1. Brand Positioning
When you think of healthy fast food, what brand comes to mind? For many, it's Subway. Or what about a relaxing night in at nepal telemarketing database home? Netflix. Looking to refresh your living room? IKEA.
These brands have earned a reputation as the go-to solution for specific pain points thanks to their successful positioning. Nail this for your brand, and your marketing team can more easily:
Write compelling copy and content that makes them feel seen and understood.
Design user experiences tailored to specific aspirations and challenges.
Craft relatable campaigns to stress buyers' pain points.
Strong brand positioning relies on understanding exactly who you're positioning for. That's where buyer personas come in. This clarity on positioning needs will guide you in designing a customer journey.
hubspot’s brand positioning framework
2. Customer Journey
Marketers work extremely hard (and spend millions of dollars) trying to convince customers to think of their brand a certain way. These efforts sometimes stick: like Subway telling us to “eat fresh” in the early 2000s.
But no matter how catchy a campaign is, marketing will always stand in the shadow of the lived user experience. Like Subway patrons learning there‘s so much sugar in Subway’s bread that it isn't legally classified as bread in some countries.
Brands can't dictate what consumers will think of them. Instead, marketers have to follow the journey that the customer takes when forming an opinion of them, and optimize these touchpoints for success.
3. Cross-Functional Alignment
I‘ve seen marketing teams pour hours of work into their buyer personas only to have other departments completely ignore the finished product. What causes this? Sometimes, the wider team doesn’t see the value. Other times, the marketing team worked in a silo and missed the mark.
Alignment — specifically, early alignment — between teams pays off. Sales, marketing, product, and customer success teams should collaborate to create personas that are both accurate and useful for all parties.
HubSpot's buyer persona templates are designed for cross-team use and have marketing messaging built directly into a select number of templates:
Free HubSpot persona templates
Convinced about the impact? Let me share my recipe for building in-depth personas.
How to Create Buyer Personas: An Actionable Playbook
Here's what I do to keep generalizations and assumptions at the gate and create nuanced buyer personas based on hands-on market research.
1. Collect quantitative and qualitative data about customers.
The first step is the most critical link in the chain: collecting customer data. A generic snapshot of your target customers isn't enough to move the needle on sales. Instead of assuming details about your target buyers, use analytics tools and conduct qualitative research to dig deeper into customer behavior.
A combination of quantitative and qualitative data will explain what buyers want and why they want something. Ben Pines, the Director of Content at Wordtune, shares why this holistic approach is so essential: