Effective Product Marketing Rule #11

This is the eleventh in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #11: Align marketing campaigns by buyer persona, not just products or services.

The other day, my husband showed me a direct-mail postcard he’d received. It was from a Boston-area boat club, and it was advertising some special - so many free gallons of gas - if you signed up to moor your powerboat at a local boat club. This was obvious part of a broad, general mailing to anyone within shouting distance of the Charles River in Boston. That would include us.

Maybe there’s no way to discern who’s a boat owner and who’s not, but even on the products and services level, this campaign falls short. Other than an occasional, "let’s take the boat tour" impulse when we’re on vacation - last taken roughly five years ago in Dingle, Ireland -  and the occasional trip to see my sister on the Cape (she’s in Wellfleet, so it’s really much easier to take the boat to Provincetown than it is to drive), we just aren’t boat people.

But, given the neighborhood we live in, they also fell down on persona. Big time.

It doesn’t take much of a demographer to figure out that Zip Code 2008 is not powerboat territory. This is white-wine-sipping-brie-eating-Obama-voting-elite-snobbing-NPR-listening-tree-hugging Beacon Hill. If someone in this neighborhood has a boat, I’d guess that 80-90% of the time, that boat’s going to be a sailboat, not a "stinkpot."

The cost of the mailer may have been so low that it didn’t make financial sense to really scrub their list and try to find those who might better match up with the criteria they were looking for.

But it’s really worth thinking about who the target for your marketing campaign is before you start that campaign.

Sending the CFO an flyer that details the bits, bytes, bells and whistles of software is going to end up in the recycle box in a nano-second.

An ad in a tech magazine that’s all about the cost-savings and ROI of said software is probably not going to prick the attention of the techie audience (ROI? Who cares? What’s it written in?)

Sometimes, of course, we just don’t have the budget to come up with completely distinctive campaigns for each buyer persona. If that’s the case, it’s okay to send a "mixed-message" - but make it clear through headers, taglines, or call-outs, that you’ve got something for everybody.

But it’s really best to have something tailored to the specific audience.

Ad in the Wall Street Journal? This is the ROI and business results story that you want the CEO, CFO, and business line execs to hear.

Ad in EE Times? Then you get to talk about the clockspeed of the new whiz-bang processor.

But you also have to be honest with yourself about who is actually going to be involved in the buying decision, and at what point.

Time and again, I’ve heard sales and marketing debate the importance of selling in at the C-level. This has typically been in companies where the products are priced above market and/or the sales folks would rather call on Mr./Ms. Big than some dweeb down in the trenches and get him/her to help move the cause along. (Of course, 99% of the time you’d have been better off starting with the dweebs, and providing them with the ammunition they need to sell internally once they fall in love with your product, rather than bothering the top guns who really don’t want to be bothered.)

Face the facts: not every product or service is "strategic". While it may give you some point of pride to have friends tell you they saw your ad in the WSJ, if it makes more sense to put the ad in EE Times, that’s where the ad should go. Even if the big macher you meet at the cocktail party will never tell you, "I saw something the other day in The Journal about Widget, Incorporated."

The bottom line: money spent on marketing campaigns that don’t address the persona is very likely to be money that’s just swirling down the drain.

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