Does your company sell great products? Or, if you don’t work in a traditional company, does your organization (church, nonprofit, consulting company, school) offer great services? Well, get over it! Marketing is not only about your products or services! The most important thing to remember as you develop a marketing and PR plan is to put your products and services to the side for just a little while and focus your complete attention on the buyers of your products or services (or those who will donate, subscribe, join, or apply). Devoting attention to buyers and away from products is difficult for many people, but it always pays off in the form of bringing you closer to achieving your goals.

Think Starbucks for a moment. Is the product great? Yeah, I guess the three-dollar cup of coffee I get from Starbucks tastes pretty good. And most marketers, if given the opportunity to market Starbucks, would focus on the coffee itself—the product. But is that really what people are buying at Starbucks, or does Starbucks help solve other buyer problems?

Maybe Starbucks is really selling a place to hang out for a while. Or for that matter, isn’t Starbucks a convenient place for people to meet? (I use Starbucks several times a month as a place to connect with people or conduct interviews.) Or do people use Starbucks for the free wireless Internet connections? Maybe Starbucks saves 10 minutes in your day because you don’t have to grind beans, pour water into a coffeemaker, wait, and clean up later. For some of us, Starbucks just represents a little splurge because, well, we’re worth it.

I’d argue that Starbucks does all those things. Starbucks appeals to many different buyer personas, and it sells lots of things besides just coffee. If you were marketing Starbucks, it would be your job to segment buyers and appeal to them based on their needs, not just talk about coffee.

The approach of thinking about buyers and the problems our organizations solve for them can be difficult for many marketers, since we’ve constantly been told how important a great product or service is to the marketing mix. In fact, standard marketing education still talks about the four Ps of marketing—product, place, price, and promotion—as being the most important things. That’s nonsense. To succeed on the web under the new rules of marketing and PR, you need to consider your organizational goals and then focus on your buyers first. Only when you understand buyers should you begin to create compelling web content to reach them. Yes, marketers often argue with me on this. But I strongly believe that the product or service you sell is secondary when you market your organization on the web.

So I will ask you to put aside your products and services as you begin the task for this chapter: building a marketing and PR plan that follows the new rules. While the most important thing to focus on during this process is buyers, we will do that in the context of your organizational goals. Trust me—this will be like no marketing and PR plan you’ve created before.

What Are Your Organization’s Goals?

Marketing and PR people have a collective difficulty getting our departmental goals in sync with the rest of the company. And our management teams go along with this dysfunction. Think about the goals that most marketers have. They usually take the form of an epic to-do list: “Let’s see; we should do a few trade shows, buy Google AdWords ads, maybe create a new logo, get press clips, produce some T-shirts, increase website traffic, and, oh yeah, generate some leads for the salespeople.” Well, guess what? Those aren’t the goals of your company! I’ve never seen leads or clips or T-shirts on a balance sheet. With typical marketing department goals, we constantly focus on the flare-up du jour and thus focus on the wrong thing. This also gives the marketing profession a bad rap in many companies as a bunch of flaky slackers. No wonder marketing is called the branding police in some organizations and is often the place where failed salespeople end up.

Many marketers and PR people also focus on the wrong measures of success. With websites, people often tell me things like: “We want to have 10,000 unique visitors per month to our site.” And PR measurement is often similarly irrelevant: “We want 10 mentions in the trade press and three national magazine hits each month.” Unless your site makes money through advertising so that raw traffic adds revenue, traffic is the wrong measure. And simple press clips just don’t matter. What matters is leading your site’s visitors and your constituent audiences to where they help you reach your real goals, such as building revenue, soliciting donations, and gaining new members.

This lack of clear goals and real measurement reminds me of seven-year-olds playing soccer. If you’ve ever seen little children on the soccer field, you know that they operate as one huge organism packed together, chasing the ball around the field. On the sidelines are helpful coaches yelling, “Pass!” or “Go to the goal!” Yet as the coaches and parents know, this effort is futile: No matter what the coach says or how many times the kids practice, they still focus on the wrong thing—the ball—instead of the goal.

That’s exactly what we marketers and PR people do. We fill our lists with balls and lose sight of the goal. But do you know what’s even worse? Our coaches (the management teams at our companies) actually encourage us to focus on balls (like sales leads or press clips or website traffic statistics) instead of real organizational goals such as revenue. The VPs and CEOs of companies happily provide incentives based on leads for the marketing department and on clips for the PR team. And the agencies we contract with—advertising and PR agencies—also focus on the wrong measures.

What we need to do is align marketing and PR objectives with those of the organization. For most corporations, the most important goal is profitable revenue growth. In newer companies and those built around emerging technologies, this usually means generating new customers, but in mature businesses, the management team may need to be more focused on keeping the customers that they already have. Nonprofits have the goal of raising money; politicians, to get out the vote (for them); rock bands, to get people to buy CDs, iTunes downloads, and tickets to live shows; and universities, to get student applications and alumni donations.

