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Most buyer personas aren’t very good

The team at Audiense is in the business of helping their customers understand their audience, so they know how impactful well-developed buyer personas can be. The problem? Most buyer personas aren’t very good.

According to Carlos, many businesses target their marketing efforts to an Ideal Customer Profile, rather than an actual one. This prevents businesses from connecting with the people they need to reach: those who can get value from their products and services today.

“In today’s world, people create buyer personas, but then don’t use them,” said Carlos. “That’s because they don’t find they’re getting enough value from them– they’re not actionable enough.”

A comprehensive process and a true partnership

Best Buyer Persona offers a comprehensive process for creating buyer personas. This includes a four-pronged approach to gathering data. There is also a focus on creating personas based on jobs-to-be-done, rather than biased-centric personas based on gender, age, and race.

When Audiense partnered with Best Buyer Persona, the team immediately saw the power of the approach. Best Buyer Persona’s process went far beyond standard market research, as the team spoke with 20+ Audiense customers to get a true sense of who they are, what they want, and what value they get from Audiense. They also ran a 12 question survey, receiving 51 responses from Audiense customers.

“The team at Best Buyer Persona spoke with 21 of our customers,” said Carlos. “This was incredibly useful: it helped us better understand our customers, develop personas, and understand what other personas might be out there.”

Not only that, but Best Buyer Persona was easy to work with. They came into the partnership with a standardized process but a flexible mindset. The team at Audiense felt that Best Buyer Persona could not only create buyer personas, but could also develop strategies based on their findings.

“The relationship went above and beyond what I had initially expected, which is why we’re continuing to work with Best Buyer Persona,” said Carlos. “Best Buyer Persona is excelling: they’re a true partner who is flexible, adaptable, and committed to the growth of Audiense.”

Results

A set of buyer personas in use across the business

Thanks to the partnership with Best Buyer Persona, Audiense now has well-developed buyer personas, based on the jobs-to-be-done framework, that can be used in their marketing and sales efforts.

“Thanks to the work of Best Buyer Persona, we can develop a content marketing plan, attach a sales enablement plan, and attach a value plan for how to get value out of this audience.” –Carlos Serra, COO & Corporate Development Director, Audiense

Insight into who customers really are

One of Carlos’s biggest gripes is that most companies market only to an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), rather than who the customers actually are. ICPs have their place, but targeting this persona alone neglects the rest of the market. Oftentimes, it leaves out a whole slew of people who would get value from your products.

By partnering with Best Buyer Persona, the team at Audiense was able to understand who their customers really are. Best Buyer Persona’s research uncovered motivation and buying triggers, pain points, as well as responsibilities, relationships, and their customer’s tech stack.

Buyer personas that can be used across the business

Carlos and his team are incredibly excited to use their new buyer personas across the business. Once the personas were created, numerous teams wanted to see the results so they could tailor their roadmap accordingly. Sales, marketing, product, and engineering teams all gained value from a better understanding of Audiense’s personas.

“Best Buyer Persona’s in-depth interviews with our customers helped us identify the current customer profile,” said Carlos.

“More importantly, having that buyer persona then translated into a methodology that we can apply across the business.“Now we can develop a content marketing plan, attach a sales enablement plan, and attach a value plan for how to get value out of this audience,” said Carlos.

Ability to better target marketing efforts

With buyer personas in hand, Audiense can better target their sales and marketing efforts. Carlos and Best Buyer Persona are now working together on a number of campaigns tailored to these personas.

The discovery of new opportunities

Best Buyer Persona’s process did much more than create buyer personas. It also led to new discoveries and opportunities. “The work that Best Buyer Persona did resulted in a lot of collateral damage: those customer conversations led us to identify six potential customer case studies,” said Carlos.

Having buyer personas also helped Audiense build better engagement with stakeholders and board advisors because they had something concrete to point to in terms of customer development and marketing efforts.

Objectives

When Catchpoint, a unified platform for monitoring digital experiences, acquired WebPageTest in 2020, the team wanted to better understand WebPageTest’s users. After all, visitors of all kinds could visit webpagetest.org, enter their URLs, and get an idea of how their website was performing.

