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Eduardo talks with Ernesto Valle, Institutional job seekers database package Image Coordinator at Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University, about the importance of defining the right buyer personas during an Inbound Marketing campaign. Learn how to design a buyer persona correctly using market research and up-to-date data in the first episode of Inbound from Within.
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EE : In this new episode of Inbound from within , I meet with Ernesto Valle, Institutional Image Coordinator at the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega University. Together with Ernesto, we are going to talk about the importance of defining your ideal client and how not having one impacts attracting people who are not ideal for your business, causing an increase in unnecessary time and resources. So Ernesto and I are going to be talking and going deeper into the importance of defining your ideal client. Ernesto, welcome to the program and thank you for having us here in the technology classrooms.
EV : Thank you Eduardo, welcome. It has been quite an experience working with you and I think we have learned a lot about the subject.
EE : Well, they have been working with us on inbound since approximately June or April when we started.
EV : June, more or less, yes.
EE : Exactly. One of the important parts when starting with the methodology is to be very clear about who we want to attract. So, to put our audience in context, tell us a little about your role within the university and why you decided to use inbound?
EV : In 2017, the idea of developing a different strategy to modernize the admissions channels arose at the university, especially the channel aimed at 5th year high school students in schools. For this new program, several options were chosen and it was decided that one of the most recommendable strategies was to manage Inbound Marketing, so that was when they contacted me and we began to develop the project, looking for the best way to attack this problem we had. UIGV is a traditional university, which has always managed traditional marketing, but we saw that with the new generations this did not work so well, we had to look for a new option.
EE : You have just spoken about the new generations. This new generation has changed the way in which they used to research a career, how to choose universities. How has this change been compared to previous generations?
EV : I think it has been very important and it has been a big change because, in my experience, what was previously handled for kids who were between 15, 17 or 18 years old was more of an ATL marketing issue or BTL actions at best.
EE : Sure, you went to fairs, visited schools.
EV : Or you did activations in shopping malls and obviously all the mass media “focused” on youth, like radio, television, that kind of thing and the Internet as well. With the arrival of social networks and the development of new technologies, we have been able to focus much better on the issue, using our strategies, which was what we were looking for.
EE : And that led them, obviously, within the methodology, to have to define well who they want to attract. That starts first by defining the market well. How did you define that? How did you define the segment and what was the process you followed to define the ideal client?
EV : Well, initially, since we were focusing on strategies for the program for 5th grade students, that gave us a frame of reference. We had a frame of reference in terms of age, and another thing that restricted us as a base frame was the positioning of the university itself. The university targets a certain segment of the market at a socioeconomic level.
EE : And also how the client or the student perceived it.
EV : Yes, there was a perception of positioning precisely about which group of students, which schools, were more interested in applying to the university. With that, we began to investigate more in order to fine-tune it much better. We began with market research, with you, from there we did a workshop that we managed with Impulse, very interesting. Gathering all the experience and points of view of the sales force or of the people who had worked on the university issue in previous years. We not only focused on the demographic variables that we already had with the university, but we also began to pull insights that came from the sales force itself that had been in direct contact with the students and knew more or less how they thought, in addition to the market study that was carried out by calling all the students who had applied in previous years, whether they had entered or not, we had that database and we began to work on that.
Not only did we focus on the demographic variables that we already had with the university, but we also began to pull insights that came from the sales force itself.
E : Sure, and we started to model these buyer persona archetypes. You’ve talked a little about the process of how we do it and the idea when you define these buyer personas is not to only focus on the demographic variables, which I think most businesses know very well, what needs to be internalized is how do I find those behavioral variables, those insights, those motivations, those fears, those challenges that these people have and how I, from the university’s perspective, can create something of value to give to them and in that way begin to relate and position myself in a different way, versus a positioning like you said at the beginning of a lot of going to visit the student at their study center and not necessarily that student at that moment wanted to listen to you.
EV : Exactly. For the university, it was very important in this project not only to locate the space or schools where the students are, but to begin to understand how they think. And that involved sitting down with them, talking, seeing what they were looking for, what they wanted or what they expected from the university, from their ideal university, and what Garcilaso could offer to that student within their aspirations.