So your first step is to meet with the leaders of your organization—your management team or your associates in your church or nonprofit or your spouse if you run a small business—and determine your business goals. If you run a nonprofit, school, church, or political campaign, consider your goals for donations, applications, new members, or votes. Write them down in detail. The important things you write down might be “grow revenue in Europe by 20 percent,” “increase new member sign-ups to 100 per month in the fourth quarter,” “generate a million dollars in web donations next quarter,” or “generate five paid speaking engagements in the upcoming year.”

Now that you have the marketing and PR plan focused on the right goals (i.e., those of your organization), the next step is to learn as much as you can about your buyers and to segment them into groups so you can reach them through your web publishing efforts. In the next chapter, we’ll go into depth about how your marketing and PR programs drive sales.

Buyer Personas and Your Organization

Successful online marketing and PR efforts work because they start by identifying one or more buyer personas to target, so you need to make buyer personas a part of your planning process. A buyer persona (which we touched on back in Chapter 3) is essentially a representative of a type of buyer that you have identified as having a specific interest in your organization or product or having a market problem that your product or service solves. Building buyer personas is the first step and probably the single most important thing that you will do in creating your marketing and PR plan.

Consider the market for tricycles. The user of the most common tricycle is a preschool child. Yet a preschooler doesn’t buy the tricycle. The most common buyer personas for children’s tricycles are parents and grandparents. So what problem does the tricycle solve? Well, for parents, it might be that the child has been asking for one and the purchase quiets the child down. Parents also know that the child is growing quickly and will want a two-wheeler with training wheels soon enough, so a basic trike is typically enough in their eyes. However, grandparents buy tricycles to solve the problem of providing an extravagant gift, so they often buy an expensive model to show their love to the child and his or her parents. When you think about tricycles from the perspective of buyer personas, you can see how the marketing might be different for parents and grandparents.

You, too, need to segment buyer personas so you can then develop marketing programs to reach each one. Let’s revisit the college example from Chapter 3 and expand on it. Remember that we identified five different buyer personas for a college website: young alumni who had graduated within the past 10 or 15 years, older alumni, the high school student who is considering college, the parents of the prospective student, and existing customers (current students). That means a well-executed college site might target five distinct buyer personas.

A college might have the marketing and PR goal of generating 500 additional applications for admission from qualified students for the next academic year. Let’s also pretend that the college hopes to raise $5 million in donations from alumni who have never contributed in the past. That’s great! These are real goals that marketers can build programs around.

The Buyer Persona Profile

After identifying their goals, the marketing people at the college should build a buyer persona profile, essentially a kind of biography, for each group they’ll target to achieve those goals. The college might create one buyer persona for prospective students (targeting high school students looking for schools) and another for parents of high school students (who are part of the decision process and often pay the bills). If the school targets a specific type of applicant, say, student athletes, the marketers might build a specific buyer persona profile for the high school student who participates in varsity sports. To effectively target the alumni for donations, the school might decide to build a buyer persona for younger alumni, perhaps those who have graduated within the past 10 years.

For each buyer persona profile, we want to know as much as we can about this group of people. What are their goals and aspirations? What are their problems? What media do they rely on for answers to problems? How can we reach them? We want to know, in detail, the things that are important for each buyer persona. What words and phrases do the buyers use? What sorts of images and multimedia appeal to each? Are short and snappy sentences better than long, verbose ones? I encourage you to write these things down based on your understanding of each buyer persona. You should also read the publications and websites that your buyers read to gain an understanding of the way they think. For example, college marketing people should read the U.S. News & World Report issue that ranks America’s best colleges as well as the guidebooks that prospective students read. Reading what your buyer personas read will get you thinking like them. By doing some basic research on your buyers, you can learn a great deal, and your marketing will be much more effective.

The best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people. The marketing person at our hypothetical college must interview people who fit the personas the school identified. The college marketing people might learn a great deal if they turned the traditional in-person college admissions interview around by asking prospective students questions such as the following: When did you first start researching schools? Who influenced your research? How did you learn about this school? How many schools are you applying to? What websites do you read or subscribe to?

Once you know this firsthand information, you should subscribe to, read, and listen to the media that influence your target buyer. When you read what your buyers read, pay attention to the exact words and phrases that are used. If students frequent Facebook or other social networking sites, so should you, and you should pay attention to the lingo students use. By triangulating the information gathered directly from several dozen prospective students plus information from the media that these students pay attention to, you easily build a buyer persona for a high school student ready to apply to a college like yours.

“A buyer persona profile is a short biography of the typical customer, not just a job description but a person description,” says Adele Revella,¹ who has been using buyer personas to market technology products for more than 20 years. Revella is the author of Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into Your Customer’s Expectations, Align Your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business, which is a new release in my New Rules of Social Media books series. “The buyer persona profile gives you a chance to truly empathize with target buyers, to step out of your role as someone who wants to promote a product and see, through your buyers’ eyes, the circumstances that drive their decision process. The buyer persona profile includes information on the typical buyer’s background, daily activities, and current solutions for their problems. The more experience you have in your market, the more obvious the personas become.”

Though it may sound a bit wacky, I think you should go so far as to name your persona. You might even cut out a representative photo from a magazine to help you visualize him or her. This should be an internal name only that helps you and your colleagues to develop sympathy with and a deep understanding of the real people to whom you market. Rather than a nameless, faceless prospect, your buyer persona will come to life.

