SiriusDecisions’ Rachel Young: Adaptable Messaging For Targeting Buyer Personas Boosts Engagement

During her keynote session at the B2B Content2Conversion Conference, SiriusDecisions’ Rachel Young highlighted the importance of creating messaging that pivots around personas to create preference-based assets that will help companies stand out and differentiate themselves within the market.

“When you’re creating messaging around your offering, the content becomes menu-based,” Young noted. “At a certain point of the buyer’s journey, they will use that content, but not early on when they are looking for education.”

Young noted that Adobe had a similar challenge prior to working with SiriusDecisions. The company’s product-centric messaging did not maximize inbound marketing and contributed to limited product launch success.

Adobe reassessed their messaging, tools and systems and shaped it to be focused more around the persona buyer journey. This change helped the company increase web revenue by 53%, while decreasing time it takes to bring content to market by 78%.

“What took them weeks to work with the global marketing team for content creation now only took days,” Young said. “The heavy lifting has already been done through the creation of actionable buyer personas.”

Young said that B2B companies should isolate the target market segments — down to the buyer persona — for an offering. She added that isolating these segments “defines your audience and identifies where your focus needs to be.”

Marketers then have to contextualize their personas, define attributes the messaging will be conducted for, while also understanding the intent of the messaging based on demand.

This fundamentally positions marketers to craft the core value proposition for the buyer persona using five building blocks: audience, need, assertion, outcome and distinction.

“Different buyers have different needs, and it’s important to meet those needs to stay relevant,” Young concluded.

Once that is addressed, B2B marketers can define inflection points by cataloging the persona’s information requirements by stage, according to Young. “We want the buyer to consume the messaging, be propelled to take action then move on to the next stage of the buying journey. It’s critical to do that research to understand their needs.”

Ultimately, the key is to take the messaging components and be prepared to modify it to fit the final asset type—positioning companies to provide the right message through the right content format, at the right time.

“The messaging you create should stay the same, but also be able to morph into the content format you need,” Young said. “This helps create consistency across all content formats.”