to understand not only what’s important to the buyer but also where they are in the buyers journey
- A comprehensive description of someone who is likely to buy from them (commonly known as a Buyers Persona)
Some key things you will need to understand are;
- Why are they going to buy?
- What’s important to them?
- What are their common pain points?
Two of the best places online where one can get buyers Personas is Hubspot and the Buyer Persona Institute
Early questions to ask when creating a Buyer Persona
- Start with what is the trigger event that started them searching for a solution
- An example of a trigger event could be a business who is an exporter and the realised to manage their logistics they need a third-party management system. The trigger event in this case is the business wanting to grow and export is their way of growth
- What do they want to achieve? An example of this could be a shortlist of vendors or solutions. This is sometimes known as the success factors
- Following the success factors you need to look at the perceived barriers. This is essentially asking the question; what are the reasons people don’t buy from us
After looking at the perceived barriers in a buyer persona you need to look at the decision criteria, which is the question “ what is the information potential buyers are asking for in order to make a decision about purchasing your product or service?”
Once we have all this information for a potential buyer you need to break it down into a buyers journey which consists of the three stages of;
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
At the Inbound Marketing Company, they further break down each stage of the buyer’s journey and look at what are the most important one or two things that the buyer is looking for at that stage;
- What are their trusted resources and who is the influence
- What sales and marketing assets are needed for these stages.
- The inbound Marketing Company regularly surveys both people who have gone through the sales process and made a purchase as well as people who have gone through the sales process and not made a purchase as if you are only getting information from buyers you are missing out on information from the customers who didn’t make a purchase which could help you in the future convert more prospects into dedicated clients
- A major reason as to why talking to customers before, during and after purchasing is vital is to understand what keywords they are using while searching for your product or service
- This is very important as if you are just using words as a marketer you could be using industry insider words or words that are industry jargon, it just won’t resonate with the people who are likely to purchase your product or service.
- A great resource for anyone struggling to wrap their heads around buyer personas, check out this free e-book from the inbound marketing company.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the Marketing Strategy Show, don’t forget to check out Stacie Chalmers on any of her social channels (Twitter @staciechalmers
or on Linkedin; https://www.linkedin.com/in/staciechalmers/?ppe=1 )
Resources
- Hubspot
- Buyer Personas Institute
- Stacie Chalmers Linkedin
- Stacie Chalmers Facebook
- Stacie Chalmers Twitter
- Buyer Persona e-Book
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