For example, a buyer persona for a male high school student who is a varsity athlete and whom you want to target might be named Sam the Athlete, and his persona might read something like this: “Sam the Athlete began thinking about colleges and the upcoming application process way back when he was a freshman in high school. His coach and parents recognized his athletic talent and suggested that it will help him get into a good college or even secure a scholarship. Sam knows that he’s good, but not good enough to play on a Division 1 school team. Sam first started poking around on college websites as a freshman and enjoyed checking out the athletic pages for the colleges in his home state and some nearby ones. He even attended some of these colleges’ games when he could. Sam has good grades, but he is not at the top of his class because his sports commitments mean he can’t study as much as his peers do. He has close friends and likes to hang out with them on weekends, but he is not heavily into the party scene and avoids alcohol and drugs. Sam frequents Facebook, updates his Facebook at least once a week, and has a group of online friends that he frequently instant messages with on Snapchat. He is hip to online nuance, language, and etiquette. Sam also reads Sports Illustrated. Now that he is a junior, he knows it is time to get serious about college applications, and he doesn’t really know where to start. But to learn, he’s now paying more attention to the application pages than the athletic pages on college websites.”

Okay, so you’re nodding your head and agreeing with this buyer persona profiling thing. “But,” you ask, “how many buyer personas do I need?” You might want to think about your buyer personas based on what factors differentiate them. How can you slice the demographics? For example, some organizations will have a different profile for buyers in North America versus Europe. Or maybe your company sells to buyers both in the automobile industry and in the government sector, and those buyers are different. The important thing is that you will use this buyer persona information to create specific marketing and PR programs to reach each buyer persona, and therefore you need to have the segmentation in fine enough detail that when they encounter your web content, your buyers will say, “Yes, that’s me. This organization understands me and my problems and will therefore have products that fit my needs.”

Marketers and PR pros are often amazed at the transformation of their materials and programs as a result of buyer persona profiling. “When you really know how your buyers think and what matters to them, you eliminate the agony of guessing about what to say or where and how to communicate with buyers,” says Revella. “Marketers tell me that they don’t have time to build buyer personas, but these same people are wasting countless hours in meetings debating about whether the message is right. And of course, they’re wasting budgets building programs and tools that don’t resonate with anyone. It’s just so much easier and more effective to listen before you talk.”

How Beko Develops Products Global Consumers Are Eager to Buy

Let’s step back and look at how buyer persona research is used to develop products that people want to buy. That’s the first step in effective marketing. Then, when the resulting product is brought to market, those same buyer insights are used to create compelling web content to educate and inform consumers.

Arcelik, based in Turkey, is one of the largest white goods (refrigerator, washer/dryer, dishwasher) manufacturers in the world. The company sells white goods and other electronics in more than 100 countries under many brand names. The Beko line is the best known around the world.

People from Beko conduct buyer persona research in many of the countries the company sells in and modifies product features based on what the researchers learn from consumers. The key here is that Beko staff develop buyer personas using actual input from interviews. Unlike most companies, which dream up product features in a conference room at headquarters, Beko taps the marketplace to gather intelligence first.

With clothes dryers, Beko marketing people learned through discussions with Chinese consumers that the traditional approach of drying clothing in the sun is an important aspect of Chinese culture. In some parts of China, people believe that clothing is part of an individual’s soul. After washing, the clothing must be exposed to sunlight in order to bring the soul back. Thus, Beko realized it might be too much of a leap for consumers to go from hanging clothes outside in sunlight to drying them indoors with a machine.

Seems like an insurmountable problem, doesn’t it? Not for Beko! The company developed a dryer that includes a setting to stop the cycle after clothes are about halfway dry. The consumer then hangs the slightly damp clothing outside in the sun to finish the process. These dryers are selling very well in China.

Another insight led to product development in the Beko refrigerator line sold in China. Because rice is a staple of the Chinese diet, rice storage is important for Chinese families. It turns out that rice is best stored at low humidity and at about 10 degrees Celsius. But this is not a good setting for storing most fresh foods. In this case, Beko product engineers created a three-door fridge that has the usual freezer and refrigerator compartments as well as a new compartment for rice storage.

With both the fridge and the dryer, the buyer persona insights are also used to market the product. The actual words and phrases used by Chinese consumers to describe the way they dry clothing and store rice can be used in product descriptions.

At a recent IFA Fair in Berlin, Germany, the world’s leading trade show for consumer electronics and home appliances, the Beko refrigerator won a coveted innovation award. But you simply can’t make such products up in your conference room. The only way to learn about customer needs in a global marketplace is to spend time speaking with buyers in the countries where you plan to sell.

That’s also the only way to tap insights from buyers to create web and social media content that appeals to consumers in your markets.

So whether you’re a product developer or a marketer, buyer persona research will give you insights to drive success.

Reaching Senior Executives

Many people ask me about reaching senior executives via the web. That executives do not use the web as much as other people is a commonly held belief, one that I’ve never bought. Frequently, business-to-business (B2B) marketers use this misperception as an excuse for why they don’t have to focus on building buyer personas and marketing materials for senior executives. Based on anecdotal information from meeting with many of them, I have always argued that executives are online in a big way. However, I’ve never had any solid data to support my hunch until now.

