Rethink your buyer personas/profiles — refresh (or start fresh) to include the most useful information, by decision maker and influencer, by appropriate segment, across departments and roles
Research things such as:
Investment priorities
Turn this into:
Goals and ambitions
Challenges
Observations
Interview your sales team - often
Your sales team can be an absolute goldmine when it comes to understanding how your existing customers are aligned and make decisions.
Interview them and ask questions that get them talking about customers as if they were the product you are selling. This will help you frame and market to your ideal customer profile.
Workshops with sales are an indispensable way to build partnerships and cross-functional understanding.
Clean up your data - and keep it tidy
Existing customer and prospect data is priceless. When maintained, it’s the single best view into the behaviour of your ideal customer.
As data capabilities become more advanced, you should be able to pinpoint the role of every communication, every content asset, every channel in persuasion and conversion. This is the true power of marketing data.
And as we now live in a world where B2B customer expectations are often driven by their consumer realities, the degree of marketing and sales personalisation required demands precise data.
SIDE NOTE // What’s insights got to do with it?
Most marketers know they need to gather buyer insights as part of persona development (data and analytics plays a big role in this). It’s what they do with these insights that often falls short.
Once you understand your audience in the context of their own experience, you can use your stories to paint a picture of how that experience could be improved.
Next: Create a compelling, persuasive storyline >