In a previous post, Digital 101 for B2B Marketers, I talked about how to get started in digital B2B marketing. The basics of marketing is understanding your customer and how you can deliver your key message in a way that will get their attention. This is even more true of digital communications, because the customer can decide to abandon the activity before they receive any message, if it isn’t tailored to their goals and behavior. So this leads us to our next best practice which is conducting user research.
You can start user research by looking at secondary research. For example, this eMarketer report provides a good place to start in terms of understanding some of the general behavior of online B2B activity. We know that B2B research begins online with search engines.
And we have some sense of what B2B professionals look for when conducting research.
We also begin to get an understanding of the types of sites they visit and which tactics they use online, all valuable information in developing a digital strategy.
In addition to using secondary research, you may want to think about conducting some primary research with your specific audience to ensure that you completely understand unique behavior trends among those customers that will impact your success.
Ultimately, your goal is to be able to tell a story about the people that you are trying to convert and to develop a persona. A persona is an archetype developed from an understanding of your target audience’s behavior, interests, attitudes, work environments, and concerns.
These archetypes should serve as a benchmark to remind the marketing team who will be using the digital content and the user experience that is mostly likely to resonate with them. The team may think that creating a new widget for the site is really cool, but if you don’t think that your archetype will, then scrap it.
So once you have a key understanding of Joe, how do you use it? Stay tuned for more best practices…
I’m fascinated by the diverse range of views and opinions. Who’s your “go to” guy?
Hey, cool post. My brother and I were discussing this the other day, and he had some weird ideas! lol Are you going to extend this? I would love to learn more :)
Thanks for your feedback. Yes, our plan is to cover a series of topics including Usability, Search Engine Optimization, Writing for the Web, Web Measurement, and Social Media. Any specific topics you’d be interested in reading more about?
[...] make sense of the data available, it is likely that personas are developed. Profiles that are really a mash-up of generalisations and stereotypes, laced with our persistent [...]