Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business Hardcover – March 9, 2015

Every few years, the flood of new marketing books brings with it a real gold nugget. This is one of them.Buyer Personas is a wonderful book and an important service to the marketing community. So many misconceptions are floating around about how to create buyer personas, it's a wonder anyone creates and uses them correctly. I believe few companies do. Of the 14 or 15 companies I've worked with, not a single one has created and used effective buyer personas. I've created a few myself, and this book helps me see the mistakes I made along the way.I think the problem is that few people understand what a good buyer persona is, why it's valuable, and how to use it in marketing. Fewer still know how to create them. They settle instead for demographic profiles, composite portraits, and second-hand information gathered from salespeople.You can search for hours on the Web to learn about creating and using buyer personas. You'll come up with a lot of superficial, vague, and conflicting recommendations. Now you can just buy this book and be confident you're getting your information from a single authoritative source.Ms. Ravella's book appears to hold back no secrets or tricks of the trade. It's a true how-to guide, loaded with plenty of practical advice. After reading it, you can make great progress in creating and using your own personas. Ms. Ravella makes it clear that the only good way to create effective personas is to interview customers and prospects. And she explains that process in detail, right down to where to get names, how to contact them for appointments, what questions to ask in the interviews, how to conduct effective interviews, and how to compile and present the information you learn. I highlighted page after page in the Kindle edition.Ms. Ravella also explains how to sell the concept of buyer personas to skeptical managers. It's clear she's been through the process many times and has developed advice to avoid or overcome many of the practical challenges people are likely to face.This is not one of those 30,000-foot overviews that's designed to generate leads and credibility for the author's business. You'll find Buyer Personas informative and very useful even if you intend never to hire Ms. Ravella's company. Yet after reading this book, I think many bigger companies with the means to hire her will see they'd be foolish not to do so.I am happy to have found this book. If you're serious about creating good buyer personas, you'll also be happy to have read it.

When I first started out in B2B technology marketing, I had the good fortune to take a Pragmatic Marketing class with Adele. During the class I distinctly remember her teaching and coaching style, very supportive, fact-driven and detailed. It was obvious that she had been in the marketing trenches, rolling up her sleeves and doing the detailed work. But I admit to being a bit intimidated by the whole process given how new I was to marketing.Fast-forward 6 years later and Buyer Personas are a hot topic to many marketers, content marketers in particular. And there are discussions, templates and tools all over the internet on how to create personas but they seem of mixed value to me. I find out that Adele has struck out on her own and is publishing her first Buyer Persona book so it's time to get it on Amazon!Having just finished the book (I will re-read the key chapters), I found it structured and presented in the same practical fashion that she used as an instructor. Plenty of details, supportive coaching, insights and more. In the end, building a buyer persona is qualitative market research and not everyone has that skill in their toolset. Adele's book provides the busy marketer, guidance and the guard rails to keep your Buyer Persona project on track with enough details but also the flexibility to fit your resource scenario. The book also provides examples of how to document your interview results and how to prioritize and synthesize them for execution in your marketing plan. She also covers the political aspects of getting sales support and buy-in to your Buyer Persona project.Overall a very detailed and thorough book on Buyer Personas that you should leverage if you're serious about taking that first big step. Adele's been doing Buyer Personas for a long time and her expertise and wisdom shines through in this book. Worth the time and effort for professional marketers supporting medium to high consideration products and services, thanks Adele!