Do you feel like your marketing efforts to drive product specification by architects are less than effective? Are you struggling to even determine how to get your products specified by architects? You may be missing a critical piece of the puzzle to pull it all together: truly knowing your audience.
The foundation of a solid marketing strategy is built on the process of identifying, understanding and satisfying architect wants and needs. The first step to making an impact and better connecting with architects is to recognize what they care about, what their needs are and how your product can solve their problems. This is accomplished by developing a buyer persona focused on the architect.
Here is our three-step guide to developing your own architect persona:
- Establish goals. First, determine what you want to know about the architect. Once this has been accomplished, we recommend conducting quantitative research. Create a survey of no more than 25 questions to uncover what they’re doing and how they’re behaving. This survey should be distributed to a focused segment of your architect audience. Distribution of the survey can be accomplished via an existing list of contacts or through a third-party research provider, like Qualtrics.
- Analyze the data. So you have the survey results, now what? Analyze the data and identify the themes that are the most directly impactful to your business. Take it one step further and enrich your understanding with qualitative research. Carefully select a small group of participants that are most representative of your target audience and conduct one-on-one in-depth interviews to uncover why they do what they do. The more you can talk to architects directly, the more you’ll begin to see themes emerge, which will inform the development of a persona.
- Create a user persona. Now that you have insights from the quantitative and qualitative data, it’s time to distill the information. Use the most salient findings to create a persona based on the architect’s needs and motivations. It should include demographic information, background, business challenges and goals. And don’t be afraid to use easy tools and templates, like this one from HubSpot, to help you develop your persona.
Building meaningful architect personas can mean the difference between success and failure. Taking the time to develop a persona allows you to gain deeper insight into the mind of the architect and better inform your marketing strategy to drive product design specification.