Internal alignment between sales and marketing teams can mean sharing knowledge for better campaign messaging. What the sales team knows about clients’ business issues – and how your solutions resolve them – can inform the messaging of your direct mail, email and telemarketing to make sure it hits the right note.
With the right marketing data, building your messaging around these pains is as easy as 1-2-3.
Step 1: Dive into the depths of data – identify your target audience
The first step in any marketing campaign is knowing who you’re targeting – so if you haven’t already built out your buyer ‘personas’, now is the time to do so. This is a way to gain a better understanding of the needs and wants of your clients by imagining their the things they need, the things they’d love in their organisation, the things they’d be interested in, and all the things they hate. Dig into your marketing database and find answers to questions like:
- What is their job title?
- What is their level of seniority?
- Are they male or female?
- How big is the business they work for?
(Source: Hubspot)
Step 2: It’s all in the detail – build out your personas
Once you’ve got your personas sorted and aligned with your marketing data, you can begin to work out their business pains. This is where sales and marketing need to cooperate: while the marketing team’s strength lies in its ability to convey messages clearly and concisely in the right tone and in the right place, the performance messaging that it creates needs to be informed by the sales team’s knowledge of the customer journey.
Then you need to put yourself in your prospects’ shoes. Imagine a typical day in their life and ask yourself questions like:
- What are their ambitions?
- How much power do they have in their organisation?
- Are they spending more time at work, or at home?
- Where would they rather be?
- What do they like to do for fun?
- Where do they go for information?
It might even be useful to assign a photo to each persona – adding tangible details can really help when it comes to establishing key business pains.
(Source: Hubspot)
Step 3: Where does it hurt? Identify your personas’ pains
Finally you’ll need to identify your prospects’ biggest pains. This will allow your marketing team to align their content according to business pains and really speak to your prospects. Think about:
- The biggest problems they face in their job
- The tasks they complete day-to-day
- Their ambitions and what could be holding them back
- Their most common objections to your product or service
The story of persona-less content is a sad one, so once this information has been gathered and aligned with your marketing data, let your marketing team loose on creating custom content which shows your personas how you can soothe their pain.
