Why Content Marketing is Like Training to Run a Marathon

May 23, 2013 Leave a Comment
Boston_Marathon_2009_-_Leading_Women

Content Marketing is Like Training to Run a Marathon

Boston_Marathon_2009_-_Leading_Women

Dammit! I’ve always want to to run 26.2 miles, but I never did. But I’ve thought long and hard about what it would take to run those 26.2 miles.  A lot of hard work and preparation. And now that I’m in my 50′s, I suspect the chance for Jeff Ogden to run a marathon has passed me by forever.

But this blog is about marketing and growing revenue in your business – and that takes great content.  But what does it really take to create great content? I thought long and hard about that question.  And I decided that content marketing is like training to run a marathon, including hard work and preparation.

How do your prepare to run a marathon?

Deciding to train for a marathon

The first step in running a marathon is deciding to do it. So to with content marketing. You simply have to make a decision to do it and commit to that decision.

Working Out a Training Regimen

It’s not a good idea to put on a pair of sneakers and start running. You need a plan. Maybe you need to start with short runs and extend it over time. By the same token, content marketing needs a plan. You don’t just start it and hope. A plan will help you lay out what needs to be done. In fact, content marketing really need to start using deep insights on buyers. This is why we highly recommend developing buyer personas before content marketing.

Enter a Race

You can train forever, but until you actually enter a race, you can never gauge your progress.  By the same token, content marketing requires a major commitment too. Maybe you will enter an awards competition for your content. The key is to simply step up.

Running (and finishing) the Race

26.2 miles is a LONG way. It is an arduous and difficult journey.  So is content marketing. You simply don’t give up after Mile 3, and content marketing means you stick it out for a long time. Content marketing is a race that never finishes.

The analogy in this blog post was learned from 5 Ways to Bond with Your Blog’s Audience, from Copyblogger. Check it out.

Find New Customers proudly recommends WPEngine, the fastest WordPress hosting on the planet – which powers this blog. Get a great offer on WPEngine here - including two free months!

What do you think of this analogy? Do you have anything to add or suggest anything I got wrong? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our blog posts on social media.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert who has been trained in buyer personas by The Buyer Persona Institute. He’s also  President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV.

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips from Find New Customers here.

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What Makes REAL Buyer Personas? Beware of Pretenders developing Buyer Personas

May 22, 2013 3 Comments
Buyer PersonaS Master Class

Beware of Pretenders developing Buyer Personas

Recently I was contacted by the new Chief Marketing Officer at a past client of mine. I had proposed developing buyer personas for them.

He wrote to me :

“In terms of Personas, we’ve hired a top agency in NYC  to help us with our Brand and Website and they are using a specific methodology for that endeavor.

Also in terms of Personas, both myself and my associate have worked with and trained with Alan Cooper in the 90′s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Cooper who is considered the founder and author of persona driven solutions and design. “

There’s one huge flaw in this Chief Marketing Officer’s thinking. What he’s describing here are NOT best-practices buyer personas!

First, check out the Wikipedia page of Alan Cooper. You will see he focuses on buyer personas in software design.  Of course, software should be designed for people. But buyer personas are a lot more. REAL buyer personas focus on the needs of salespeople, not software design. Good personas drive marketing messages, lead nurturing, content marketing, sales enablement and more, as well as branding and website design.

Real buyer persona are based on unstructured interviews with won and lost deals, done by trained professionals.  It also involves collect and documenting those findings using best-practices templates and tools.

There are also two critical ingredients in REAL buyer personas:

  1. Core Buyer Personas – demographics, likes, education, etc.
  2. Buying Preferences, especially why they would or would not buy your company’s product or services.

The problem is that many marketing leader turn to companies who do only 1 and fail to do 2. As a result, the information they gain from these incomplete buyer personas lacks real value.

I strongly suggest companies turn to professionals trained in buyer persona best practices, like those who have completed the Buyer Persona Master Class at www.buyerpersona.com. Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers has completed that training.