Forbes Insights, in association with Google, released a study called The Rise of the Digital C-Suite: How Executives Locate and Filter Business Information. The findings clearly show that executives consider the web to be their most valuable resource for gathering business information, outstripping at-work contacts, personal networks, trade publications, and so on. In a follow-up study, Video in the C-Suite: Executives Embrace the Non-Text Web, Forbes Insights found that 75 percent of executives surveyed said they watch work-related videos at least weekly, and 65 percent have visited a vendor’s website after watching a video. The social element of online video is strong in the executive suite. More than half of senior executives share videos with colleagues at least weekly and receive work-related videos as often.

“The common perception is that top executives at the largest companies do not use the Internet, but the reality is just the opposite,” says Stuart Feil, editorial director of Forbes Insights. “These findings show that C-level executives are more involved online than their counterparts, and younger generations of executives—those whose work careers have coincided with the growth of the PC and the Internet—are bringing profound organizational change to these companies.”

The Importance of Buyer Personas in Web Marketing

One of the simplest ways to build an effective website or to create great marketing programs using online content is to target the specific buyer personas that you have created. Yet most websites are big brochures that do not offer specific information for different buyers. Think about it—the typical website is one size fits all, with the content organized by the company’s products or services, not by categories corresponding to buyer personas and their associated problems.

The same thing is true about other online marketing programs. Without a focus on the buyer, the typical press release and media relations program are built on what the organization wants to say rather than what the buyer wants to hear. There is a huge difference. Companies that are successful with direct-to-consumer news release strategies write for their buyers. The blogs that are best at reaching an organizational goal are not about companies or products but rather about customers and their problems.

Now that you’ve set quantifiable organizational goals and identified the buyer personas that you want to reach, your job as you develop your marketing and PR plan is to identify the best ways to reach buyers and develop compelling information that you will use in your web marketing programs. If you’ve conducted interviews with buyers and developed a buyer persona profile, then you know the buyer problems that your product or service solves, and you know the media that buyers turn to for answers. Do they go first to a search engine? If so, what words and phrases do they enter? Which blogs, chat rooms, forums, and online news sites do they read? Are they open to audio or video? You need to answer these questions before you continue.

In Your Buyers’ Own Words

Throughout the book, I often refer to the importance of understanding the words and phrases that buyers use. An effective web marketing plan requires an understanding of the ways your buyers speak and the real words and phrases they use. This is important not only for building a positive online relationship with your buyers but also for planning effective search engine marketing strategies. After all, if you are not using the phrases your buyers search on, how can you possibly reach them?

Let’s take a look at the importance of the actual words buyers use, by way of an example. Several years ago, I worked with Shareholder.com to create a web content strategy to reach buyers of the company’s new Whistleblower Hotline product and move those buyers into and through the sales cycle. The Shareholder.com product was developed as an outsourced solution for public companies to comply with Rule 301 (the so-called Whistleblower Hotline provision) of the U.S. Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that was passed in the wake of corporate scandals such as Enron. Most important, we interviewed buyers (such as chief financial officers within publicly traded companies) who were required to comply with the legislation. We also read the publications that our buyers read (such as CFO, Directors Monthly, and the ACC Docket of the Association of Corporate Counsel); we actually downloaded and read the massive Sarbanes-Oxley legislation document itself; and we studied the agendas of the many conferences and events that our buyers attended that discussed the importance of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

As a result of the buyer persona research, we learned the phrases that buyers used when discussing the Sarbanes-Oxley Whistleblower Hotline rule, so the content that we created for the Shareholder.com website included such important phrases as “SEC mandates,” “complete audit trail,” “Sarbanes-Oxley rule 301,” “confidential and anonymous submission,” and “safe and secure employee reporting.” An important component of the website we created (based on our buyer persona research) was thought-leadership-based content, including a webinar called “Whistleblower Hotlines: More Than a Mandate” that featured guest speakers Harvey Pitt (former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) and Lynn Brewer (author of House of Cards: Confessions of an Enron Executive). Because this webinar discusses issues of importance to buyers (not only Shareholder.com products), and the guest speakers are thought leaders that buyers are interested in learning from, 600 people eagerly watched the presentation live.

“The webinar was very important because when we launched the product we were starting from a position with no market share within this product niche,” says Bradley H. Smith, who was director of marketing/communications at Shareholder.com at the time. “Other companies had already entered the market before us. The webinar gave us search engine terms like ‘Harvey Pitt’ and ‘Enron’ and offered a celebrity draw. Search engine placement was important because it created our brand as a leader in Whistleblower Hotline technologies even though we were new to this market. Besides prospective clients, the media found us, which resulted in important press including prominent placement in a Wall Street Journal article called ‘Making It Easier to Complain.’”