EE : Let's talk a little about the process, so that other companies can understand how these buyer personas are defined. Maybe you can start with a market study first, it gives you a lot of information, but then you said something very important: involve the people who have direct contact with your clients, in this case the sales executives who have contact with students in schools, at fairs or at activations, and conduct a workshop with them so that, based on the information they provide you, you can understand the pain points from their point of view. Do you remember a little about how that process was?
EV : It was a very interesting and rich process for us because it allowed us to gather all the knowledge that was within the organization but scattered across the different sales forces that the university manages and that are in contact with the students. In this workshop we were able to bring them all together and gather interesting insights because they are precisely the ones who talk to them, who listen to their questions, who start to give them answers and they ask back. So that gives you a lot of information about what the student is really looking for, apart from all the information that you can give them. There are questions that are repeated over and over again that give you the key and are important.
EE : I remember that it was a dynamic that lasted almost an entire day applying the Design Thinking methodology to help the sales team, and in fact not only the sales team, I remember that there was also part of the commercial team.
EV : Yes, there was part of the sales team, some marketing people, people from the image area.
EE : Yes, of course. Everyone involved sought to understand their ideal clients and then, this information, which is the basis for defining a prototype, a first hypothesis of a buyer persona, we began to contrast it with data. I remember that we began to do surveys, interviews.
EV : Yes, we conducted surveys with you, and also with an external provider, and the information was cross-referenced and it matched. The idea, as you say, is that we had a workshop to bring together various areas, each with a different point of view: marketing has its own point of view, image has its own point of view, call center managers have a different view, so all of that is enriching.
EE : Exactly. In the end, when you have a buyer persona archetype, in this archetype you must have a representation, let's say a biography of a typical day-to-day life of this person, their desires, their dreams, their worries, their pains, their fears, their motivations behind the purchase, but then as a consequence it helps you understand this. For example, how did it help you? Did it help redefine communication?
EV : It helped us a lot to redefine the topic of general communication for students, from how to approach telephone speech, to the topic of what should be in graphic and audiovisual materials.
EE : Content creation.
EV : Exactly, everything that has to do with content creation, everything that has to do with blogging, posting on social networks, that is the backbone of our strategy, that sets the tone for which topics are really relevant and what motivates students to apply or what they look for in a university.
EE : Based on the definition of this buyer persona, the university internalizes: if this person has these pains, from my experience as a university, what can I offer them of value to match those pains and, in this way, make these people find my content relevant. And it is no longer just shooting for the sake of shooting, but today we create content that answers the questions, resolves the doubts that these ideal clients have.
EV : Of course, I remember that a very relevant question that came up in the analysis was that the kids weren't sure how well paid they would be when they finished their careers, so that was an open topic, why study at a university and not at an institute, so those topics were key to first attracting the student's attention and beginning to calm their doubts and fears, giving them an option and directing them towards university.
EE : Apart from these fears that you have mentioned, that others found in this analysis, in this definition, which today are being resolved with content.
EV : In addition to fears, another interesting thing was expectations, what they consider to be success in the workplace. Many students were very interested in the topic of travel, kids like to travel and that helped us realize a very important asset that we had, which is a number of international agreements. This was a selling point that we were not taking advantage of, it was something that we had, that we could exploit very richly, it was very interesting for the student and it was there. If the analysis had not mentioned it, we probably would never have used it.
EE : It was still going unnoticed. Excellent. Today, how is the strategy helping you in this transformation process?
EV : Well, one of the problems that was identified later and that we have seen as a result of this is that a lot of money was invested in schools where it was perhaps very difficult for students to come to study, either due to a geographic location issue, a cost issue, or a course issue. So we began to better define who we wanted to reach and optimize the budget based on this.
EE : Definitely. Well, very well, would you like to add anything else about learning the definition of buyer personas? How is it impacting?
EV : I think that the experience of building this buyer persona has been very important for me and it has been very useful to me on a professional level, as well as at the university because it has allowed us to not only focus better on the budget but also to see the entire strategy and all the content from another point of view.
EE : I think that one part that really caught my attention, positively, is that for the first time different areas were involved within the strategy, because what generally happens in a traditional model: marketing only thinks about the strategy, never communicates it with sales and that divorce always happens.
EV : Yes, as I told you, this is a program that started last year and the idea is to begin to unify the areas and be able to work better as a team.
EE : Perfect. Very well! That's it for a new episode of Inbound from Inside with Ernesto. Thank you Ernesto for your contributions and for the experiences you have given us today. Until next time.