How to identify your customer personas
A case study and 3 simple questions to help you do better marketing
I have a very simple heuristic to identify and plan marketing for customer personas, and I’ve used it since the time I briefly led marketing for Freshmarketer, the marketing platform from Freshworks.
It’s not foolproof or even holistic, but it’s a great starting point to understand who to sell to, and what kind of marketing to do for them.
I’m going to use my time at Freshmarketer as a case study to try to explain this.
Freshmarketer is a marketing automation software with the usual bunch of features that make up the category. It’s great in terms of usability, but the product’s unique differentiator is its integration with other Freshworks tools, which makes data easy to control, use, disseminate, and protect across functions. This also means that Freshmarketer can be bundled and sold with Freshsales, the CRM product, or with Freshdesk, the flagship helpdesk product.
There you have it, this is why organisations buy Freshmarketer.
Your first step is to answer this for your product: Why should organisations buy it?
Right. But Freshmarketer also has to stand alone as a product, and has to be sold as a unique solution. This is important for both the product division and the company. Because Freshmarketer’s separate growth has the potential to increase revenue, as it opens up the Freshworks suite to new users.
So now I have to answer the question: Who will buy Freshmarketer?
Your next step is to answer this for your product: Who will buy it?
What follows is how I answered the question at the time.
There are two important customer personas in B2B marketing and sales: the user persona and the buyer persona. There are also other important personas, like the influencer and so on. But for the sake of simplicity, let’s stick to these two.
At times the user persona and buyer persona are the same, at other times different. In Freshmarketer, they may be different. Because the user persona may be a junior marketing analyst who actually needs to use Freshmarketer, but the buyer persona may be a senior executive/marketing head who is making the plans and strategies, and who holds the credit card to actually make the purchase.
Okay, now who do I sell to, among these two?
I try to answer for myself one simple question: Who is the person in the organisation who can present the product on their year end appraisal, positioning its implementation as a win, and ask for a raise?
That’s it. That’s the persona you need to target.
This clarity means that you can decide on the marketing strategy too. If the user persona will become successful because of your product, you can focus on easy onboarding, usability, and value. If the buyer persona will become successful, you can focus on brand, integrations, and trust.
This framing also helps you figure out where to do your marketing: do you advertise where the users are, or do you advertise where the buyers are. Because both involve different kinds of marketing, different kinds of messaging. How?
Back to Freshmarketer.
Freshmarketer is not that expensive (relatively in the category), but not that inexpensive either. So ideally I had to make sure I cover both personas. That’s what we tried to do. We ran ads and created messaging both for the analyst looking to make his job easier (with case studies and easy onboarding), and for the Director/Head of marketing who needed to be convinced of the quality of the product (with thought leadership and brand campaigns).
Here are the three questions again:
Why should organisations buy our product?
Who will buy our product?
Among them, who can present the product at their appraisal and ask for a raise?
Once you have these answers clear, all that other jazz of giving the personas names and creating characters out of them can happen. And of course, every product is different, and the derivations of these basics will change. But the fundamentals are the same. This is the starting point. Begin here.