Shareholder.com then took the service to the Canadian market, where the legislation was called “Ontario Securities Commission and the Audit Committees Rule of the Canadian Securities Administrators Guidelines Multilateral Instrument 52-110” (quite a mouthful). Smith and his colleagues interviewed buyers in Canada to conduct buyer persona research to determine if there were any differences in the words and phrases used in Canada. There were! Unlike the other U.S. companies attempting to enter the Canadian market for hotline solutions by just using their U.S. marketing materials, Shareholder.com created a separate set of web content for Canadian buyers. In the pages for these buyers were specific phrases that were used by Canadian buyers (but not buyers in the United States), such as “governance hotline,” “conducting a forensic accounting investigation,” and the exact name of the Canadian legislation.

Because the marketers at Shareholder.com had done extensive buyer persona research and had created web content with the words and phrases used by buyers, the Shareholder.com pages were visited frequently and linked to often, and they became highly ranked by the search engines. In fact, Shareholder.com became number one out of 258,000 hits on Google for the phrase “whistleblower hotline.”

As a result of traffic driven from the search engines and great web content for both U.S. and Canadian buyers (such as webinars), the product launch was a success. “In the four months immediately after the webcast, we signed 75 clients,” Smith says. “Furthermore, the webcast archive of the event continued to work for us throughout the year, advancing our brand presence, generating sales leads, and contributing to the strongest Shareholder.com stand-alone product launch ever.”

After I wrote the original version of this story, the Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc., acquired Shareholder.com.

Figuring out the phrases for your market requires that you buckle down and do some research. Although interviewing buyers about their market problems and listening to the words and phrases they use is best, you can also learn a great deal by reading the publications they read. Check out any blogs in your buyers’ marketplace (if you haven’t already), and study the agendas and topic descriptions for the conferences and seminars that your buyers frequent. When you have a list of the phrases that are important to your buyers, use those phrases not only to appeal to them specifically but also to make your pages appear in the search engine results when your buyers search for what you have to offer.

What Do You Want Your Buyers to Believe?

Now that you have identified organizational goals, built one or more buyer personas, and researched the words and phrases your buyers use to talk about and search for your product or service, you should think about what you want each of your buyer personas to believe about your organization. What are the actual words and phrases that you will use for each buyer persona?

In the 2008 election, Barack Obama focused on his buyer personas and identified as crucially important the concept of “change.” Everywhere you saw the Obama campaign, there were nods to this theme: on the podium where the candidate was speaking, on T-shirts and buttons, on posters, and of course on the web. The Obama campaign shrewdly understood that when voters pulled the lever to vote for Obama, they were buying into the idea of the need for change.

The same thing was true with the Donald Trump campaign in 2016. The Trump campaign focused on buyers and clearly articulated a campaign promise to “Make America Great Again.” He established the #MAGA hashtag for social media, especially Twitter.

In both of these cases, voters were choosing an idea, not just a man. The Obama and Trump campaign strategists clearly understood, and articulated, what they wanted their buyer personas to believe that the candidate would bring.

You must do the same thing with your buyer personas. What do you want each group to believe about your organization? What messages will you use to reach them on the web? Remember, the best information is not just about your product. What is each buyer persona really buying from you? Is it great customer service? The safe choice? Luxury? For example, Volvo doesn’t sell just a car; it sells safety.

And don’t forget that different buyer personas buy different things from your organization. Think about Gatorade for a moment. For competitive athletes, Gatorade has been the drink of choice for decades. I found some interesting messages on the Gatorade website,² including: “If you want to win, you’ve got to replace what you lose” and “For some athletes, significant dehydration can occur within the initial 30 minutes of exercise.” These are interesting messages, because they target the buyer persona of the competitive athlete and focus on how Gatorade can help those athletes win.

Now, I’m not an expert on Gatorade’s buyer personas, but it seems to me that it could further refine its buyer personas based on the sports that athletes play or on whether they are professionals or amateurs. If tennis players see themselves as very different from football players, then Gatorade may need to create buyer persona profiles and messages to target both sports separately. Or maybe women athletes make up a different buyer persona for Gatorade than men.

But there’s another buyer persona that I have never seen Gatorade address. I remember back to my early 20s, when I lived in an apartment in New York City and was single and making the rounds in the party circuit and late-night club scene. To be honest, I was partying a little too hard some weeknights, skulking home in the wee hours. I then had to make it down to my Wall Street job by 8 a.m. I discovered that drinking a large bottle of Gatorade on the walk to the subway stop helped me feel a lot better. Now I don’t actually expect Gatorade to develop messages for young professionals in New York who party and drink too much, but that buyer persona certainly has different problems from those that Gatorade solves for athletes. Imagine advertising for this buyer persona: “Last night’s third martini still in your system? Rehydration is not just for athletes. Gatorade.”

I told this Gatorade story to a group of people at a seminar I ran for marketing executives, and a woman told the group that her mother had always served Gatorade to her when she had a cold or the flu. How interesting—another buyer persona for Gatorade: parents who are caring for sick children and who want to make sure they are properly hydrated.

The point is that different buyer personas have different problems for your organization to solve. And there’s no doubt that your online marketing and PR programs will do better if you develop information specifically for each buyer persona, instead of simply relying on a generic site that uses one set of broad messages for everyone.

