As a B2B technology marketer, chances are your buyers have complex journeys. How can you help them find you, learn more, and choose your solution? By adding value with relevant information at every touch!
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[Webinar] How Tech Companies Leverage Personas and Segmentation
1. How Tech Companies Can Leverage
Personas and Segmentation
Hally Pinaud
Principal Segment Marketing Manager
Marketo
@hallypino
Vyoma Kapur
Sr. Manager, Marketing
Marketo
@vioma
2. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
• This webinar is being recorded! Slides and recording will be sent to
you after the webinar concludes.
• Have a question? Use the chat box and I’ll get to your questions
after the webinar.
• Posting to social? Use our hashtag - #mktgnation
Housekeeping
3. Why Personas & Segmentation Matter
Hint: tech business objectives depend on getting personal.
8. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Product-
centric
Customer-
centric
Rethinking How We Market Technology
Pushes
Volume
Pulls with
Value
Customer-centric
organizations are 60%
more profitable.
(Deloitte)
9. Here’s Where to Start!
3 Steps: to Understand and Engage Tech Buyers
DEVELOP YOUR
PERSONAS
CONNECT TO
SEGMENTATION
APPLY TO
PROGRAMS
10. Step 1:
to Understand and Engage Tech Buyers
DEVELOP YOUR
PERSONAS
CONNECT TO
SEGMENTATION
APPLY TO
PROGRAMS
11. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Wait, What’s a Persona?
“A persona is a fictional character
created as a proxy for a target
audience. These audience archetypes
commonly include illustrative pictures
and fictional names that make them
tangible to digital designers and
marketers. Personas identify similar
patterns of behavior that result in
commonly held goals.”
12. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Identify Your Personas
Role & “Need to Knows”
Product alignment
Goals / Drivers
Challenges / Pain
Sources of Information
Tech Footprint / Comfort
Questions + Objections
Buyer / Decision Maker User / Influencer
Complex: Multiple personas may exist in complex sales
Diverse: Personas can differ across industries
Changing: Keep personas up-to-date!
13. Buyer Persona: Director of College Recruiting
Background:
Decision maker
Large Public
University
Employee
~15 Employees
Busy, frequent
traveler
Technology
footprint:
Goals:
• Maximize relations with key hiring orgs
• Increase % of students hired YOY
• Ensure team is set up to succeed
Common Objections:
• “We have everything we need”
• Budget
• “You don’t work with schools like us”
Pain Points:
• Engaging the students early & often
• Getting top applicants to accept offers
• Budget challenges, resource “bang for buck”
Information Sources:
• Recruiting Conferences, Specialized Groups
• LinkedIn (especially industry peers)
• Business media (WSJ, Forbes, etc.)
Leads College Career Center at D1 Research University
Here’s a
real
example
14. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Primary Data
Sources
Customer
Databases
Marketing
Databases
Surveys
Interviews
Customers
+ Prospects
Customer-
facing team
Other
Resources
Analyst
reports
Industry
media
How to Research Your Personas
15. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Primary Data
Sources
Customer
Databases
Marketing
Databases
Surveys
Interviews
Customers
+ Prospects
Customer-
facing team
Other
Resources
Analyst
reports
Industry
media
How to Research Your Personas
FAQ:
How do you recruit
for persona
interviews?
16. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
DO
• Actually interview people!
• Start with what makes sense
• Share x-functionally
DON’T
• Focus on “cutesy” details
• Set and forget
• Forget the post-purchase
Dos and Don’ts of Personas
17. Step 2:
to Understand and Engage Tech Buyers
DEVELOP YOUR
PERSONAS
CONNECT TO
SEGMENTATION
APPLY TO
PROGRAMS
18. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Map Personas to Your Database
• Role in purchase
• Function
• Industry
• Company size
• Geography
• Relationship
• Tech stack
• Job title
• Job title/dept.
