Solving for Poorly Defined Audience Personas

Symptoms of Poorly Defined Audience Personas:

• Poor Conversion Rates
• Difficulty Defining the Buyer’s Journey
• Content that is All About Your Product or Services

Understanding the Problem

Weak personas are absolutely the most common problem facing marketing teams in the United States. Many marketers are so busy doing marketing that they forget whom they are marketing to.

As marketers, we understand everything we do is about getting the “right message to the right person at the right time.” We know that buyers go through numerous stages before they’re ready for a sales conversation, and we have to align our message touchpoints to these stages or we will lose their attention entirely. However, it is distressingly common that marketers are so far removed from our buyers that we forget what is important to them, and then our message doesn’t land.

The Solution: Define and Document Your Personas

Regardless of your industry, there are a few tried-and-true practices that always form the foundation of our work. One of these is persona building.

Getting to know any new person means asking questions. Defining buyer priorities is all about asking the right questions and prompting insight into the “why” behind buying decisions. I strongly recommend documenting buyer personas using open-ended questions.

My personal favorite two-part prompt is, “What problem does this person have, and how do we help solve it?”

If you need help, Tactical Marketing’s Buyer Persona Worksheet is a free resource available to anyone looking to improve their Persona Development!
Download the Persona Worksheet below.

If you’re looking for more quick fixes to big problems like these, check out other articles like this:
Lack of Processes
Unpredictable Lead Gen

Correcting Your Lack of Processes

Symptoms of Lacking Processes:

• Last-Minute Campaign Changes
• Overwhelming Manual Activity
• Missed Deadlines

Understanding the Problem

Marketing has the highest employee turnover rate of any industry at an astounding 17%. This means that marketing programs are often a hodgepodge of ideas, rebuilt and reprioritized over-and-over by the different people who have come and gone. As new marketers rush in, they take on lead generation, email newsletters, marketing automation, and social media – with the expectation that all of these practices will continue without a hitch. Marketers dive into a defined set of activities and change the micro-strategy; often, there is not enough time to reinvent the entire marketing process. Couple that with the fact that most marketers have experience with hands-on tactical initiatives and not systematic, strategic planning.

Just knowing where to begin can be incredibly frustrating.

The Solution: Find The Right Processes

Take what you need! When it comes to strategy, don’t reinvent the wheel; look around, and find a good resource. Marketing processes have been rebuilt by everyone under the sun.

If you need a strategy, I guarantee it’s already out there.

Companies like Tactical live and breathe strategic planning. We develop standard methodologies and approaches to form playbooks that work for thousands each year. Whether it’s our playbook or another company you’re a fan of, don’t be ashamed of taking inspiration from the resources you see and using them as a jumping-off point.

For example, we make our standard strategic playbook available to anyone for free download on our website. We intentionally designed it to be a jumpstart for strategic marketing planning so you can get back to executing campaigns.

Download the Marketing Process Flowchart below.

If you’re looking for more quick fixes to big problems like these, check out other articles like this:
Poorly Defined Personas
Unpredictable Lead Gen

Fixing Unpredictable Lead Gen

Symptoms of Unpredictable Lead Gen:

• No Automated Lead Nurture
• Unknown Conversion Metrics
• Undefined Marketing Funnel Stages

Understanding the Problem

No matter how your performance as a marketer is measured, funnel stage conversion rates are part of your process. Many marketers mistake their goal metric as the only metric to track (e.g., leads generated per quarter). This oversight creates a very reactive environment: if leads seem down, send more emails, and buy more ads; if leads are up, assume everything is just fine.

The Solution: Standardize and Monitor Your Reporting KPIs

When marketing is executed proactively, campaign results become predictable, and any deviation from the standard becomes evidence of success for failure.

If your marketing has unpredictable success, then you probably aren’t using the right metrics to standardize and optimize your campaigns.

I recommend explicitly identifying funnel stages and benchmarking your current conversion rates. With these metrics, you will be able to clearly define where your process gap is. Additionally, you can predict the audience size needed to hit your target revenue or predict how much revenue you could generate from your current audience

This type of reporting is commonly referred to as a lead waterfall and generally requires some effort to develop. If you’re looking to jumpstart this at your company, we have, of course, built an easy to use lead waterfall template in Excel that you can download and use!

Download the Lead Waterfall Template

If you’re looking for more quick fixes to big problems like these, check out other articles like this:
Lack of Processes
Poorly Defined Personas