Developing Content to Reach Buyers

You must now think like a publisher. You should develop an editorial plan to reach your buyers with focused content in the media they prefer. Your first action might be to create a content-rich website with pages organized by buyer persona. This does not mean you need to redesign the entire existing website, nor does it necessitate a change in the site architecture. You can start by just creating some new individual pages, each with specialized content customized for a particular buyer persona, creating appropriate links to these pages, and leaving the rest of the site alone. For example, our hypothetical college might create content for each of the buyer personas it identified. Sam the Athlete (the high school student who is a varsity athlete and a candidate for admission) should have specific content written for him that describes what it is like to be a student athlete at the college and also gives tips for the admission process. The college could include profiles of current student athletes or even a blog by one of the coaches. In addition, appropriate links on the homepage and the admissions pages should be created for Sam. An appropriate homepage link such as “high school athletes start here” or “special information for student athletes” would attract Sam’s attention.

At the same time, the college should develop pages for parents of high school students who are considering applying for admission. The parents have very different problems from those of the students, and the site content designed for parents would deal with things like financial aid and safety on campus.

As you keep your publisher’s hat on, consider what other media your organization can publish on the web to reach the buyers you have identified. A technology company might want to consider a white paper detailing solutions to a known buyer problem. Perhaps you have enough information to create an e-book on a subject that would be of interest to one or more of your buyer personas. You may want to develop a series of a dozen videos focusing on issues that you know your buyer is interested in. Or it might be time to start a blog, a podcast, or a Twitter feed to reach your buyers.

Consider creating an editorial plan for each buyer persona. You might do this in the form of a calendar for the upcoming year that includes website content, an e-book or white paper, a blog, and some news releases. Notice as you build an editorial plan and an editorial calendar for the next year that you’re now focused on creating the compelling content that your buyers are interested in. Unlike the way you might have done it in the past (and the way your competitors are marketing today), you are not just creating a big brochure about your organization. You’re writing for your buyers, not your own ego.

Let’s think for a moment about the real estate business. Most Realtors focus on the property itself. In residential markets, they talk about the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the type of countertops and appliances in the kitchen, and how much land the house sits on. If you’re only talking about product attributes, you’re not marketing to real customer needs effectively.

It’s much more important to focus on your buyer’s attributes than your product’s. Real estate professionals need to step back and understand the people looking for property.

As in many parts of the United States, the countryside around Portland, Maine, has many farmhouses no longer occupied by professional farmers. When the owners of these properties want to sell, the challenge for real estate professionals is to help buyers who aren’t professional farmers find and appreciate these homes. (There just aren’t that many farmers looking to buy.)

That’s where buyer personas come in. Distinct buyer personas relevant to this situation might include the following: newly married couples who want to raise a family in a rural environment; professionals from urban areas seeking a simpler way of life; professionals who live within driving distance of Maine, perhaps in nearby Boston, and want to buy a weekend retreat; people who want a vacation home but can’t afford a place on the beach; and people who grew up in a rural area and dream of returning to that life, perhaps becoming hobbyist farmers.

In short, creating content that frames the Maine farmhouse property according to possible lifestyles—rather than as an amalgam of room counts and land acreage—is a subtle but critically important shift. Not for nothing, the associated content on the real estate website, blog, or social media feed will also be a lot more fun to read, and to write.

An effective real estate agent doesn’t focus first or even primarily on the farm. They investigate, through interviews and other research, and then cater to the attributes of potential buyers. Then they weave those attributes together to try to understand how people of the desired sales demographics actually think—and speak, and search—about such a property. What words and phrases would they use to describe such a property? How do they feel about the prospects of owning that property?

This information can then be incorporated into online content by an editorial team dedicated to serving each buyer persona with relevant content. It might include YouTube videos, e-books, audio podcasts, photo essays, charts, and interactive tools or calculators. Agents’ new knowledge should also inform their participation in real estate forums, social networks, and blogs. It should also inform a search engine optimization strategy, generating relevant and timely information that solves problems for buyers, uses their natural language, and ultimately benefits search rankings. This content also leads buyers down conversion paths where they are more likely to express interest in a property that appeals to them.

The measurable results of countless marketing makeovers I’ve been privy to demonstrate the benefits of marketing based on detailed understanding of buyer personas.

Clear benefits accrue to marketing based on detailed understanding of buyer personas. In particular, when you stop talking about yourself and your products and services and instead use the web to educate and inform important types of buyers, you will be more successful.

Marketing Strategy Planning Template

Over the past several years, as I’ve connected with people from around the world who have read earlier editions of this book, I’ve heard from some readers that they’ve struggled with getting started. Most of the implementation challenges that people describe involve the shift from focusing on products and services to the more effective approach of focusing on buyer personas and information that helps solve buyers’ problems. A secondary challenge people share is the shift in emphasis from offline marketing techniques and programs (such as direct mail, trade shows, and advertising) to reaching buyers on the web.

