How to Leverage Personas and Prospect Data for Content Creation
To achieve personalization, the content must identify your target’s specific needs and communicate your ability to meet those needs. This requires developing clearly-defined personas and collecting accurate attribute data on your prospects. Your content creators can then develop messaging and designs that appeal to people in relation to where they are in the buying cycle.
The 4 Types of Persona Attributes
As you align your organization around a common understanding of your target buyers and their needs to drive content, consider these four attributes to determine which data sets to leverage for developing your target personas:
• Functional Attributes focus on job roles, common job titles or positions on an org chart. You may also want to group prospects according to their buying center or firmographics cohorts.
• Emotive Attributes are typically based on the initiatives your target audience is trying to achieve or the challenges they face. This helps identify specific buyer needs and gives marketing a lexicon of terms to work with.
• Decision Process Attributes focus on the buyer’s role, their engagement level in making buying decisions, and their decision drivers.
• Behavioral Attributes include the types of content assets and the type of interactions your audience finds most appealing as well as the online “watering holes” where they like to hang out.
Data Types to Collect for Personalized Campaigns
To personalize your content, there’s the attribute data that you’ve simply “must have” for your target audience. These include their basic contact information, the industry, geolocation, and the job role of the individual. You also want to tie into any products and services your company has already sold to each account. From there, identify the goals of each individual’s buying center and the particular target product or solution you’re hoping the individual will buy.
Beyond the “must-have” data, there’s the “should-have” attributes that will drive deeper personalization within your content. These include contact engagement history and specific job titles, which can change frequently! Also collect and the current buying cycle stage of individuals as well as their buying group and buying group role. If possible, gain access to any opportunities already in the sales pipeline and identify the sales stage.
Lastly, there’s the “nice-to-have” information such as current relationship status: When was the last time they purchased one of your products or services? Have there been any customer service issues? It also helps to know their net promoter score (are they loyal?) and the competitors you are going up against. If you can reach this level of attribute data, you will set yourself apart from your competitors in your ability to personalize content.
Sourcing Additional Data
To take personalization to an even higher level, consider acquiring data from other systems within the company and external vendors. Here’s a sampling of data types you can tap into from your marketing, sales, customer service and ERP platforms:
• Account and Individual Profile Data that comes from marketing and sales force automation platforms, web content and contact data management systems, billing, customer care, and contracts.
• Account Activity Data from event management systems, social media, sales asset management systems, order entry, product portals, and IoT platforms.
• Derived Data from business intelligence sources such as intent monitoring, predictive analytics, data warehouses, data marts and visualization solutions.
These data sources give you the ultimate attribute database to enable personalized content, especially if you unify these sources with the intelligence sources discussed above. You will essentially form a complete picture of your targeted accounts, their actions, and their anticipated next steps.
A Strong Digital Foundation for Content Generation
Raising the bar on personalization is vital in today’s economy—B2B buyers have dramatically-heightened expectations about their digital interactions with companies seeking their business. B2B marketers thus need to step up their “right time, right content, right channel” capabilities in order to compete effectively.
By creating highly-customized, one-to-one interactions with your prospects and customers, you can achieve this objective as you scale your content generation efforts supported by a strong digital foundation. This blog is an excerpt from “Personalized Experiences: Building a Powerful and Scalable Digital Foundation,” a webinar sponsored by SiriusDecisions and featuring Jay Atcheson, VP of Marketing for R2i Technologies, Danny Dalton from the Adobe Industry Strategy Group, and Jessie Johnson, Research Analyst-Demand Marketing from Sirius Decisions. Click here to listen to the entire session For more information on how to leverage personas and prospect data for content creation, contact R2integrated at https://www.r2integrated.com/contact
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