Buyer persona and Smarketing explained
Marketing Automation has been one of the most efficient tools used by B2B marketers to reach their goals. But the entire field can seem a little bit overwhelming if you had never been exposed to it. That’s why, in this article, we will be looking at two important concepts surrounding the Marketing Automation discipline and try to explain each.
Understanding buyer personas
Let’s face it: many B2B companies struggle to get the right message to the right audience, at the right time. In all honesty, it’s not a simple challenge to tackle. Brands need to make sure they perfectly understand their audiences and they need to make efforts in identifying the best approach for each subset or group. The right insight and data can help businesses create strong and reliable profiles of prospective clients, also known as buyer personas.
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You might be wondering what a buyer persona is. The most comprehensive and spread definition, used by marketers for over a decade is: Buyer personas are research-based archetypal representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, where they buy, when buyers decide to buy, and why they make buying decisions.
Probably the best way to approach the buyer persona is both as a guideline for your marketing and sales strategies, as well as a precise definition of your audience. Once you have figured out your target, it will become clear what measures best help you achieve your goals. On the other hand, you need to constantly reassess your buyer personas, based on data collected from your campaigns.
Buyer personas with Marketing Automation
Using a Marketing Automation solution can help you figure out the relevant data when designing buyer personas, while at the same time supporting you with up-to-date insight from your leads’ digital behavior.
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While buyer personas are a vital part of developing the perfect strategy, getting it right doesn’t guarantee the success of a campaign. Content, well-crafted buyer journey, and persona alignments are all essential elements of an overall marketing plan. Nowadays, in order to stand out from the crowd, you can’t have one without the other. But the good news is that a great content strategy helps businesses grow faster and establish lasting connections. In order to tick every box, that content needs to be personalized. Companies no longer can afford to shout at their audience, but instead, need to speak to individuals in a manner that seems personal.
Define your buyer personas before starting a Marketing Automation campaign in order to fully take advantage of the inbound strategy.
Smarketing and its benefits for your business
We know, we know. Smarketing has become a sort of buzz word, used by specialists all over the world to describe the importance of integrating sales and marketing efforts within a company or strategy. But the word itself is not stripped of meaning. And in the larger discussion on inbound marketing, analyzing the benefits of smarketing for your business might be a smart first step.
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If B2B companies struggle to adopt innovative and modern tools to address the challenge of a counterproductive relationship between marketing and sales, it means losing opportunities and increasing the workflow. Let’s take the most obvious example: generating qualified leads. When marketing doesn’t have the ability to properly assess them it might result in sending unqualified, but still valuable, leads directly to sales. But those aren’t sales-ready prospects and they will be either discarded or reintroduced into some marketing funnel.
Marketing Automation plays an important role in addressing this exact issue. This is precisely where smarketing shines. Here’s how that happens:
- By creating a formal handoff of prospects from marketing to sales
- By sending off leads only when they are qualified, based on lead scoring
- By making all details available in the lead section
- By integrating the buyer personas into the strategy, at both sales and marketing levels
With the aid of a smart, multi-channel platform that can handle each step of the buyer’s journey, it will become increasingly easy to get the right insights regarding prospective clients, optimize messages and increase conversions.
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For B2B companies, this kind of control and tight overview can translate into them becoming more customers focused and better equipped to overcome challenges. In very simple terms, Marketing Automation helps businesses reach their goals faster and easier.