• SIC code
• Company name
• Company name
• CRM data
• Inferred data
• Specialist vs. VP
• Finance vs. Sales
• Tech vs. Pharma
• SB vs. Enterprise
• USA vs. Canada
• Customer vs. Prospect
• Competitive vs. partner
ATTRIBUTES DATA EXAMPLES
19. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Every form completion asks for incremental information
Use Progressive Profiling
Benefits Gain deeper insight into personas
Help sales tailor approach to prospects
Shorter forms (3-5 fields) result in higher conversion rates
Better customer experience
21. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Firmographic data supplied by Dun & Bradstreet
Enrichment for leads entered into CRM system
Identifies technologies used by companies
Sources new names based on buyer profile
Removes and manages duplicate data
Consider Data Vendors for Enrichment
22. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Segment Content Based on Pain Points
Manual tasks
Inefficiencies
Lack of resources
PERSONA CHALLENGES CONTENT
Cheat sheet:
10 Tips on How to
Automate Processes and
Get Executive Buy-In
Poor ROI
Decreasing budget
Organizational changes
White paper:
Research Study on Driving
Revenue Through Effective
Change Management
InfluencerBuyer
23. Step 3:
to Understand and Engage Tech Buyers
DEVELOP YOUR
PERSONAS
CONNECT TO
SEGMENTATION
APPLY TO
PROGRAMS
24. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
• Demographic
• Firmographic: industry, named account, company size, products used etc.
• Role/function: seniority, division, department etc.
• Behavioral
• Engagement: program interaction, content consumed etc.
Score Personas Based on Key Attributes
25. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Setting up the right
segmentations & enabling
dynamic content allows for
personalization at scale
Leverage Dynamic Content
26. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Engagement
Programs
Priority 1
C-Level ENT Verticals
Higher Ed
Healthcare
Sports
Financial
Services
Manufacturing
C-Level SMB Competitors
Competitor 1
Competitor 2
Competitor 3
B2B MA Non
Specific
B2C ESP Full
Function
B2C ESP
Limited
Function
Priority 2
ENT B2C
Pending
Early
Mid
Late
ENT B2B
Pending
Early
Mid
Late
SMB B2C
Pending
Early
Mid
Late
SMB B2B
Pending
Early
Mid
Late
Create Nurture Tracks For Top Segments
27. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Increase
relevance
Drive
engagement
Generate
conversions
Try Intent-Based Content Syndication
Intent to buy
• Overlay demographic information
with surge data
• Finds your personas on the web
• Identifies which target personas are
actively researching your products
• Signals when and what they want to hear
from you
28. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
• Classic bottom-funnel tactic in B2B enterprise SaaS
• Pre-: push trial to user segments based on activity
& buying stage
• During: provide guidance thru nurture & education
• Post-: trigger sales follow up with persona-specific
approach
Tailor Free Trial Strategy to Segments
• Version One case study:
• Shifting to enterprise required agility & scalability
• Created dynamic landing pages with multiple forms for
trial validation
• Developed trial flows based on segment/persona
29. #mktgnation | @hallypino | @vioma
Recap
Persona development is critical in understanding your
audience
Define personas with meaningful attributes and
use multiple data sources
Map attributes to your database and create
segmentations
Apply personas and segmentations to your marketing
programs
Your customers have moved online, or at least your future customers have.
Are your online channels and your agent communications delivering a consistent and compelling experience – when taken as a whole?
---------------------------------------
Extended talk track:
An omnichannel (customer centric ) sales and distribution model and business strategy.
Customers increasingly expect their insurers to have robust online and mobile channels, with technology integrated seamlessly into activities such as call center conversations. Digital tools, such as tablets used to issue a policy through a completely digital process, will also augment the agents’ toolkit.
Young online companies like SureNow and Protect Your Bubble have a head start in this regard, often targeting digitally savvy customers with low-cost insurance products. Incumbants are responding, like Dutch insurer Aegon has launched Kroodle, a paperless insurance company, designed mainly for mobile users who purchase via Facebook.
