Personas And How They Play Into Automated Marketing And The Sales Funnel

By Joel Black on 06/25/2014

Last week we talked about how to set up your automated marketing campaign and what the first steps are in setting that up.  Then we talked about what is the first question you need to ask yourself to set that up.  My idea was, “What is your sales funnel, and what does it look like”?

Video Transcript:

We went through the process of a Project Management software as a service type solution, and what is their sales process, and what phases do they go through, as an example, we used: Research, Comparison, Demo, and Purchaser Phase and how they walk a user through their sales funnel.

At first, they might not know what solution they are looking for, and once they do find the solution name, they are comparing it to other products on the market.  Then, many times they will do a demo on the product, and then, finally, they may choose to purchase the product.

So, I ended up finally saying, “How does the persona affect this sales funnel”?  When I say persona, there are many things that go into a persona.  What I am looking at here is almost a piece of the persona, almost a role– what is their role in business?  Persona goes quite a bit deeper, but I am going to keep it easy, since we are first getting started in our automated marketing process.  I want to keep it easy so we can keep moving forward.  Let’s, for our purpose, let persona ring well with a role.  How does that affect your sales process or sales funnel?   What happens is different personas or roles within the company will come into your sales funnel at different parts of the funnel.  So, let’s take the case of a small business owner; he does not have a big team, research or purchasing department.   They would need to find their solution on their own; he might give his administrative assistant the task of finding solutions to a project management system. 

So these personas or roles may come into the funnel just as we see them here into one of these phases; it may be the research phase, comparison or free trial or demo or even the purchasing phase.  What if that wasn’t the case.  What if it was the project manager or a member of the project where would they come into the funnel and how would that mix things up.  What if the administrative assistant had found the product and they did some comparisons and now it is time to deliver the product, so the project manager may come into the funnel at the “free trial”; they would have missed most of these earlier messages.  So your message to your project manager if you are starting with an automated marketing would be different than the business owner or administrative assistant that would have come into the top of the funnel.  So the business owner that came into the top of the funnel can be sent messages about how it can increase productivity, how it can lower costs on projects, how to keep track of their profits, which most business owners do not know unless they have a project management system.  Their marketing message, then, will be much different than those you did not start at the top of the funnel.  The project manager may come in at the demo phase and does not care much about costs or comparisons; he just wants to try it out.  So his message may be along the lines of a manager team working easily, work from any location, cloud based, use your time more wisely.  Now, if a team member gets involved, their message will be different, as well.  Their concerns will be more about how can I save more time, how can I manage my projects more efficiently; their message may be entering time, or how to save time.  Their message will be “Make your life much easier- We can help you keep up with your time, so you can spend more time working and seeing progress.”  Even at the bottom of the persona funnel, the CEO or business owner aren’t interested in research, but are interested in the costs or comparisons; they are mainly interested in the bottom line!   If he does move into the funnel, he will be in the purchaser phase, so the information will be about financials and high level of information that a CEO or business owner would be most interested.

So that is just a simple comparison or illustration, to show when we set up our funnel, there will be different personas; where they enter the funnel, will trigger automated marketing messages specifically for each persona.  How do you know who they are?   You need to ask them, as they are coming into the funnel, what role they are in; maybe a dropdown menu to provide the information you will be needing.   From that, it will help you build your persona, and it will help get you started in your automated marketing campaigns.

I hope this helps.

I am Joel Black with Black Bear Design and this is another 2 Minute Tuesday.

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