Taking a suggestion from Toby Jenkins and Adam Franklin of Australian web strategy firm Bluewire Media, I’ve devised an aid to tackling these challenges: a simple marketing strategy planning template. Jenkins and Franklin had been working on a similar template when we first got connected, so we decided to collaborate. You can download a newly revised and updated full-color and more user-friendly version on my website.³

I created the template to help people implement strategies for reaching buyers directly. I believe it’s essential to shift out of the marketer’s comfort zone of preaching about products and services. For example, if you were to say to me, “I want to start a blog,” I would point you to the template and have you start asking the following questions:

• Who are you trying to reach with the blog?
• Is a blog the best tool? Or might another form of content be better?
• What problems can you help solve for your buyers?
• What value do you bring as creator of this content?
• What search terms are people entering to find you? (This will help you name the blog itself and to title individual posts.)
• What sort of person are you, and what is your company’s personality? (This is helpful for creating the design.)
• What do you want people to do—buy, donate, subscribe? (It is helpful to create appropriate links to additional content.)

The marketing and PR strategy planning template is built on the same principle I use throughout this book: Understanding buyers and publishing information on the web especially for them drives action. This approach becomes clear on the second and third pages of the strategy template. The second page points out that when you publish valuable information (videos, blogs, Twitter feeds, e-books, and so on), you are creating the sorts of links that search engine algorithms love. Thus, your content surfaces when buyers are looking for help solving their problems! The third page reminds you that the information people find will drive them to action and help you achieve your goals. Moreover, you can monitor your own effectiveness: You can measure how many people follow you on Twitter, sign up for your email newsletter, or download a white paper. You can also measure how your marketing strategies are helping your organization reach its most important goals, such as new sales and revenue growth.

The New Rules of Measurement

Readers of my blog and those who have seen my talks know that I am very critical of the old return on investment (ROI) approach to measuring marketing and public relations success, an approach still popular today. In my days as vice president of marketing and PR for a NASDAQ-traded B2B technology company more than 15 years ago, we measured success in two ways. Our marketing programs were measured via sales leads: the number of people who registered to download a white paper or who tossed a business card into a fishbowl at the trade show. In other words, the only thing that mattered in our approach to marketing was how many people raised their hands by submitting personal information to us. Similarly, our public relations programs were measured via a PR clip book, a collection of all the clippings of magazine and newspaper articles written about the company. The book represented a month’s worth of clippings and was usually bound for us by our PR agency. We would then calculate the advertising equivalency value of those press clips—that is, how much we would have had to pay to purchase a similar amount of ad space in that publication. These were the measures my bosses used to gauge my success. And I’m told by tons of marketing and PR people that sales leads and clip books are still the primary metrics used today.

Asking Your Buyer for a Date

To illustrate how the old form of measurement based on sales leads is flawed, I like to appeal to a dating analogy. Imagine that a man goes up to someone he finds attractive at a bar and the first thing out of his mouth is “Give me your phone number.”

Imagine that a woman sees someone she finds interesting at the local coffee emporium and starts off the conversation with “How much money do you make?”

If you’re a famous celebrity or amazingly hot, this approach might work. However, mere mortals are not likely to get too far in the dating world by acting like this.

Yet this is exactly the way that many companies behave. They apply to the web the old rules they learned for offline marketing. They require the disclosure of personal information before sending an interested party a white paper. They design inane “contact us” forms to fill out before it’s possible to speak with a human. How does that make you feel? So the next time you have to design a marketing strategy, think about how you would approach it if you were trying to date the buyer.

Measuring the Power of Free

While the dating discussion helps us understand what’s at stake for marketing measurement, what about for public relations? How do we measure the effectiveness of PR?

A reader named Lee put it bluntly: “Wow you really don’t like us poor old PR people do you? So—how do you replace the clip books, which you are so scathing of and our bosses and clients still demand? Can you help me understand how to explain to a client exactly what they have paid for on a monthly basis? They want to see results.”

Here is a longer version of what I answered back to Lee:

The problem I have with clip book measurement is that it does not reflect the realities of what we can do today to reach our audiences via the web. A clip book implies that all we care about is ink from mainstream media. Measuring success by focusing only on the number of times the mainstream media write or broadcast about you misses the point.

If a blogger is spreading your ideas, that’s great.

If a thousand people watch your YouTube video, that’s awesome.

If a hundred people email a link to your information out to their networks, tweet about you, or post about you on their Facebook pages, that’s amazing.

If a hundred people join your LinkedIn group, go ahead and shout, “Woo-hoo!”

If you come up on the first page of Google results for an important phrase, break out the champagne!

You’re reaching people, which was the point of seeking media attention in the first place, right?

The problem is that most PR people measure only traditional media like magazines, newspapers, radio, and TV, and this practice doesn’t capture the value of sharing. There’s nothing wrong with a clip book, but it’s not enough.

What You Should Measure

These days, the web gives everyone—not only B2B companies like the one I worked for but also consumer brands, consultants, nonprofits, schools, and many others—a tremendous opportunity to reach people and engage them in new and different ways. Now we can earn attention by creating and publishing online for free something interesting and valuable: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an e-book, a Facebook page.

But how should we measure the success of this new kind of marketing? The answer is that we need new metrics.

Take another look at the last page of the marketing and PR strategy planning template. Under Goals is a list of many things that you can measure and observe, such as how many people participate in your social networking sites, how many people are reading and downloading your work, and how many are making inquiries about or buying your products and services.