What do you think? Do you have experience with buyer personas?  We love comments and those who share on social media.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is an award-winning marketing expert and President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers, who is trained in buyer personas by the top firm, the Buyer Persona Institute. He’s also the creator of the very popular TV on the Web show, Marketing Made Simple TV. You can schedule a free one hour marketing review here.

You can also sign up for free bi-weekly market tips from Find New Customers here.

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I’m Your Customer. You Think You Understand Me, but You Don’t!

April 23, 2013 1 Comment
buyer personas

buyer persona execsDo your customers believe you truly understand them? Real Buyer Personas are needed.

If you are doing marketing (and Drucker famously said “all there is is marketing and innovation” – so any decent business has someone in charge of Marketing.  But we can ask a simple question:

If we were to ask your customers how well you know them, what would those customers say?

I’m willing to be most business leaders will claim “Hey we know a lot about our buyers!” And I’m also willing to bet that if I talked to those customers, most would say “No he does not.”

I cannot count the times I sat in a room with sales executives and salespeople and listened to them analyze their buyers. They all miss the point. They think they know their buyers, but they don’t. For instance, What qualms do they have about buying from your company? If I asked those internal people, they would be stumped.

True buyer insights come from phone interviews with buyers conducted by a trained professional, like Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers – trained by an organization like the Buyer Persona Institute.

Buyer personas are journeys of discovery. You are finding things you never expected. You are learning insights that you could never have guessed.

This is why surveys and apps cannot do personas.  Survey’s have pre-defined questions.  Pre-defined questions do not uncover fresh insights.  Neither do apps.

To learn about Buyer Persona services from Find New Customers, click here.

What do you think? We love your comments and appreciate those who share on social media.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is an award-winning BtoB marketing expert who is also trained in Buyer Personas.

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Buyer Personas are the Foundation of Great BtoB Marketing Programs

April 23, 2013 1 Comment
buyer personas in digital marketing

“There’s no aspect of marketing that buyer personas won’t improve” – Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute

Today, BtoB sellers compete around who has the best buyer insights. Companies who have the best buyer insights enjoy a clear competitive advantage today. If you want to get a competitive advantage, you need world class buyer personas.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is trained in Buyer Personas – having completed The Buyer Persona Process Master Class from the Buyer Persona Institute.

BuyerPersonaMasterClassLet me tell you a bit about this training:

See the diagram at right? This is the process covered in the Buyer Persona Master Class. It covers everything from

  • Understanding what personas are and are not
  • How to recruit interviews
  • How to collect and collate information from the interviews
  • Finally documenting your persona interviews in a form to drive all downstream marketing activities.

Please note that buyer personas cover more than simply understanding what makes a buyer tick. You also need to cover why and why not they would buy your company’s products and services.  The Buyer Persona Institute calls this the 5 Rings of Insight(TM), which is a trademark of the Buyer Persona Institute.

Interested in learning more about the Buyer Persona Service from Find New Customers. as well as our free buyer persona grading service? Click on Tell Me More About Buyer Personas.

Jeff Ogden, President of the sales lead generation company Find New Customers is an award-winning btob marketing expert who is trained in buyer persona best practices. Sign up for free bi-weekly marketing tips here.

What do you think? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our posts on social media.

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“I can’t think of any aspect of marketing that doesn’t benefit from deep buyer insights from buyer personas” – Adele Revella, Buyer Persona Institute

March 28, 2013 Leave a Comment
sales lead generation

Adele’s right. Buyer personas are the foundation of great sales lead generation programs, plain and simple. As she says further:

buyer personas

“Buyer personas are about messaging plus targeting, segmentation, prioritizing marketing investments, and sales enablement.”

In short, buyer personas dramatically improve the performance of every aspect of marketing in your company. Can you afford NOT to invest in buyer personas?

What are buyer personas?

“Buyer personas tell you exactly how and why a representative buyer makes the decision to buy the products, services or solutions that you market.

