How IDM Companies Can Improve Their Core Messaging

It would be easy for your board members, investors, and C-Level executives to say you have the disruptive technology. However, if the marketplace does not perceive it to be disruptive, is it disruptive? 

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional depiction of an ideal client. Personas are based on real data and light educated speculation. Buyer personas are not just demographics and behaviors. Buyer personas are the aggregation of everything. 

Using Buyer Personas to Find Consensus

Buyer personas do not necessarily need to fall on the lines of vertical markets or be segmented along the lines of job titles. But, they are the kind of thing where regardless of whether you build them through surveys, focus groups, phone interviews, person interviews, or reviewing lead intelligence (there’s a lot of different ways to gather information), you want to get to the point where there’s a consensus.

Examples of consensus include:

• Your subjects are all within five years of age
• Several of your subjects attended the same school
• Your subjects have the same/similar degrees
• The majority of your subjects attend the same conference
• Several of your subjects belong to the same LinkedIn groups
• Many of your subjects use the same language and words
• Your subjects have the same/similar goals
• Your subjects have the same/similar challenges
• Your subjects have the same/similar plans

Until you see these similarities, you may not have a buyer persona. A good way to think of it is: imagine you’re holding an event. The event is being held for CPAs, but a sales director happens to wander in when you are in the middle of talking about gap accounting and depreciation. How is that sales director going to feel? Likely, bored to tears.

Vice versa, if a CPA happened to wander into a sales conference when you’re talking about deal stages, pain points, accelerating the sales cycle, and getting to decision-makers, the CPA will likely be bored to tears.

It’s important to recognize in this era where people are one click away from deciding whether you’re relevant or irrelevant, and hitting the back button; you have to pay attention to them. Regarding your core messaging, make sure everything is well-defined with SMART goals.

Aligning Your Messages with SMART Goals

SMART goals are goals that are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Specific: Everyone wants more leads and customers, but that is not something that we can build a plan around. We need to know how many leads and how many customers.

Measurable: There has to be a way for us to figure out what we have done in the past and whether we are making progress towards our goal?

Attainable: We need to be able to review our history to see what we have achieved in the past and the resources we have available today; to believe our goal is within the realm of a possibility.

For example, if your past annual conference attracted 250 people, is it an attainable goal to increase attendance from 250 to 2500 in a single year using the previous budget?

Relevant: Your goal needs to be relevant to the overall mission. In regards to social media, it is too easy to think “Oh cool! We have X amount of likes, followers, and connections,” which is important to a certain degree, but it is easy to let those vanity metrics get in the way of true priorities.

The primary reason most companies in midmarket enterprise tech and identity are using social media is to attract net new strangers to the top of their funnel and nurture some of the existing strangers who are in the middle of the funnel.

Additionally, it can be a way to keep tabs on what your customers are talking about for an indirect customer service channel. However, when using social media solely to collect likes, connections, or followers, ask yourself: is this going to help my company? If it’s not relevant to the overall mission of your company, it should not be a goal.

Time-bound: Setting a timeline for your goals helps your business stay on track while delegating, prioritizing and executing tasks on your campaigns.

Providing Content for Every Stage

It’s important to understand the buyer’s journey. There needs to be content for people looking for awareness-related information, consideration-related information, and decision-related information.

Bottom Line

Most IDM websites need a lot more content when it comes to the problems they solve rather than just talking about themselves.

Think about when a person talking keeps going on about information someone simply is not interested in. Avoid this scenario by ensuring your messages are grounded in buyer personas, SMART goals, and provide content at each stage of the buyer’s journey. You may think you are disruptive, but the key thing is: do your buyer personas, and stakeholders believe that?

Does your identity management company differentiate from other IDM companies by optimizing its messaging? Let us know in the Comments below. 

If your identity management company is ready to accelerate its revenue growth and learn more initiatives to take you to the next level, check out our webinar “Identity Management Revenue Growth Acceleration Q&A Webinar.”