Here are seven things you can measure:

1. How many people are eager to participate in your online efforts? (You can measure how many people like you on Facebook, subscribe to your blog, follow you on Twitter, sign up for your email newsletter, or register for a webinar.)
2. How many people are downloading your stuff? (You can measure how many people are downloading your e-books, presentation slides, videos, podcasts, and other content.)
3. How often are bloggers writing about you and your ideas?
4. (And what are those bloggers saying?)
5. Where are you appearing in search results for important phrases?
6. How many people are engaging with you and choosing to speak to you about your offerings? (You can measure how many people are responding to contact forms and making requests for information.)
7. How are sales looking? Is the company reaching its goals? (Ultimately, the most important form of measurement within management teams is revenue and profit.)

The closer marketers align the way we measure with the real goals of the business, like revenue and profit, the more our marketing programs will help to achieve those goals. And an added benefit of this approach is that you will be more respected by your peers in other parts of your company.

Stop Thinking of Content Creation as a Marketing Expense

I get pushback about the new rules from many entrepreneurs, business owners, and chief marketing officers (CMOs) because they see the investment in “content people” as a barrier. They say things like: “I cannot find money in my budget to spend $5,000 a month (or however much) on content creation.”

When I’ve probed, I’ve learned the vast majority of these decision makers are looking at content creation in the same way they look at other marketing expenses: advertising, trade show booths, agency retainers, and printing.

Thinking of your online content as just another marketing expense will always lead you to underspend.

For example, if you spent $5,000 in a given month on a Google AdWords advertising campaign, the only thing you bought were the ads appearing in the search results and the resulting clicks on your ads, which appeared against the important phrases people search with to find your business. But as soon as you stop paying, your advertising and clicks completely stop. That is a classic example of a genuine marketing expense. You pay and you get something but when you stop paying it immediately goes away.

However, if you spend $5,000 in a given month to hire a freelance journalist to write a bunch of interesting blog posts, that content will live on beyond that particular month. It will continue to drive people from the search engines to your website for years to come. The content will retain its value many years after it has been paid for.

I started writing my blog in 2004. There are posts that I wrote many years ago that rank highly in the search engines for phrases that people search on today: “brand journalism,” “newsjacking,” and many others.

My free e-books provide an even more dramatic example. They’ve been downloaded well over a million times. Every single day, people download my e-books, in some cases years after I have written them. Why? Because they enter search terms like “viral marketing” into a search engine and discover my content created long ago.

Those blog posts and e-books are assets that I own. They’re not one-shot marketing expenses. They draw 500 or so search engine users to my website or blog each day. For free.

Almost all marketers make this mistake, viewing investment in content as a short-term advertising expense rather than the creation of a long-term asset.

It’s time we educated the decision makers that content creation is asset building. I am such a believer in this idea that I think we should start putting our blogs and YouTube channels onto our balance sheets in the same way that many companies value patents, trademarks, or brands.

Allow me to propose a metric for doing so. Let’s call it AdWords value equivalency, analogous to the traditional PR metric of advertising value equivalency.

The way to calculate it is to figure out how much you would have to pay for the Google AdWords equivalent of a particular search term for which you rank highly in the natural search results (thanks to that great content you invested in). Then figure out how often that phrase is searched on and clicked to calculate a value for a year (or 10 years, or in perpetuity).

Here’s an example. As I write this, my content is currently in the #2 position for the phrase “online media room” on Google. That’s from a report titled “Online Media Room Best Practices” I wrote and posted to my site nearly 10 years ago! At the same time, there are companies buying ads against this phrase using Google AdWords, including LVL Studio and Prezly. I would argue that the value of that phrase as a marketing asset to my business is the present value of the maximum AdWords price you have to pay, times the number of searches (or the number of clicks). You could figure it out such that a keyword like that could potentially be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars over, say, 10 years. Maybe millions of dollars.

My point here is simply that a marketing expense is something that you spend money on and, after it’s spent, the value is gone. However, a marketing asset like content is a lasting investment and needs to be weighed differently. In many cases, the value far outweighs the initial investment, and benefits accrue for years to come.

Stick to Your Plan

If you’ve read this far, thank you. If you’ve developed a marketing and PR plan that uses the new rules of marketing and PR and you’re ready to execute, great! The next 13 chapters will give you more specific advice about implementing your plan.

But now I must warn you: Many people who adhere to the old rules will fight you on this strategy. If you are a marketing professional who wants to reach your buyers directly, you are likely to encounter resistance from corporate communications people. PR folks will get resistance from their agencies. They’ll say the old rules are still in play. They’ll say you have to focus on the four Ps. They’ll say you need to talk only about your products. They’ll say that using the media is the only way to tell your story and that you can use press releases only to reach journalists, not your buyers directly. They’ll say that bloggers are geeks in pajamas who don’t matter.

They are wrong. As the dozens of successful marketers profiled in this book say, the old rules are old news. Millions of people are online right now looking for answers to their problems. Will they find your organization? And if so, what will they find?

Remember, on the web, you are what you publish.