While buyer personas may include other details, the Five Rings of Insight™ are their most overlooked and essential aspect, clarifying decisions for persuasive messaging, content marketing, product or solution launches, campaigns and sales alignment.”  The Buyer Persona Institute

The Five Rings of Insight (property of the Buyer Persona Institute)

  1. Priority Initiatives

    What causes certain buyers to invest in solutions like yours, and what is different about  buyers who are satisfied with the status quo?

  2. Success Factors

    What operational or personal results does your buyer persona expect to achieve by purchasing this solution?

  3. Perceived Barriers

    What concerns cause your buyer to believe that your solution or company is not their best option?

  4. Buying Process

    Sometimes known as the buyer’s journey, this insight reveals details about the steps your buyer takes to evaluate their options and select one.

  5. Decision Criteria

    Which aspects of the competing products, services, solutions or company does your buyer perceive as most critical, and what are their expectations for each?

What business to business company today would not like to see vast improvements in the quality of sales leads going to sales? And what sales leader would not like more quality sales opportunities for her team?

This is why YOUR company needs a best-practices buyer persona program today! Due to the complex nature of personas (unstructured interviews and collection/use of findings) is why we strongly recommend you leave buyer personas to professionals at companies like Find New Customers.

What do you think? We love to read comments here and appreciate those who share on social media. Also, here’s one of the many marketing awards won by Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers.

2011 SLMA award

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Only 36% of BtoB Marketers Believe their Content Marketing is Effective. Lack of Buyer Personas Hurt.

March 25, 2013 2 Comments
buyer personas drive content

Just over one out of three BtoB companies believe their content is effective.  That means almost 2 out of three believe it’s not working. Lack of Buyer Personas hurts badly.

Which begs a simple question.

What are the other 64% doing that is not working?

In a preview of the 2013 Content Marketing Benchmark Report by Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute, only 36% of businesses believed their content marketing is effective.buyer personas

This begs a question. Why is so much content ineffective?  I believe it;s because the sellers lack buyer expertise that come from best-practices buyer personas.

To illustrate, check out this example – a well-known maker of security software. Their internal marketing department created a marketing message. Then the Buyer Persona Institute conducted buyer interviews and the marketing message was restated in buyer terms. (Editor’s note: The Buyer Persona Institute trained the client and their own marketing team did the persona interviews.)

Note the differences.

Marketing Speak

“The world’s largest and most effective Advanced Detection Network to protect the security of your computer and your business.”

Buyer Persona Messaging

“Increase productivity with the security software that won’t slow you down, get in your way, or swallow system resources.”

The key lesson here is the only way to put messaging in buyer terms is to talk to buyers directly. Company employees brainstorming in a conference room need to validate what they come up with – by talking to actual buyers.

“Buyer personas are about messaging plus targeting, segmentation, prioritizing marketing investments, and sales enablement. In fact, I can’t think of any aspect of marketing that doesn’t benefit from deep buyer insights.” Adele Revella, the Buyer Persona Institute

Please note that Find New Customers now offers a free Buyer Persona Grading Service. Just send your existing personas to sales at findnewcustomers.com and we will grade them using our grading sheet and return them with recommendations.

What do you think? We love to read your comments and appreciate those who share our posts on social media.

 

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My experiences trying to finish my Certification in Buyer Personas

March 13, 2013 Leave a Comment
sales lead generation

Buyer Personas make the connectionsIn order to complete my certification in buyer personas, I needed to complete 6 buyer interviews – and have them graded by the Buyer Persona Institute. Once I proved I could do these interviews, I would get my certification badge. I’ve already completed the Buyer Persona Master Class.

I needed a company to volunteer to let me interview their buyers – in both won and lost deals – for free. Sounds kind of like a no-brainer, right? Get great insights and don’t pay a dime. But someone had to say yes first.

<a target=”_blank” href=”http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=407413&u=745436&m=41388&urllink=&afftrack=”><img src=”http://www.shareasale.com/image/41388/WPE_New_250x250.jpg”  border=”0″></a>

I started reaching out to companies with my offer to do free interviews for buyer personas. Some were past clients – small software firms I had done work for. Others were companies I have talked to recently. And for good measure, I threw in one giant services company.  But I certainly did not expect the giant household name to say yes.

