B2B Marketing: 5 Ideas for Creating Personas That Influence Your Content, Context and Conversion

1. Create Context For Content
With B2B Buyer Personas
A presentation by Billy Mitchell
President, Senior Creative Director
@billymitchell1
We make ideas work.

2. A GLOBAL IBM STUDY OF 17,000 CMOS:
THE MOST
SUCCESSFUL
ENTERPRISES

3. FOCUS ON
RELATIONSHIPS,
NOT JUST
TRANSACTIONS.

4. A GLOBAL IBM STUDY OF 17,000 CMOS:
BIGGEST
CMO
HEADACHE :

5. THE DATA EXPLOSION
“WE’RE
DROWNING
IN DATA”
.

6. 79
OVER THE NEXT 5 YEARS
%
OF
CMOs
EXPECT INCREASING COMPLEXITY
IN THEIR MARKETING

7. 48
BUT ONLY
%
OF
CMOs
FEEL PREPARED
FOR IT.

8. THE MOST
EFFECTIVE CMOs

9. FOCUS ON
GETTING TO KNOW
INDIVIDUALS,
NOT JUST MARKETS.

10. THE MOST
EFFECTIVE CMOs

11. USE CUSTOMER
ANALYTICS TO TURN DATA
INTO INSIGHTS
ON WHICH THEIR
ORGANIZATIONS CAN ACT.

12. A persona is
a composite sketch
of a type of customer
you serve.

13. Who uses content
marketing as part
of your overall
marketing efforts?

14. How many use
buyer personas to
shape your content
marketing strategy?

15. How many of you included:
Discussions with
Sales to develop your
buyer personas?

16. How many of you included:
Conversations with your
customers to develop your
buyer personas?

17. How many of you included:
Data from your CRM
database to develop your
buyer personas?

18. Since developing your
buyer personas, how often
do you update them?

19. 56
ACCORDING TO THE CMO COUNCIL
%
OF
COMPANIES
BELIEVE THEY ARE
CUSTOMER-CENTRIC

20. 12
ACCORDING TO THE CMO COUNCIL
%
OF
ONLY THEIR
CUSTOMERS AGREE

21. Your company,
and mine could look
something like this
to our prospects:

22. YOU’RE NOBODY TO ME
I may have heard of your company,
but I have no opinion or affinity.

23. SOMEWHAT ACQUAINTED
I may have had exposure to your
content or brand in some way.

24. I’M FAMILIAR WITH YOU
I know who you are, but I'm not yet
sure you're relevant to my needs.

25. I KNOW YOU
I've discovered you may have insights
I find valuable so I'm paying more attention

26. I RESPECT YOU
I'm following your blog or have
subscribed to your newsletter because I see
consistently valuable ideas.

27. I LISTEN TO YOU
I'm now on the lookout for your content
and have shared your stuff with my network.

28. I LEARN FROM YOU
I'm in conversations with your salespeople
to see if you can really help me.

29. I’M A CUSTOMER
I've decided you bring enough value to the
table that I'll invest in having you help me solve
my problems. I think I can rely upon you.

30. I’M AN ADVOCATE
You've proved your value and I'm so enthusiastic,
I think others should have you help them —
and I'm proactively sharing my praise.

31. In B2B, it’s often
more than one person
doing the buying.

32. Three categories to focus
on with personas are:
1 orientation
2 objectives
3 (and then) obstacles

33. The person who makes
the final decision may not
be a persona candidate.
If they are only holding the purse strings,
then you may be wasting your time.

34. Some say B2B is not
different than B2C because
it’s all P2P.

35. But it is very different.

36. B2C buying decisions
are driven by lifestyle.

37. B2B buying decisions
are driven by livelihood.
People’s jobs are at stake.

38. B2B personas recognize that the
prospect’s professional standing
and priorities will hold additional
sway over what catches their
attention when it comes time to
solve a business issue.

39. B2B persona information will vary but can include:

40. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
STATUS QUO

41. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
STATUS QUO
STRATEGIC BUSINESS & CAREER GOALS

42. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
STATUS QUO
STRATEGIC BUSINESS & CAREER GOALS
PREFERENCES & AVERSIONS

43. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
STATUS QUO
STRATEGIC BUSINESS & CAREER GOALS
PREFERENCES & AVERSIONS
INFLUENCERS

44. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
COMPETITIVE
STATUS QUO CONSIDERATIONS
STRATEGIC BUSINESS & CAREER GOALS
PREFERENCES & AVERSIONS
INFLUENCERS

45. B2B persona information will vary but can include:
COMPETITIVE
STATUS QUO CONSIDERATIONS
STRATEGIC BUSINESS & CAREER GOALS
PREFERENCES & AVERSIONS
INFLUENCERS INFORMATION,
SOURCES & SEARCHES

46. My agency, MLT Creative created a tool for making personas that
we collaborated on with our mentor on the subject, Ardath Albee.
Ardath is the author of eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.
She consults with enterprise level clients on
persona development and with her permission
I’ll share an example from her book:

47. The best way to wrap
your mind around a B2B
persona is to take a look
at one.

48. Let’s take a look at the
fictional persona of Gloria.

49. Gloria Miller
Manager of Product
Development at WhizBang 3X

50. Can you see how you’d be able to help Gloria if you
knew all about her situation and offered a delivery
system that would match her goals?
Before you think, “yeah, but I’ll never get close to
knowing Gloria’s situation,” consider the following
possibilities for how you might know enough to get
a good handle on this information.

51. The type of information
needed to build personas
is available, the challenge
is connecting the dots.

52. It’s important to
remember that personas
evolve and change along
with their environments.

53. You should not create
a persona and then never
revisit it for tuning
and tweaking.

54. You must be diligent about
monitoring related changes
and advances and updating
your company’s personas
as warranted.

55. We all know our companies, our products,
our solutions. We are given these corporate message
briefs or brand positioning documents or whatever
they are, and what we need to do is take a look at
those and say, “OK, from this persona’s perspective,
how the heck is this relevant, where is the relevance
and how can we help transition that into more of
a relevant story and make it apply to something that
engages with the persona?

56. B2B buyers don’t want
to be sold with mass
marketing, they want
to be informed.

57. They want your
help not your hype.

58. Thank You.
www.UpCloseandPersona.com

59. We make ideas work.