The site was seeing a ton of traffic and the WebPageTest team had recently begun offering a paid model– an API option where WebPageTest could be seamlessly integrated into a developer’s workflow for a fee.

But to ensure the premium product was widely understood and accepted, the team wanted a better understanding of WebPageTest’s users. How was WebPageTest getting integrated into workflows? Whose workflows? Who else was using WebPageTest in the same team or company? And out of that group, who was most likely to take advantage of the premium offering?

Jeena James, EVP & General Manager at WebPageTest, turned to Best Buyer Persona for help. The BBP team jumped in to understand the goals of the WebPageTest acquisition, strategically interviewed its users, and developed a series of user personas that could help Catchpoint better market WebPageTest and its premium offering.

“The best part about Best Buyer Persona is that they never go radio silent. Throughout the process of working together, they came back and checked in with insights on what was working well and what wasn’t. They will try to make your life easier and be as efficient as possible.” -Jeena James, EVP & General Manager, WebPageTest (Catchpoint)

Challenge

A multitude of users – but who are they?

WebPageTest had a unique situation problem: tons of visitors running millions of tests per getting value from the product. They knew it was helping all their users but didn’t know which teams/roles, beyond what was shared by their users on social platforms or support channels. Any visitor– from a front-end developer building the webpages to someone creating content for an e-commerce site to a team building a new SaaS product– could visit WebPageTest and get an idea of how their website was performing.

This model had worked well for years, but as the team continued to build and offer enhanced and premium offerings to WebPageTest users, they needed a better understanding of who the users were, why they turned to WebPageTest, and how the tool fits into their workflow. This understanding would not only help the team market the premium offerings but would also help inform them on what to build in the future.

The team had some understanding of their users but wanted an objective third party to do some digging and provide a clear picture of who was using the product and what jobs they most commonly used it for.

“We understood what our users were doing at a macro-level: where they were coming from and what sites they were testing. But we didn’t have a good idea of how users were integrating the tool into their daily workflow. We had assumptions, but we needed to understand how the product was used at a micro-level.” Jeena James, EVP & General Manager, WebPageTest (Catchpoint)

Solution

A partnership with Best Buyer Persona to better understand users

Jeena had worked with BBP in a previous role and was impressed with what she saw. In particular, she saw how the team’s ability to dig in to ask the right questions about how a product gets used, which resulted in the uncovering of valuable insights.

So, when WebPageTest released its premium offering and wanted a better understanding of user behavior, Jeena called on the BBP team. They decided to work together on a Buyer Persona Strategy with the aim of creating a set of personas based on how users were getting value from WebPageTest.

“When I met Adrienne, I saw how well she could grasp what the platform was trying to do, the problems it was solving, and why it provided value to the customer. She was able to distill the information she collected into clear, crisp stories that the rest of the organization could understand.” -Jeena James, EVP & General Manager, WebPageTest (Catchpoint)

The BBP team interviewed 20 WebPageTest users across different industries and work experiences, sat down with key stakeholders (such as the Catchpoint CEO, WebPageTest’s founder, and the director of developer experience engineering to name a few), combed through prior survey results, and conducted a new survey of hundreds of developers to gain a better understanding of WebPageTest users.

Results

A set of user personas to propel marketing, sales, and product development

Thanks to the partnership with BBP, WebPageTest now has well-developed user personas, based on the jobs-to-be-done framework, that can be used in their marketing and sales efforts. They are also able to build on top of this learning and keep it updated as the product and the offerings evolve.

A synthesized overview of users through the lens of jobs-to-be-done

BBP was able to create user personas through the lens of jobs-to-be-done. That is, BBP, synthesized insights from customer research into a digestible format that could be shared throughout the organization. These insights could then be used by multiple teams for sales, marketing, and product development efforts.

