"So, summarizing, the alternative path to persona driven B2B marketing and sales is:

1) Build an ideal customer profile of the enterprise (almost an Enterprise Persona) that looks at a variety of attributes, including psychographic elements.  Use this profile to tailor marketing efforts and sales qualification.
2) Develop information on the typical members of the buying team that focuses on their role in the buying process.  You can call this a basic persona, if you like, but you won’t benefit from the consumer level persona development.   Don’t feel obligated to go deep into personality attributes that may vary widely across your target customers (or conflict with the enterprise personality).
3) As you engage with customers, profile them to identify mobilizers, talkers, and blockers.   Evaluate those profiles again your buying team personas and develop an opportunity strategy that engages the mobilizers to help you build the consensus toward a decision."

Their email address is still valid, yet that person is no longer in your persona, and you should no longer be targeting or talking to that person. But because that email address doesn’t bounce, we still do.

The aspect of the horizontal and vertical movement is pretty compelling. The second thing that I thought was really fascinating was the idea of growth and the concept of churn. One of the things that we often don’t really think about is that our personas are actually a fluid set of people. It’s different day to day.

Some people leave that persona completely. Hence they were in this managerial role, and now they’re in a different department; they have just left our persona. And then some people enter that marketplace altogether. That’s the reverse, such as they were in support, and now they moved over into sales, hence making them a part of our persona.

Here’s a look at why, and how you can get started on using this important tool immediately for improved customer acquisition.

I was recently talking with Scott Levine, SVP Strategy at Kern, about the need for personas to evolve if they are to continue to drive relevant marketing decisions. Below is Levine's perspective on the challenges associated with using traditional personas and how personas are evolving.

The primary route we use to make sense of user behavior is behavioral personas. You may be familiar with cohorts based on things like date—all those users who signed up in January 2017, for instance. A behavioral persona is similar, but segments users out by patterns in how they use a product.

If you were analyzing a Gmail extension that checks the spelling and grammar of all a user’s emails, then you could imagine a few simple behavioral personas relating to usage right away:

• High-volume emailers: users who process many more emails than the median user
• Low-volume emailers: users who process fewer emails than the median user

You could expand this out to include people who write their emails very quickly, those who spend more time on them, the degree of broadness of the networks people have (whether they email many different people or just a few), and so on—behavioral personas are a very flexible tool.

(a) Identify Customer Needs

(b) Identify Customer Demographic Characteristics

(c) Identify Psychographic Characteristics

(d) Analyzing Customer Data

(e) Identify Customer Buying Behavior

1. Lifetime value
When you add customer worth to your buyer personas, you’ll be selling them short if you neglect LTV. After all, a customer who buys a Ferrari on a $0 down payment promotion is worth a lot more than $0!

2. Cost per acquisition
In my experience, to make a reasonable profit with a buyer persona, the LTV for a given persona needs to be at least four or five times larger than their CPA. If it costs more than 25 percent of your LTV to close a buyer persona, something in your marketing needs to change.

3. Buyer scarcity
Knowing how many potential customers you have within each persona will help you decide how much you can spend marketing to them and still expect a return on your investment.

Secondary research and sales data employed to build customer profiles

You may not have noticed, but Buyer Personas are dead. Predictive Marketing killed them.

Buyer Personas emerged around the year 2000, and started to gain traction in 2001. They were a great tool, designed to wrap greater relevancy and context around the B2B marketer's offerings so that the offerings were better positioned for the prospective buyer. And it made perfect sense: dig deep into different buyer personas, and match product features and expectations to those personas. Boom: relevancy...and attractiveness.

But building Buyer Personas took work, lots of painstaking work: research current customers, past customers, lost opportunities for personality and demographic traits; segment and identify common attributes, create the 2, 3 or 4 personas, test, test, and test. And at the end of the day (and this is the difficult aspect of the whole exercise), you just didn’t know if it worked, i.e., there wasn’t a clear path to attribution.

Enter Predictive Marketing. It’s the ability to take customer data and apply it across the complete database to uncover potential future actions.

Think about that for a second. If a B2B Marketer has a customer set, sliced and diced across a wide variety of variables, the marketer can apply the winning formula of variables to prospects and uncover potential opportunities. Wait: isn’t that what Buyer Personas are supposed to do, i.e., uncover variables that can be applied to a larger data set?

Here’s the big…BIG…difference: Buyer Personas are applied to coerce segments, while Predictive is applied to identify opportunities from individuals. And we all want to identify opportunities from specific individuals, cutting out the whole process of marketing into segments. Time to revenue baby!

Costs? Predictive Marketing costs budget. Whoa: building Buyer Personas costs money…and time. Go ahead and compare the costs of a SaaS Predictive solution to the costs of researching, building, testing and maintaining Buyer Personas. Yeah: I thought so.

So as you build your 2017 plans, consider the notion of Predictive replacing Buyer Personas. Fairly certain it’s the equivalent of a grooved fastball waiting to be knocked 400 feet.

The key is to do the research and create personas based on deep customer insight, not superficial profiles. Differences in personal profiles become insignificant as you do the research to understand the buyers’ motivations, concerns, expectations, and processes for solution provider evaluation and decision making. The research, not demographics, determines when you need a distinct buyer persona.

In our experience conducting buyer persona research at ITSMA, we often find that our members and clients only have three or fewer distinct personas that really matter for marketing and selling a specific solution. In some cases, there might be only one persona.

The rule of thumb is this: Only create a buyer persona if the persona can help you make marketing decisions that will result in selling more solutions.

A content persona is a data-driven representation of your ideal content that drives business goals.

What type of content gets people to your website? What content genre drives people to sign up for your product? What topic convinces people about your ability to deliver and show buying intent?

Content personas are useful during content ideation, planning, or creation phase. Based on your business objective, pick relevant content personas. Ideate and create a list of content that you can create for each content persona. During the creation process, use content personas as a framework for creating content.

A lot of that information is likely already at your disposal, and this handy guide will show you how to access it.

1. Start with the basics

2. Interview an actual person

3. Use Google Analytics data

4. Use social media data

5. Get psychographic

6. Add a face and a name

Personas are one way to organize what you know about your prospects. Whether you use technology to build look-alike models of your best customers, or you just ask questions of your consumers and prospects, the more you understand about them, the better you will be able to communicate with them.

Instead of creating unique messages for every prospect, you can use this data to inform your personas and create better content for those segments of prospects. Longer-form content, like e-books and white papers, needs to address the business challenges of your prospects, and a persona-based approach to creating that content is a smart approach.

Aligning content with your personas is part of the process, but when marketing automation and content marketing are tightly integrated into a marketing technology stack, that means that the process is seamless. The right content automatically aligns with your persona-based segments used in your campaigns.

So here’s the thing. While today’s buyer personas generally aren’t as useful as most of us would like to believe, they are a good starting point.

I’m not advocating that we get rid of buyer personas, but rather that we rethink our approach to them. Instead of getting caught up in all kinds of details about our buyers that may or may not actually matter, let’s focus on the one thing that actually does. I’m talking about understanding the various triggers that cause people not only to engage with your company, but also to make a purchase.

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