Benchmarking and Personas—When You Want to do it Right

Benchmarking and Personas Package

Is your marketing filled with misalignment? Have you inherited a website, a marketing plan, or unrealistic goals from external stakeholders basing decisions on assumptions?

Marketing misalignment happens mainly when the marketing function has been managed by various people, envisioned by non-experts, or when products and markets change. Marketing is an agile practice. And to be great at it, your team needs to recalibrate to define the strategy, the goals, and the intended results of your work.

Our discovery, benchmarking, and persona exercises help teams “find their center” again. Our team works intensely with your team to understand your needs and the best paths forward.

We do this work by conducting three critical exercises:

• Discovery: Our Discovery process is a foundational fact-finding exercise. We’ll take a deep dive into assessing your objectives, understanding your challenges, and defining your goals. We’ll spend time listening and talking to stakeholders, and together we will tease out the desired results for your efforts and the strategies needed to reach your goals.
• Benchmarking: We’ll report on your competitors’ and/or role model university websites, identifying their audiences, how they talk to them, and what brand strategies are at play. This work helps isolate strategies, best practices to learn from, and pitfalls to avoid. We’ll discuss what we’ve learned from our analysis and how we can help position your college unit.
• Personas: Through interviews with your team and our expertise in the industry, we’ll craft fictional representations of key audience members. These personas will carefully identify the nuances that make these individuals important to reach. Personas will create the “lens” through which your future marketing efforts should be viewed.

Our findings from the discovery, benchmarking, and persona exercises will be delivered in a series of reports for you and your team to share with key stakeholders. Our documents are yours to use to refine your work, evolve your marketing strategy, or plan the next phase of work.

Who is this for?

This package is for units that need to recalibrate their marketing efforts, brand strategy, or audience identification. It’s often the desired package for teams that seek a more customer-focused marketing website or units that intend to embark on a site redesign but need stakeholder buy-in. This package creates a foundation by which future marketing can be planned more strategically. Connect with us to get started or learn more about our Digital Audit or Brand Analysis packages.