If you're not familiar with the term “buyer personas” it simply means “the buying personality of the people who buy, or who could buy, your product or service.” This can include basic demographics, such as the age, gender, income level, education level and geographic location but the best personas include insight on how the potential buyer thinks about your product or solution from their point of view. When we explore buyer personas we need to delve deeply, answering questions such as:

“We need a new website!”

Although the two words -- sales & marketing -- are often uttered in the same breath, there exists in the business world a great divide between the sales force and marketing team. Marketing people don't “close.” The marketers are the “idea” people, the creative ones, while it's the sales force that drives the bottom line (provided they follow up on the leads provided by the marketing team, that is).

The salespeople make the money for the company (provided the marketers don't screw up and fail to share the hot leads.) Traditionally, each side has looked down (maybe just a little bit, and maybe secretly) at the other.

In the first post of our Inbound Marketing Strategy series, we explored three weaknesses of outbound marketing. In short:

If you're a business owner or a marketing executive, you may have heard the terms “push” or “pull” marketing, sometimes called inbound and outbound marketing or even permission-based marketing vs. “interruption” marketing. But you may be fuzzy on the definitions of these different marketing tactics -- or how to employ them effectively in your business.