It’s not all about the C-Suite

Aka why is so much audience/persona mapping in B2B marcomms poorly thought through?

It’s an important question. If you work in B2B marketing, you’re normally told your audience is a functional role (“IT”, “HR”, etc) or the C-Suite leader responsible for a specific function (CIO, Chief People Officer, CMO, CEO etc).

And of course, in many cases, these are the audiences that sign the budgets off for investing with your company. In many cases, they may be the key decision maker.

However, in a very significant way, they’re also not the key decision maker. You don’t want or need to engage them directly through the majority of the sales process. You want to help your direct influencing audience to engage with them; giving them the materials they need to secure interest, support and the right decisions, to help profile them in front of their leadership. This is core to the ‘prescriptive content’ trend I’ve written about elsewhere.

So why does this go wrong?

We conflate ‘senior sponsor’ with ‘senior decision maker’

Many change or innovation programmes have an executive sponsor. A leader in the business nominally responsible for driving programmes associated with a theme, issue, challenge or opportunity. As a board director, I’ve run many such initiatives with teams co-opted from around the business – often spanning functions – contributing thoughts and insights into the programmes.

When things go wrong, I am forced to dip in and do primary research, investigate issues directly and form recommendations on how to tackle the challenge or seize the opportunity we’re looking at.

When things go right, my teams do that, I’m presented with all the research, information and insight the team has collated, given options to pick from, and I can either guide a decision through directly, or recommend next steps in investigating one.

So, whilst your executive sponsors are technically the decision makers, they are choosing from a pre-picked list of options selected by critical influencers over a research process which might run for months before they contact suppliers. Whilst we (they) are crucial audiences, you address them at a different point and in a different mechanism in the customer journey.

We don’t give the influencers the support they need to influence the decision makers – because we don’t know who they are

You want to be in a situation where you’re equipping your potential advocates and influencers with the substance they need to traverse their “journeys” through whatever issue or problem you’re addressing, with the deployment of your solution or service to tackle it as part of the ultimate destination.

First, you need to work out who these people are. Hint: it’s rarely the C-Suite themselves. But starting in a function is a good idea if your offering is targeted to and used by people within it. Investigate the roles specifically. Who would a CXO task with researching solutions to a given problem?

Whilst there are sophisticated tools and data sets available on B2B buying audiences, even something as free and straightforward as playing around with LinkedIn campaign manager can help improve your understanding of organisational structures, roles within a business, audience sizes and profiles in different sectors and so on.

We don’t do this enough. We don’t think about the ‘committees’ of people involved in researching and recommending mitigation measures to the business problems we are trying to fix with our products and services. We just aim for the boss – which is not always a useful approach.

We’re too sheepish about selling

We find it difficult, as marketers, to cut to the rub. That hits on the dirty word – sales – that many of us find uncomfortable, and that we believe belongs in the territory of the sales team.

That’s fine. In the main, we’re not there to sell directly.

But if we’re really helping our customers through a journey, we can’t be sheepish about what we’re doing. We just need to apply the mantra that “selling is helping” to our content marketing efforts. CEB research, as I mentioned here, makes the point that customers are confused by traditional thought leadership content that doesn’t signpost how it’s helping clearly enough. Our goal, in addressing a diverse buying committee, has to be to ensure that our content helps each of those audiences, in each of their stages, clearly move along their journey (of which we are unashamedly part of the destination).

We don’t spend enough time thinking about how customers travel towards a solution.

These journeys will start at different places, travel through different places, but all hopefully end with your brand as part of the destination.

There’s a big difference between what drives one member of a buying committee into or through a journey compared with what might drive a CXO into it. Your content needs to reflect not just the audience role, but their place in the journey.

To explain; say you’re a brand that is well-known in a space, and generally gets a call when there’s a problem… but perhaps lack credibility in a specific area or issue. Then their content marketing efforts might well need to be focussed on demonstrating credibility rather than raising awareness. And it will need to be structured to resonate with the right decision makers – probably the more technical ones – as the C-Suite will probably be OK with the brand if their technical people say it’s OK. The reverse might be true for a disruptive brand.

We don’t think holistically about how to reach these audiences, or we hit them with fragmented messaging and campaigns.

Let’s assume we’ve successfully managed to map a customer buying committee, a target audience or set of audiences, and a journey. All set?

Not always. Because comms teams are so frequently structured around channel-centric silos, we now proceed to execute, say via PR and on social media. But perhaps not via DM and web, or paid channels. And perhaps owned social isn’t well publicized either. And perhaps there’s a second campaign running from a different marketing function at the same time we didn’t know about, targeting notionally similar targets that conflicts your messaging here in some small but critical way.

This is where so much falls down today. We need to think multi-channel, multi-audience, multi-journey from the outset. We need to plan our execution together, strategically.

A world in which all of this is commonplace is not a million miles away. Sophisticated marketers are already doing this today; in fact, one of our scale-up clients in the US has many possible journeys, personas and audiences mapped out, and not only runs its content programmes structured around them but has multi-touch attribution lead scoring set up too. It’s an undertaking that’s worth the effort; the outcome will be marketing that is helping and engaging customers, building intimacy, and positioning you as a trusted advisor to your key audiences. Invest the effort!