Understanding your Buyer Personas is at the heart of great marketing

As we wind to a close and head off to learn more about marketing metrics and the infamous marketing dashboard, I'll take with me a fundamental but vital reminder -- great marketing originates from an understanding of your buyer personas and the problems they face. In good company with the advice of David Meerman Scott in World Wive Rave, by taking time to listen to your customers talk about their problems, articulate their needs, you'll be able to speak in to them in meaningful ways, using their terms, about how your product or service can help them. Your marketing becomes real, valuable and engaging in a way that influences your consumer to make a decision in your favor.
Meerman Scott offers this counsel,which some tenured marketers and big marketing machines seem to forget over time: "Targeting your work to buyer personas prevents you from sitting on your butt in your comfortable office just making stuff up about your products, which is the cause of most ineffective marketing". Now look carefully and fess up - how often have marketing campaigns from your company focused on the product calling out all the technology minutia which separates you from your competitors? Have you ever used jargon laden language and messaging like, "flexible, scalable solutions" or "cutting edge technology"? There's an endless laundry list of industry buzz words and phrases that mean little to customers. Don't fall into that trap!
Take David's challenge to "...speak with members of your buyer personas. Meet them on their own turf, their home office or where they go for fun - and listen to their problems. Then create something interesting and valuable especially for them, and offer it for free on the web". It's not your mothers marketing game anymore. What have you got to lose?
For more on Rules of the Rave, pick up Meerman Scott's World Wide Rave. It's a quick, easy, one sitting read. It may do more for your online marketing success and position you for the new ways of marketing than any other two hours you spend!
Mary