To make a long story short, while there were nibbles from the small software firms, the giant services firm said yes first. But there’s also an important lesson here – personal relationships matter a lot – and trump company size.

In this giant services company, I had met their managing director of global marketing at a Christmas party in New York City, organized by a Chief Marketing Officer I know, Margaret Molloy.  Margaret introduced me to Katrina, and I had the pleasure of speaking to her at some length.

It was Katrina I reached out to with the offer of free interviews in buyer personas and she said yes.

Here is my take-away:

It’s not the size of the company or the industry or anything else, but the quality of your relationships that drive desired behaviors.

What do you think? Has anything like this happened to you – where you thought you could not get into a giant company, but personal relationships trump everything? We love comments and those who share on social media.

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Don’t Assume – Ask. How managing employees is like understanding buyers in Buyer Personas

March 12, 2013 Leave a Comment
Buyer Personas make the connections

Don’t Assume – Ask. How understanding employees real motivations teaches us about understanding buyers in Buyer Personas.

As the creator and host of Marketing Made Simple TV, I get lots of books from authors who want to be on my show. One of those books is Rise: 3 Practical Steps for Advancing Your Career, Standing Out as a Leader and Liking Your Life by Patty Azzarello.  But since I am trained in Buyer Personas by the Buyer Persona Institute, I’m always looking for ways to explain the need to ask open-ended questions.

Case in point, one potential buyer persona client wanted to do an email survey, which has closed-ended questions. Those don’t work in good buyer personas. And good buyer personas are a critical part of your content marketing programs in sales lead generation.

On page 112, the author has a section I wish to share on managing employees. But talking to customers is like talking to employees. The author shares a story about how to talk to employees:

What to Worry Aboutbuyer persona execs

Don’t assume you know what to be concerned about. Don’t guess. Ask. Say “As your manager, I’m going to worry about what matters to you. When I worry about you, what should I worry about?” (Notice the open-ended question.)

I guarantee you will be amazed and inspired by what you hear. We tend to think everyone wants more money, promotions, stock options, recognition – you know, the usual stuff. But you hear things you never would have guessed – let alone assumed.

Example: the author was working for a California software company and asked the question of a man who worked for her. He got quiet for a moment, then he said “My father is in Boston and he’s dying. I’m worried I won’t be able to spend time with him.” Her response “You’re now transferred to Boston. Let me know when you are settled.”

Never in a million years would I have known if I hadn’t asked.

The same idea works in buyer insights. We might think we know what buyers think, but unless we ask, we will never really know. At the end of our buyer persona service, I bet you will say “Never in a million years would I have known that was a key issue for our customers.”

Key point: You do not have to learn how to do the interview and collect/collate the data.  Let the expert do it for you.

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How Effective are Your Buyer Personas? Let Find New Customers grade yours for free.

March 11, 2013 3 Comments
buyer personas grades

Find New Customers introduces a free grading service to evaluate buyer personas. Read on to see how you can get your personas graded by the experts.

buyer persona grades

According to Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute, over 1/2 of marketers (56%) have developed buyer personas.But there’s a very important question:

Are these buyer personas effective?

Properly done buyer personas make you a true “buyer expert” and they clarify your sales messaging and marketing programs – making your marketing far more engaging to buyers. But most are not properly done.

“Buyer personas are about messaging plus targeting, segmentation, prioritizing marketing investments, and sales enablement. In fact, I can’t think of any aspect of marketing that doesn’t benefit from deep buyer insights.” Adele Revella, the Buyer Persona Institute

Case in point, most are missing the second part of buyer personas – the Product/Service connection. In addition, few cover the full range of 5 Rings of Insight. (trademark of the Buyer Persona Institute.)

Adele sees three challenges faced by companies doing buyer personas.

  1. Becoming buyer experts is a very new skill … marketers have never learned how to interview buyers (effectively.)
  2. It is a cultural shift to allow marketers to have direct contact with buyers … sales people resist this step.
  3. Many people are doing personas incorrectly, making stuff up without buyer interviews, or with the wrong data collected in buyer interviews, resulting in inferior personas.