Today’s fierce battle for new customers in is largely won by price, yet price-sensitive buyers are more prone to switching later for a lower-priced offer.
Customers want policies tailored to their requirements and to be only paying for what they need
Even price-sensitive customers, though, can be converted to loyal promoters through differentiated products and standout service.
Bain’s research shows that loyalty leaders in most countries, such as USAA & Progressive in the US, Liverpool Victoria in the UK and Apia in Australia, excel on both price and service dimensions.
It comes down to delivering a better product, with better service at a better price – but customer experience overall is becoming the key differentiator.
So, it’s important to take a look at your marketing programs, and your overall customer experience and ask yourself some key questions…
[PwC found that 50% of consumers will provide their insurer with additional personal information to enable them to seek the best deal for relevant services on their behalf]
(For the life sector, price matters less than investment returns, except for standardized products like term life, because there’s less price transparency.)
Your customers have moved online, or at least your future customers have.
Are your online channels and your agent communications delivering a consistent and compelling experience – when taken as a whole?
---------------------------------------
Extended talk track:
An omnichannel (customer centric ) sales and distribution model and business strategy.
Customers increasingly expect their insurers to have robust online and mobile channels, with technology integrated seamlessly into activities such as call center conversations. Digital tools, such as tablets used to issue a policy through a completely digital process, will also augment the agents’ toolkit.
Young online companies like SureNow and Protect Your Bubble have a head start in this regard, often targeting digitally savvy customers with low-cost insurance products. Incumbants are responding, like Dutch insurer Aegon has launched Kroodle, a paperless insurance company, designed mainly for mobile users who purchase via Facebook.
What kind of service are you providing to your customers after they sign up and between renewals?
While it used to be sufficient to focus on brand recognition, today you need to treat your customers like individuals and deliver personalized service.
If you are providing real value through your content and programs, you will be in the minority, and therefore stand out from your competition.
Thank you Hally!
Once you have completed your persona development,
The next step is to use them to define your segmentation.
Here are typical attributes B2B tech companies use, in the first column. Hally covered many of these in her section
Idea is to make them actionable and map to the data u have
One important attribute for many tech cos is role in purchase process- decision maker or influencer.
The data that can help you distinguish lies in the job title. You may want to determine the threshold above which they’ll likely be decision makers, below most likely influencers- e.g. specialist as the practioners, VP as the buyer
Function is also something that can be inferred from job title- Director of marketing, is in marketing dept. and sometimes you also have function as its own field.
Industry- often rely on a metric called SIC code, universal system for classifying industries
Company size, Geo- deduced from company name.
Relationship- customer, partner, prospect? CRM data that has been updated by your sales ops team
Tech stack interesting variable- chances are you have competing tech products,
inferred data- more on that shortly.
You may be thinking that you don’t have a lot of this information, or the information you have isn’t very accurate.
So what can you do to enrich your data?
One way is Progressive profiling is common for tech cos to get more information directly from the horses mouth.
Basically a form appeas every time a person comes back to your website.
Lots of benefits of this approach- deeper insight that you may not be able to get otherwise.
With this info, sales can tailor their approach
Shorter the form the better, for higher conversion rates
Of course a better customer experience
And this is what it looks like.
The very first time your persona comes to ur site- ask them basic info to capture them as leads in your database
Second time, say they are registering for an event- you get to welcome them back and ask more info, e.g. their address and function, which will help you do geo segmentation
3rd time: if they’re requesting a demo, you can ask them some qualifying qns at that point.
Of course, no such thing as too much data, or too big of a database.
At Marketo, we use a bunch of different data enrichment technologies to augment and manage the leads and contact data in our system
From ReachForce, which we use to add firmographic data from Dun&Bradstreet, to Leadspace for finding new names based on buyer profile
Datanyze is a great tool that which has a sophisticated web crawler to determine the technologies used by companies. We use this to segment personas based on competitive or partner technologies being used
Tech stack
Competitive techs
Partner techs (CRM)
Greenfield/whitespace
Now, beyond just segmentation based on who they are, also look at what content they are browsing.
