The role of personas in your B2B PR strategy
Personas – an essential element of impactful communications
Effective communication is based on an in-depth understanding of your customer base. You need to know who your customers are and which channels they use to stay informed. You need to uncover their fears, pain points and ambitions in order to engage with them successfully.
To facilitate a better understanding of your customers, we create audience profiles or ‘buyer personas’. These are fictional representations of your customers that help visualise their needs, habits and objectives.
We ask your potential buyers some of the following key questions:
- What is your job title and key responsibilities?
- Where do you go for professional insight? (i.e. LinkedIn, trade media etc)
- What are your concerns? What keeps you awake at night?
- What are the key capabilities or expertise you are looking for in a supplier/service?
This information informs the development of typical personas, that may look like this:
Do I really need personas?
You really do. Without personas, your communication will be impersonal, completely untargeted and therefore ineffective. Personas guide the development of your key messages. They ensure you are targeting the right people with messages that are compelling and tailored to the specific stage of the buying cycle they’re currently at. They reduce waste and promote marketing/sales collaboration.
Personas are integral to campaign planning as they ensure that at every stage of the journey, customers receive an appropriate type of message that nudges them to the next stage of the buying process.
Find out more about Personas in our guide: Your 8-step communication strategy
Flexibility and longevity
Personas should be a living and breathing concept, not a document to be produced and filed away. Individual personas should be updated over time, or new personas created, in line with your evolving business strategy and changing market dynamics.
In our experience, it is particularly important that personas, along with key messages, are socialised within the company to ensure that your marketing, sales and customer service teams internalise them and refer to them to guide their content and messages on a day-to-day basis.
The outcome
On a strategic level, personas are an important tool to ensure your communication is targeted and relevant to your key target audiences. Personas also help align your communication efforts with sales by tailoring messaging to specific stages of the buying process.
On a more tactical level, personas support your campaign planning by helping determine what type of message, content and format should be served throughout the customer journey to achieve maximum commercial results.
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If you’ve found this article valuable, you can get more useful insight here:
Download our essential guide: B2B PR Campaign Planning
READ this article: Communication without purpose is just noise
watch our video: “how to identify your target audience”
At EC-PR we are passionate about B2B communication. We believe your work is amazing and we want to help you tell the world how extraordinary it is. Get in touch.
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