A better understanding of users who are likely to opt for premium services

For many years, WebPageTest was a free service, offered to any visitor who plugged in a URL. When Catchpoint acquired WebPageTest, they committed to maintaining the richness of the open-source platform with all the insights and wanted to provide additional, feature-rich both free and premium offerings so that developers could better integrate WebPageTest into their workflows and take action on improving the web performance. But to make this pivot and successfully market to this audience, the team needed user personas, which BBP provided.

An ongoing user research practice that will support growth

Jeena and the rest of the WebPageTest team don’t see buyer personas as a one-and-done effort. As the company and product grow and change, they’ll need to revisit who is using it and who is seeing value. Thanks to BBP, they have the foundational framework to continue these efforts today and into the future.

This vol was sent to subscribers on June 27th. Want the newsletter sent to your inbox? Sign up here —> Human Behavior <> Marketing

Hey ya’ll, 
I started reading up on burnout last December, and what I learned then has helped me navigate and regulate through–well…2020. So, I thought I’d share this study with you, and hopefully, it’ll help you create balance for the 2nd of half of 2020 and whatever it brings. 

The Study:

Narratives of Burnout and Recovery from an Agency Perspective: A Two-year Longitudinal Study 

The Hypothesis:

Once burnout occurs, how do you recover? And how do you prevent it from happening?

The Method:

The study was conducted in Finland. They studied four people who were currently in rehab for burnout. They did two interviews and a questionnaire over the course of two years.

Rehab is 70 hours- 11 hours of individual therapy and tests and 59 hours of group exercise, nutrition, and group therapy. The scientists wanted to see what aspects led to an individual’s recovery. 

The Results: 

While people usually attribute burnout only to job stress, the study found that it’s most likely from a storm of events that happen all at once; job stress, divorce, sick family member, etc. In one of the participants, burnout seemed to happen overnight. But healing and recovery from burnout is possible when the participants changed parts of their lives.

Human Behavior < > Marketing

While there isn’t a marketing takeaway per se, this study has some good info we can all use. 

Like most conditions, burnout has symptoms. 
1. Exhaustion
In laymen’s terms exhaustion is the kind of tired you don’t recover from after a few nights of good sleep, or a weekend chilling on the couch. Exhaustion becomes a mental state, not just a physical experience. 

2. Cynicism
I wrote about the impact of cynicism in my first newsletter, but it’s important to note that if you find yourself constantly seeing the negative in things, you may be showing signs of burnout. 

3. Reduced Professional Efficacy
This means that your job performance is suffering. You’re making small mistakes or forgetting things you normally wouldn’t forget. 

The four participants found themselves in complete burnout and in rehab because they “couldn’t manage it anymore” and they “weren’t able to cope”.
 Noticing these symptoms in yourself early-on is a good way to help prevent burnout. 

As much as we like to compartmentalize our lives, our bodies, our thoughts- it’s impossible to do so. An unsupportive and stressful work environment will impact your home and personal life and vice versa. 

How Do You Heal From Burnout?

The participants in this study were all a part of a rehabilitation program, but most of them didn’t attribute the rehab to what helped them the most. Everyone’s path to recovery is different, but there are common themes:

1.Rehab 

The rehab served as a time out. A time to reflect on their own needs, and learn how to meet them best. This could be accomplished in multiple ways including therapy, a long vacation, or in 2020, a social media unplug for an extended period of time.

2. Supportive supervisor 

One of the participants had a supervisor and work situation that was very supportive of her recovery. The other three had to quit or retire from their positions. Work is incredibly important to our mental health. If you are in a toxic work environment and trying to recover from burnout, your health must take priority, and you likely won’t heal in that environment. 

3. A mindset shift in how they approach work.

One participant said that before her burnout episode, she would see tasks that didn’t get completed and stacks of papers that needed to be worked on, and she would see failure. She thought she didn’t succeed that day because there were still things left to do. After her burnout, she focused on the things she did accomplish. And was comfortable with letting the work sit there until the next workday. 

I hope this newsletter finds you well. But if you’re not well, and today’s newsletter hit a little too close to home, I hope you can take the steps to heal. As someone who has had to recover from another physical manifestation of burnout (adrenal fatigue) the road to recovery is one that will require you to look at your life differently, but it’s so worth the healing.