This is something to do in your research phase as Hally mentioned.
What you want to do is take an extra step and classify content based on personas and hence pain points
So looking at the 2 most common personas- the influencer/practitioner has different challenges from the buyer, or decision maker.
The influencer may be more concerned with inefficiencies, manual tasks, lack of resources, so a simple cheat sheet on how to automate processes and get exec buy in
The buyer may be more interested in ROI, budget or org changes, so a well researched white paper on driving revenue could be mapped to her.
Very helpful exercise in promoting and scoring content differently to different personas
Market/score differently
And now, once you have your segments built out, how can you apply that to programs?
This is your Step 3.
And it starts with scoring before you plan programs.
Crucial to consider both demographic and behavioral score-
the demographic attributes split into 2 broad categories- firmographic and those that aligned with role and function
Behavioral segmentation has to do with how your personas are engaging with your program.
At Marketo robust scoring methodology based on the investment someone has to put into engaging with a program (Y axis) and the stage (X axis)
So if someone attends a field event where we have a lot of late stage content like demos, we give that persona the higherst behavior score of 11
One thing can easily be done in the beginning stages is to set them up in your marketing automation system
With this, you can easily create dynamic content- one email that can speak to multiple segments at the same time in a relevant way
Instantly allows for personalization at scale
Going down the funnel to nurture programs
We have nurture tracks for our main segments- starts with the C level ENT track- specifically to reach decision makers in big accounts
We then take people thru vertical nuture programs that focus on industry messaging
6-7 Competitive nuture programs
For the prioriy 2 nurtures, we segment by company size (ENT/SMB), use case (B2B or B2C) and biying stage (early, mid late)
Educational- complicated product, lots of stakeholders.
Behavior based, that is based on pain points
A great thing that has emerged in the last few yrs is intent based content syndication
This allows you to find personas not just based on demographic info, but behavior too
Layer intent data on top of things like title and company name-
Looks for an increase in research on ur product
Signals when and what they want to hear
This enables u to increase relevance, u drive more engagement and ultimately generate more conversions
For tech companies, classic tactic is to offer free trials, most often thru a website. foot in door
Trials can b very generic. How can u personalize
Answer lies in following a holisitc approach tailored to each user persona.
Before the trial-. This comms should be based on their activity- how they are interacting with ur content- as well as buying stage
During the trial, it could be overwhelming for users to use a product for the first time, speaking from experience
Really need to guide along, point them to features they will find most valuable
Post trial, this is when you need to trigger sales followup to make them into paying customers. How can ur sales team be enabled to anticipate counter the most common objections? Trained on persona and what they care about
Version one, a Project Management solution
Moving to enterprise, many tech cos go thru
Needed agilty and scalbility
Were able to both increase MQLs and marketing contribution to pipeline
Guide them along, foot in the door.
Alright, before we wrap up, a quick recap:
Persona development is critical for tech cos, esp if u have complex products and sales cycles
Define personas with meaningful attributes and use a variety of data sources
Map attributes to ur database and create segments
Finally, apply personas and segments to ur scoring and programs
And that concludes our webinar!
Thank you all so much for joining. We hope you found this useful.
As we mentioned, the slides and recording will be sent to you shortly.
Seeing a number of qns come in, so we have some time for a couple.
Fist qn
How many personas should you have?
How can we determine if we are segmenting enough or if we are over-segmenting our database?
Great qn- there’s a fine line between being to generic and too granular. Ultimately I think it boils down to numbers. Do you have enough people in your database to warrant an entire segment? Because If you don’t have a critical mass, your programs may not move the needle. On the other hand, if you’re going too broad, you may be compromising on relevance and personalization. So it’s a balancing act.
You mentioned sharing personas with Sales – how do you do that?