Learn How Buyers Make Decisions

In the first slide, the speaker says that there are a number of factors around the buyer persona that may be destructive to a marketing strategy. These destructive factors result in creation of too many buyer personas hence immensely reducing the effectiveness of a marketing strategy. With that, it is very important for the marketer to discover the very thing that makes a certain problem a priority for a buyer. That is the Priority Insight.

            From their problem, the buyer considers certain solutions. The Success Factor Insight guides these solutions. The buyer has expectations about how their company will transform once they enlist a particular solution. The buyers have an expected outcome about the purchase they are considering to make.

            Although the buyer has positive insights about a particular company’s solutions, they also have negative insights about that solution. These are Perceived Barriers. In simple words, they are the factors that might make the buyer not to choose a particular company’s solutions.

            Before the buyer makes a purchase, they go through a process that may be referred to as the Buyer’s Journey. A buyer makes certain progressive considerations before making a purchase. The marketer can discover the buyer’s journey by interviewing the buyers.

            The Decision Criteria is the last process a buyer goes through in their endeavor to find the best solution for their problem. In this process, the buyer evaluates specific factors about a company. In the evaluation, the buyer compares different companies as they try to make a choice.

Summary and discussion

According to the speaker, the buyers are the greatest way for a company to forge the most effective, efficient and a unique marketing strategy. To create such an effective marketing strategy, a good marketer has to go beyond just knowing their target audience. A marketer has to deeply understand why their customers behave in a certain way and why they will make a certain purchase in preference to another.

In the buyer persona example that the speaker gives, the buyer is need of an email marketing solution for a small to medium company. This solution has to be specifically fit to the amount of leads the company is getting. The buyer has a problem with cost too. A company wishing to sell to this buyer must be able to meet a healthy number of the buyer’s needs.