1. To build effective modern B2B marketing personas, marketers should use persona maps to formalize existing knowledge from sales, marketing, and product teams about customers. 2. Personas should be based on real market research like interviews with customers, not just assumptions, to avoid being at the mercy of vocal voices within the company and to understand why deals are won or lost. 3. Personas should be humanized by conducting interviews with customers and using their quotes and recordings to make personas and insights more realistic for colleagues.

1. Steps To Build Modern B2B
Marketing Personas
A classic tool, the marketing persona is overdue for
a modern overhaul. If you’re a product marketing
expert and wondering how to manage personas,
here are the tips:
1. Use persona maps to formalize tribal knowledge.
If you don’t know what your sales, marketing, and
product managers think they know, you can’t test
those insights against market reality. Map your
personas and find out what customer-facing

2. employees learn from prospects and customers
daily. Persona maps are an especially good way
to confirm who sales really sells to.
2. Get real with personas.
Beware of the echo chamber. If you target
personas on gut instinct or tribal input only, be
ready for a roller coaster ride. Marketing will be at
the mercy of the most vocal voices in your
company. You’ll find yourself guessing at why you
win or lose deals. So, go out and conduct persona
interviews at a minimum. Better still, conduct
actual primary market research. If you’re investing
big bucks in product development or marketing
programs to reach your buyers, it’s well worth the
cost.

3. 3. Humanize personas.
The very word “persona” sounds like awkward
marketing jargon. So you have to make this real for
your colleagues. How? Conduct persona interviews.
Record these sessions with their permission. Then
use quotes, the recordings, and summaries to offer
critical insight to your sales teams and other
stakeholders. This is what makes your data and
insights real. Your marketing will be better when
you have both qualitative and quantitative
insights.
4. Don’t let persona creation stall strategy.
Some marketers pause planning and execution to
conduct complex persona mapping. We applaud
the due diligence, but don’t hit pause while you
profile buyers. Persona research should make your
current efforts smarter. Plan ahead for best results
in designing go to market plans based on persona

4. insights. If you reach planning season without
fresh persona insights, you can still quickly map
what the tribe thinks as a stop-gap effort.
5. Go digital with personas.
Everyone has ways to learn about new trends and
needs. These most certainly include digital
“watering holes.” Your B2B content, online
marketing, and digital tactics must reach buyers
across relevant digital channels as well as
traditional channels. Most B2B marketers get this.
The trick is to truly understand and explore how
digital marketing and sales enablement are
completely intertwined.
6. Make personas pragmatic.
The only goal of mapping personas is to drive real
work. Your persona maps should include real titles
of professionals–by role and rank. This helps
demand gen teams target specific people. After all,

5. we market to people. Also, you should audit your
CRM and Marketing Automation databases for
the “hit rate” of the persona titles you mapped.
How many of your target titles are already
customers and prospects? If you can’t see them in
your databases, you’re not reaching the buyers
you want.
7. Create full funnel content plans for personas.
You can’t create meaningful content marketing
plans without knowing your buyers. In my book,
that’s the #1 reason why content marketing fails.
Once you map exactly who you’re targeting, audit
what content you have for these buyers. Be a very
tough grader for this work. Does your content
really talk to executives? How do you know? Once
you have a content heat map for these buyers, you
can create and fill the “gap map” of content for
your marketing and sales funnel.

6. 8. Engage in execution of persona targeting.
Armed with your persona map, research, content
plans, and targeting lists — you’re off to the races.
But wait, there’s more! Do you know what’s really
working on your frontlines? Do your campaigns
drive high quality leads in your target buyer pool?
Is your sales team meeting with target buyers?
Stay close to the execution so that you support,
coach, and learn from your tribe as they execute.
9. Measure success of persona marketing.
As with everything in sales and marketing,
measure your success. How many more target
buyers bought your product? Are targeted buyers
converting better or faster throughout your
marketing and sales funnel? Set a baseline and
measure it.

7. 10. Evolve personas actively.
Persona development can’t be an academic
exercise. Effective marketing teams use data, input
from the tribe, and experience to keep up with
buyers. If your marketing isn’t reaching them, it’s
time to update your insights or targeting. If your
marketing works, what’s next? How can you
optimize the customer experience? In short, your
work is never done. So, settle in for the marathon
and have fun mastering deeper insights into your
buyers.