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“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”
In fact, life moves so fast that if you haven’t stopped to look at one of the core elements of your marketing strategy in while, your target audience may have shifted from a generation for whom that quote was a key part of their own teen years to a generation whose parents showed them that movie trying to recapture their teenage years. Ouch.
Our colleagues at HubSpot identified market research, including research to identify key information about target markets, as one of the eight key themes in their 2022 Marketing Content and Media Strategy Report.
They say that while only 43 percent of media planner conduct market research to find the most effective channels to reach their target audience, 7 in 10 of those who DO say it is the most effective planning strategy they utilize.
They note that one of the key changes in buyer personas in recent years may be in which channels to target. After all, if you last updated your buyer personas 10 years ago, Instagram was in its infancy and TikTok didn’t even exist. And as we’ve noted in the past, there is a shift underway in which generations make purchase decisions, including in the B2B field, and their content preferences vary:
Millennials cite video as the most important content format when researching B2B purchase decisions, far beyond whitepapers and brochures.
Millennials are more than twice as likely to focus their marketing on social media than baby boomers.
And millennial and Gen Z B2B technology buyers are twice as likely to discover a product by searching online.
Beyond media preferences, of course, there will be other considerations as you update your buyer personas. A quick checklist of characteristics to consider includes:
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Background (job, career path, family)
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Demographics (gender, age, income, location)
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Identifiers (demeanor, communication preferences)
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Industry and company size
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Job title or role (how they spend their day, skills needed, how success is measured and who they report to)
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Where they gather information
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Goals
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Challenges
Learn more about creating and using buyer personas, so you can be sure yours are current and accurate, by downloading these resources:
If it is time for a little more research to be sure you are on track, let’s talk about how JONES can facilitate that research and help craft the personas and messaging that will reach your true target audience today. Schedule a time on my calendar. I’ll be waiting. Bueller? Bueller?
