How to Maximize the Impact of Your Website When Targeting Two Personas

Many companies today pursue a pincer GTM. First, target the individual user and then convince the economic buyer, typically a manager, director, or VP depending on the scale. Two constituents in the sales motion, but only one website raises a conundrum. Who do you serve on the home page?

Technical products often face this two persona quandary. And it surfaces on the website because of the constraint of a single home page.

Successful marketing builds trust. Building trust with engineers is entirely different than building trust with marketers. Engineers prefer to spend time in Github evaluating a product’s technical prowess, in the documentation to learn how to wield the technology, and in the forums understanding the nature of the community. Technical acumen, applied content marketing, and superlative documentation build that trust.

But don’t apply the same approach with a VP Marketing or Sales and expect success.

There’s a front door to a website and a side door. Both are equally important, but each door is for a different constituency. The front door is for direct traffic, for the persona that navigates to a site because they’ve searched for the company or received an email with the website.

The side door is the pathway of deep links. The side door leads to documentation, blog posts, community brought via referral. When I wrote code, I spent time on developer forums and communities. I would read blog posts that would link to other posts and eventually product documentation or tutorial videos. A modern engineer probably spends the same or more time on StackOverflow or dev.to or DataScienceCentral today as I did ten years ago.

The best technical marketers make that part of the site as appealing as possible: theming the site differently for developers (dark mode is quite appealing), investing time in the best possible documentation with examples that are easily copy/pasted, and a vibrant community to troubleshoot issues swiftly.

The homepage of the website can be targeted another persona. They are typically filled with social proofs like logo walls and case studies to establish credibility in a different way. After that credibility is established, these pages describe the problem and the solution at the highest levels to provide executive sponsors context and comfort as they progress through the purchasing cycle. And they also serve as massive lead generation engines with whitepaper download forms or email capture fields.

Look to Hashicorp, LaunchDarkly, Twilio among others as examples. Front-door is social proof and high level vision. Side-door is documentation.

If your business pursues a pincer GTM, define your personas, understand their pathways to your website and tailor the content to each.