A recent study from DemandGen Report argues that 2 out of 3 business-to-business marketers struggle to create targeted content according to buyer interest and buying stage. How can marketers craft detailed buyer profiles that allow them to tailor key messages?
Today’s marketers rely on traditional firmographic data—business name, company size, industry classification, etc.—to build out their buyer personas. While insights on job title and company size can help marketers identify key business decision makers, they don’t provide clarity into why organizations buy. Instead, B2B marketers should incorporate web and social data to enhance their personas.
“Buyer personas are turning more into buyer profiles. They lack insights as to how, when, and why these buyers are making that decision. The consequence is that the buyer persona is focused on the data that’s readily available, not always the data that is the most valuable.” – Adele Revella, President of the Buyer Persona Institute
Customer data refer to the business and contact information on your customers. They also include all the data you track about your customers, including how they use your product and which content they interact with. Before the marketers had access to rich social insights, they segmented customers based on a series of vague attributes, including industry and company size. Nowadays, marketers can access detailed, real-time insights about their customers that go beyond traditional firmographic attributes and tap into external web and social data, such as average online review rating or presence of a Twitter profile.
When marketers rely exclusively on internal customer data within their CRMs, they paint an incomplete picture of their buyers. By tying together digital data that stems from external web and social sources, marketers can predict which companies are more likely to invest in their products. This information allows marketers to create content geared specifically towards top performing segments.
While the perfect customer looks different for every organization, certain attributes are more likely than others to predict whether or not businesses are likely to buy.
Research from CEB highlights 4 key business characteristics:
Online Presence
As businesses build online presence, we can learn a lot about the relationships with their communities from online reviews and volume of social media fans. Businesses that engage online are more likely to respond when presented with the tools they need to run their business.
Web Technologies
Businesses who adopt analytics and ecommerce tools reveal their status as growing, declining, or stagnant, and expose deeper insights about their motivations and needs.
Online Advertising
Organizations who are willing to invest in Facebook and Twitter advertising tend to be prioritizing customer acquisition, which makes them more likely to display interest in your value proposition.
Average Review
Businesses with 4 and 5 star ratings are more likely to care about the perception and quality of their brands, and tend to have a higher propensity to respond to products and services that can enhance their growth.
These metrics are not a streamlined recipe for understanding your customers, but they open the door to accurate metrics that help bring value to your buyer personas. When marketers analyze current clients on a set of external and internal data, they breathe life into their static buyer profiles.
Incorporating customer data into your content marketing strategy ensures that the content produced by your team aligns with the goals and needs of your prospects. When marketers build descriptive, fluid buyer personas, they take steps to boosting MQL-SQL conversions, reducing sales inefficiencies, and ultimately driving revenue.
If you’ve never created data-driven buyer personas, we recommend this helpful guide from our content team.
