Buyer Personas in the Capital Markets

If you pay much attention to the lead generation and lead nurturing world, you’ve been hearing a lot lately about the concept of a buyer persona. This is not a new idea. Effective sales people who manage complex sales cycles with multiple decision makers have been using these concepts for decades to flesh out the key business issues, needs, decision criteria, and prejudices of each key member of the buying committee. The best sales people map out the players and their issues and sell to each individual based on their needs and interests.  That’s how you close large deals.

But this concept is relatively new to Marketing. Traditionally, Marketing has developed feature/benefit focused content and collateral that focused on the product or solution rather than focusing on the business needs of the prospect.

In a “Sales 2.0” world, this approach no longer works. Now, Marketing needs to think more like an experienced sales person – identifying the key buying influencers and understanding their responsibilities, business needs, interests, and even how they like to consume information.  Here’s a helpful blog post that describes the process of defining buyer personas.  http://www.b2bbloggers.com/blog/how-to-create-buyer-personas/

In the B2B world, when marketing organizations take on this task, they often start from very generic buyer personas:  economic buyer, technical buyer, and user. But for those of us selling into the capital markets, that’s not enough. We need to develop content that targets people based on roles, departments, and business types. Are you targeting traders? They want quick, high level content that gets right to the point. Do you need to communicate with CTOs and architects? They want more detail about implementation. High frequency trading shops have different needs than phone-based agency B/Ds. Front office has different needs from back office, and they consume information differently.

Once you have your buyer personas defined, focus on developing content specifically targeted to those audiences. The way to deliver relevant content is by understanding who you’re trying to reach and what they care about. The beauty of buyer personas is that they enable you to get inside the head of your prospects and walk in their shoes

The marketers who do this the best are the most effective in demonstrating thought leadership and positioning their firms as market leaders. Firms who ignore this approach do so at their own peril.

Warm regards,

Candyce