Enterprise Marketing: Persona Development, Targeting and Segmentation

The Art of Buyer Personas for Enterprise Marketing

Your enterprise marketing is only as good as your ability to target it to the right people. Your potential clients usually fit into a few different archetypes and developing marketing that speaks to their needs is what helps to move them down the sales funnel. Understanding these different personas is key to creating the right marketing messages.

Creating Buyer Personas

The first step in setting up your enterprise marketing strategy is to look at your existing customer base.The people that you are already doing business with and marketing to are your best tools for identifying the buyer personas that you should be targeting moving forward.

Usually, the process starts with three sets of interviews. You will need to talk to existing customers, your sales team and your customer support team. Through these discussions, you learn about:

• potential buyers for your products and their roles in their companies
• the roles that your products play in your customers’ businesses
• how prospective and current customers make decisions about purchasing products and services
• what existing customers and prospective clients need and where their bottlenecks and pain points lie
• how prospects can be closed

At the end of the process, you should have a handful of different personas, representing the multiple audiences that your enterprise marketing will have to communicate with.

Leveraging Personas for Success

Once you know what your personas are, you can begin designing your enterprise marketing campaign. the first step is to lay out what your fundamental messages — pillars — should be for each persona. Next, you can map out how you will reach each different persona. For example, a CEO probably does not spend a great deal of time trolling product forums to learn more about new advances while an analyst might have that as his or her entire job.

With general themes and methods in hand, you can start to look at content. First, consider the content that your business has already created. Some might be usable as-is or easily repurposed into white papers, blog posts or whatever types of marketing fits your plan. You can then slot that content into a grid that graphs out each of your personas and their stages in the buying process. As you look at that grid of content, it becomes easy to identify where you need to create new material to fill in gaps from what is already present.

Finally, the personas also influence the lead management aspects of your enterprise marketing strategy. The forms that you use to initially gather leads and to nurture them through the process can all be optimized both to correctly classify incoming prospects and to keep them in the right channels moving forward.

Executing on Your Strategy

Once you’ve created your personas, your content and your lead management tools, you have to create systems that will move your plans into reality. While most marketing automation software packages can help to segment your enterprise marketing by persona, each package works a little bit differently. Click here to download our comparison and analysis so that you can make better decisions about which solution will best suit your company’s unique needs.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, PPC campaigns and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.