My guess is that most of them are not very effective based on these reasons. But how can you learn for sure? Rather than looking for buyer persona examples and doing it yourself, just share it with the experts for a free review.

Have it graded by the experts in buyer personas at Find New Customers, trained via the Buyer Persona Master Class by the Buyer Persona Institute.

Here’s how to get your buyer personas graded:

Send your personas to Jeff Ogden at Find New Customers and within one week you’ll get back graded personas with actionable advice for improving them.  Send your personas to jeff dot ogden at findnewcustomers.com for your grade.

What do you think? We love comments and those who share on social media.

 

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Buyer Insights are the Foundation of Great BtoB Digital Marketing

March 8, 2013 Leave a Comment
buyer personas in digital marketing

“Companies in the future will compete primarily on the quality of their insights on buyers” Jeff Ogden, President of Find New Customers

With 9 out of 10 companies doing content marketing in 2013 (MarketingProfs), and, according to Velocity Partners UK “That otherBuyer Personas in digital marketing one is doing nothing and won’t be bothering anyone,” it’s clear to me that relevance is key. The more relevant your content is for buyers, the more likely they are to digest it fully.

But how do you create content that is truly relevant for buyers today? How do you find the right words and messages to use in your digital marketing programs?

In order to create relevant content, you need true buyer insights. That means you need to interview your buyers, both for won and lost deals, in order to gather insights to drive digital marketing campaigns and sales enablement programs.

The problem is that almost no company on Earth has the in-house skills and experience to gather the kind of insights you truly need.  For instance, there are two parts to a buyer persona (Thanks to the Buyer Persona Institute, who owns the rights to this.)

  1. Core buyer persona
    This is the people information that is typically found in persona development. It stays the same for all buying decisions.
  2. Product, Service or Solution Connection
    This is information specific to a particular buying decision. These insights are not obvious and are a major source of competitive advantage.

But some are tempted to take short-cuts:

Isn’t there an easier way? Can’t we just email out a survey?

Some may be tempted to take a short cut, trying to get insights from focus groups or surveys. Resist this temptation.

  • Surveys are useful when you know what the question is.

  • Focus groups can get people to choose the best of three alternatives.

But these techniques can only confirm the best answer from a list of pre-selected options — validating what you already know.

The buyer persona interview process goes deeper to identify the questions you don’t know. It’s the way to get at non-obvious insights that allow you to redefine the competitive playing field.

 (Adele Revella, The Buyer Persona Institute)

Since most companies lack the in-house skills and experience to do this in-house, we suggest you check out the Buyer Persona Service from Find New Customers.

Check out my About.me profile

Jeff Ogden

Jeff Ogden

B2B Marketing Expert & Professional Writer/Speaker/TV Host

Jeff Ogden is an award-winning B2B marketing expert. as well as a professional speaker, writer and TV show host. I'm a Notre Dame grad with a marketing degree. And I'm the Creator and Host of Marketing Made Simple TV, where i interview the brilliant and famous, like New York Times best-selling author Daniel Pink, Chris Brogan of Human Business Works and Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures. (@guykawaski has over 1.65 million Twitter rollowers!) Thanks to broad syndication, it reaches an audience of over 2 million people each week. I have a wife and three boys and was born and raised in a small town in southern Indiana - Madison, where the entire downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places. Big fan of blues rock too, and of college sports too, especially football. Professional writer, speaker and TV host/producer. Author of 4 white papers, ebooks, etc. B2B Marketing and Sales expert known as the Fearless Competitor. Author of the top rated B2B marketing blog Fearless Competitor. Professional writer (author of four white papers) and speaker (national speaker for the Business Marketing Association). Profiled in the book, Get Back to Work Faster. Dad, husband and sports geek. Proud graduate of the University of Notre Dame - holds degree in marketing from the #1 undergraduate business school in the USA. Born and raised in a small town in Southern Indiana. Lives outside NYC with my wife and three boys. Contact me at jeff dot ogden at findnewcustomers.com or call (516) 495-9350.

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