Overview
B2B buyer personas are profiles of customer segments. They highlight key characteristics and information about each segment that will help you create messages that truly resonate. Personas drive personalization, decision-making, and structure for marketing and sales motions for ease of use and organization-wide alignment
Gartner supports this position, stating that personas “can be powerful marketing tools to inform decisions, guide strategies, improve customer experience, and enhance collaboration.” But building a library of personas is not quite enough as they’re most powerful when marketers support, evangelize and use them to understand customers, their journeys, and their preferences.
Tailoring personas for different needs across your company will make personas more actionable across the organization, and maximize adoption within both sales and marketing motions. Accounting for those different needs all but guarantees your team's ability to utilize the developed personas for the following:
- Personalize the customer experience
- Better understand your customers
- Create more successful marketing campaigns
- Guide decisions in making new products and services
- Interact with your customers and prospects better
Persona Models with Leadspace
When you develop a persona model with Leadspace, you will take a data-driven approach to identify the best personas to support your business, leveraging analytics to identify and define your ideal personas. Once defined, the Leadspace persona model will measure the resemblance/fit to a defined persona we’ve built (for example, demand gen marketer).
There are traditionally a few different approaches to developing personas with Leadspace. Those include:
- Top-down approach (the customer definition of what they see as a demand gen marketer)
- Bottom-up approach (examples of people who bought the product).
All inputs are then used in a concerted series of logical criteria to create a robust network of semantic keyword connections that capture the essence of your desired persona. Those keyword connections consist of a complex combination of Department, Level, Job Function, Title, and area of Expertise.
The output is a score as well, which means 'how closely does this lead fit the definition of a demand gen marketer'. The higher the score, the more confident we are that this person matches the definition of the persona.
Approaches to Building Personas
Top-Down Approach
Here, persona research informs your top-down view. Research generally dictates the top-down approach to defining and developing custom personas. Traditionally, personas are derived from a combination of multiple different research types including synthesis of demographic, psychographic, transactional, and behavioral research.
Fast-tracking this approach includes leveraging your existing segmentation to create custom personas, or capitalizing on conducted qualitative research around ideal targets and then translating those attributes into key demographic signals with a weighting applied based on the level of importance for each attribute.
To learn more about this approach, see Creating Personas with Leadspace.
Bottom-Up Approach
While the Top-Down approach can be effective, Leadspace looks to embrace a more data-driven approach by understanding the personas most frequently involved in your closed/won opportunities. Through this approach, we’re able to analyze at scale the attributes associated with those deals and craft personas that most frequently influence your revenue-generating deals.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Capture your opportunity data, or your closed/won data
- Find the associated persons/contacts with those deals and run an analysis of those people closest to the buying cycle
- Extract the definitive demographic details, as seen below, into recognizable categories to discern which attributes are most frequently associated with positive outcomes
- Department, Seniority Level, Job Function, Title, Areas of Expertise, and Technologies
- Distill the most common combination of those attributes into buyer-type personas
- Run buyer-type personas through the Leadspace algorithm and apply weighting to ensure the most effective scoring of each persona
Crafting the Personas
Selecting your Parameters
Agnostic of the approach you move forward with, whether it's a data-driven bottom-up approach or the qualitative, research-based top-down approach, you'll need to work with your CSM to translate your personas into specific attributes which we then add to our persona modeling engine.
Once you've defined those personas, you'll work with your CSM to populate a table like below which we'll load into our modeling engine.
IT Security Profile
Department | Job Function / Field of Expertise | Senior Mgmt. | VP Level | Director Level | Manager Level | Staff Level |
Information Technology | Low | Medium | Medium | Low | Fallback | |
Information Technology | Security | Low | Medium | Medium | Low | Fallback |
Network Security | High | High | High | High | High | |
SOC | High | High | High | High | High | |
Information Technology | Risk | - | - | High | High | High |
Information Technology | Compliance | - | - | High | High | High |
Chief Risk and Compliance Officer | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Chief Risk Officer | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Data Risk | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Data Risk Management | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Data Risk Manager | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Director of Risk Management | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low | |
Distribution Risk | - | - | Medium | Medium | Low |
What's Next?
Once the custom personas are completed and approved, your future enrichments will include scoring for those custom personas allowing you to pass those scores and persona details downstream to your marketing and sales teams and their desired motions. To see more about how those scores show up in enrichment, see What Do The Person Scores Mean In An Enrichment?