Building and using buyer personas can benefit your business greatly—it can help improve your marketing messaging and act as a north star for decisions you make when running a marketing campaign. If you’re wondering what a buyer persona is, and how you can enhance it, then you’ve come to the right place. Let’s start with the basics.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the ideal customer of your product. You can create more than one buyer persona for your company, and this needs to be done completely based on research, historical analysis and performance of your customers.
Here is a template of a detailed buyer persona.
As you can see, we have defined all the aspects you would consider for why an individual buyer might or might not buy your product. This includes their traits, their demographic details, goals, requirements, and more. Answering each of these questions will help you create a robust Ideal Customer Profile for your organization, that you can then keep changing with time as your consumer base evolves.
Using Buyer Personas in Marketing Strategies
Now, you have a shiny new buyer persona ready, but where and how do you use these?
This type of profiling can be used to segment your campaigns and personalize the communication that goes out to prospective buyers.
For example, instead of sending the same nurture campaign message to a list of 1000 people, you can use certain attributes to segment this audience into 3 lists, and send personalized and tailored messages to these three groups based on their buyer personas.
Furthermore, these personas can help you create targeted content towards these different groups in the long run, and can serve as a basis for your content marketing.
This type of segmentation can help you build and perfect your marketing strategies, but could also be a reason for the downfall of your prospecting efforts if not used wisely.
Why do marketing campaigns fail?
The #1 reason marketing campaigns fail is bad buyer personas. This study says that 73% of B2B leads are not marketing ready, and one of the key factors could be that the lead you are chasing is not a right fit for what your company is offering.
Your buyer personas are the building blocks of your marketing campaigns. If they’re not good enough, every part of your marketing strategy will suffer. But, how do you obtain these additional insights that can propel your marketing strategies into being successful?
The Answer: Technographic Profiling
Technographic profiling is segmenting your audience based on their technology stack. It’s as simple as asking what hardware and software a company uses. Understanding the organizations’ existing tech stacks provides you the context needed to hyper-personalize your campaign.
You can now leverage these insights to tailor the messaging and content for each target segment in different campaigns, including customer acquisition, competitive and complementary solution selling. Technographics segmentation is what allows the execution of account-based marketing campaigns at scale. This segmentation, combined with firmographic data can help you target these high-value accounts who have the propensity to buy your product. This in turn leads to better conversion and closing rates for your campaigns.
Finding Leads through Technographic Data
In today’s world, finding technographic data is super easy. There are 100s of tools in the market that can help you find technographic data, but not all of them give you insights and intent. A sales intelligence product like Slintel can help you get the technographic, firmographic and psychographic data alongside actionable buying intent insights that can help you determine how and when you can connect with prospects for the best possible results.
Let’s take an example to see how you can use a sales intelligence solution like Slintel to find relevant prospects through technographic data.
Example: Using technographic and firmographic segmentation to improve your buyer personas
Let’s say your product is an email marketing software like HubSpot that integrates with Salesforce CRM. According to your buyer persona, to find the right lead, you want a list of companies that:
- Have received funding in the last 6 months
- Are current customers of Salesforce CRM
- Are in the United States
And, you also need a list of leads that:
- Are CXOs and above
- Are in Marketing and Sales
- Have a high purchasing power
Let’s find these leads through Slintel’s powerful filter.
Step #1
Using the below filters, we arrive at a list of companies that are most likely to fit your buyer persona.
- Technologies Used: Salesforce CRM
- Company Location: United States
- Date Funded: In the last 6 months
- Job count in the last month: Minimum 1
This result shows you 1077 companies that fit your criteria from Slintel’s database.
Step #2
Click on “View Leads”. This will take you to the Lead Insights page. Here, you can apply additional filters to fit your buyer persona that you had created.
- Lead title: CXO, Manager and VP
- Function: Marketing
- Decision Making Power: High
- Email confidence: High
- Lead Location: United States
It’s that simple! Now you have a list of 419 companies that match your search criteria, and over 1000 leads from those companies who have a high email confidence score, and match your buyer persona.
Looking for more?
As you can see, finding leads who match your buyer persona becomes much smoother when you have a sales intelligence solution that can cater to your research needs. Along with a huge database, you need intelligence and accurate information to actually find relevant prospects. Slintel is a sales intelligence solution that can help you find such leads with ease as demonstrated above. Talk to one of our account executives for more information.
