What You Don’t Know about the A&D and AEC Audience May Be Impacting Your Specification Rate
Creating an Audience Persona for the Built Environment:
Most B2B and content marketers will tell you that you need to fully understand your audience in order to create relevant marketing and messaging. Experts urge marketers to create buyer personas in order to put a more focus on marketing. Ardath Albee, one of the foremost leaders in digital and content marketing, defines a buyer persona as “a composite sketch representative of your target market.”
There are numerous tools to help marketers create a composite sketch of their target audience. In order to provide valuable information, you have to understand to whom you are marketing, which requires some basic and specific knowledge about them, including:
Name
Title
Where they work
Size of company
Where company is located
What their typical day is like
Age
Gender
Education
Work background
Professional goals
Professional challenges
Values
Fears
How you can help with goals
How you can solve challenges
How you align with values
How you can mitigate fears
How they learn
What they read
Where they hang out professionally
Their professional and personal interests
Social media presence/activity
Current preferences in your product category
How they make decisions about products in your category
Other products or decisions impacting your category
While audience personas can be immensely powerful for creating content, they can be difficult to create in our industry. Instead of one target audience, numerous people, with different roles and goals influence product decisions. In order to be successful, you need to engage the entire building, design and construction team. To ensure your product marketing makes an impact, you need to fully understand the goals, needs and demographics of the multiple decision-makers and influencers, including the:
Architect
Designer
Engineer
Installer
Building owner, developer
Specification writer
Contractor
Sub-contractor(s)
Facility manager
Dealer
Distributor
Consultant(s)
Fabricators
Users, occupants
Jobsite foreman
Code officials
Homeowners
Since a lot of people influence product decisions in the built environment, you have to cast a wide net. The key to getting more products into more projects is to address every influencer and understand their needs, background and values. If you need help creating a composite sketch of each influencer in the built environment and how they impact product decisions in your category, let’s talk.