You’ve heard the question, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Here’s an updated version of the question: “If you write a great piece of cybersecurity content, but you don’t target the right personas, does it make any impact?”
Great content only deserves that title when it meets the needs of the right audience. To understand the needs of your audience, you need excellent buyer personas representative of your customers. Through extensive, continuous research about your target personas, you’ll gain deeper insights about your market and what content they’ll appreciate.
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The Role of Personas in Marketing
Your product or service caters to a distinct cyber audience. That’s where buyer personas come in, representing your ideal customer. Knowledge about your ideal customer comes from your audience and market research.
When it comes to cybersecurity marketing, several roles might make sense for you to target:
- Chief Information Security Officers (CISO), the leaders of IT departments.
- IT managers, who oversee IT teams.
- IT support managers, who supervise the teams that solve tech problems.
- IT support staff, who are the front lines of tech support.
- Developers and DevOps team members, who deal with the day-to-day programming.
- Small business owners, who aren’t always technical, but still need to protect their data against cyber threats.
Why You Need Better Buyer Personas
There are two compelling reasons to improve your customer personas:
- Your content isn’t reaching the right people.
- You’ve moved into a new market, and you’re not sure who to target.
Creating stronger personas helps you reach the right people so that your content not only resonates but converts leads into buyers. Your buyer personas inform your content strategy. If you don’t know whom you’re targeting, your marketing message will fall flat.
Buyer Personas and the Purchasing Journey
Many marketers think the purchasing journey is linear. The potential buyer first becomes aware of the problem, then they become interested in a solution. Next, they evaluate various solutions. Once they settle on a solution, they begin the purchasing process. These marketers also assume the person who’s going through the sales funnel is also the person who will approve the purchase.
However, savvy marketers understand today’s purchasing journey takes a different route. The person who’s interested in your product or service might not be the person who approves the purchase. And the person who approves the purchase might not control the purse strings.
That’s why it’s crucial to create content for a variety of personas in the purchasing journey. You might not have to work hard to convince the end user, but you still have to persuade the person who approves purchases and the person who’s in charge of money (and they might not be the same person).
How to Create Better Buyer Personas
Today’s buying journey is more complicated, but creating better, more accurate buyer personas doesn’t have to be. Here’s what goes into the persona creation process:
- Research.
- Execution.
- Iteration.
Research
Your first step to creating better buyer personas is to understand who your buyers are. Talking to customers directly is the best way to do this. They know what their problems are, and they can tell you exactly what’s keeping them awake at night.
Let’s say you don’t have the opportunity to speak directly to your customers. Your next best bet is to talk to your sales and customer service teams. These people interact with leads and customers daily. They can tell you what challenges your customers face.
It’s also a good idea to look at what your competition is doing. Who are they targeting? How do they understand your buyer’s pain points? Researching your competition is an opportunity to either learn how you can improve or to see what gaps exist on their end.
Execution
Once you understand who your buyers are, the next step is creating those personas.
Your first step is figuring out what that person’s title is. Let’s say your product or service is geared towards software developers. Looking at demographics, you could draw some conclusions about your target audience, such as their gender, their education, and their salary. These details give you a sense of who you’re trying to reach. It can be helpful to come up with a nickname for your personas, so when your content team is writing for a specific target, they can easily keep track of who’s who. In the case of the software developer, maybe you want to call that person Dan the Developer.
Understanding Dan’s psychographics—his lifestyle, his values, his interests—also helps you create a stronger persona. The more you understand your prospect, the better content you can create.
You also need to know what pain points Dan faces. Customer research gives you insights into Dan’s daily challenges. It will also help you to know what tools Dan uses, so you can explain how your product or service fits in with his workflows.
Next, craft the messaging for your persona. Dan the Developer might respond better to certain terms or phrases. He’ll definitely want to see your brand demonstrate its expertise in software development, so show him that you know what’s going on in the field.
When you’re crafting messaging, it’s equally important to know which messaging to avoid. You don’t want to include messaging that centers on fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). While it’s easy to prey on people’s anxieties about cybersecurity, that type of messaging is manipulative. Your customers will feel like they don’t have much of a choice except to do business with you, which can lead to resentment later on.
Instead of centering your messaging on FUD, show you’re a trusted advisor. Identify your buyer persona’s problems, but don’t scare them into choosing you. Demonstrate how the problem can be managed, and how your solution or service empowers that individual.
Iteration
Your buyer personas aren’t static—they need to evolve as the market changes. Moreover, if you shift or expand to a new market segment, or into a new market entirely, your buyer personas will also change.
How can you effectively modify your buyer personas? Go back to the beginning and consult with your target customers in the new market. Can’t talk to customers? Reach out to your sales and customer service teams. Look at your competitors in this new space to understand your audience and what gaps exist.
Another part of iteration is testing. It might take a bit of experimentation to figure out which messaging is the most effective. Remember that every data point tells you something, and you can take that knowledge to craft even more effective personas.
Creating Better Personas for Marketing Success
Your buyer personas are foundational to creating excellent marketing materials. Targeting the right customers allows you to focus your resources for greater efficiency and effectiveness. By continuing to refine your personas as the market shifts, you can reach leads that are the perfect fit for your product.
