Building Buyers with Data

From psychographic profiles to demographic details, you can construct amazingly detailed portraits of individual customers. There’s another important role such data can fill: It’s also the raw material for building buyer personas using aggregate data from your entire customer base and third-party data enhancement. By developing buyer personas, you’re essentially building better buyers by getting in touch with what your customers want and delivering more of it.

Let’s take a look at what it takes to build customer personas using data enhancement.

Brainstorm about Buyers

Understanding your buyers starts with a brainstorming session about the customers you want to reach. Who is your ideal customer? Do you have more than one customer type you’d like to court? Many B2B companies do, and they develop multiple buyer personas to model each market segment they’re reaching.

Some questions you and your MARKETING AI® consultant might consider include:

What industry types are we reaching?
Where are our ideal customers located?
How do our customers interact with us?
What priorities do they seek in a brand?
How frequently do they buy?
How long is the ideal lead lifecycle?

Add Data Overlays

You now know who you believe your ideal buyers to be; now it’s time to compare these prototype buyer personas with the data you and your MARKETING AI have gathered. Analytics of existing data tell you who your actual audience is; ideally, you’ll see many points of contact where your initial buyer personas overlap with your analytics, but chances are you’ll need to do a little trimming to fit your data more closely.

You might find, for instance, that your actual sales footprint is larger than you think, drawing buyers from a wider geographical area than you’d originally thought. That’s a sign to expand your horizons and reach farther into your region with your marketing efforts.

Incorporate Enhanced Data

Your initial data set may be well-maintained already, but it could always be better with data enhancement. Verification and completion of records gives you more detailed knowledge of your prospects, which in turn helps you develop more sophisticated buyer personas. Your data enhancement consultant can help you improve the accuracy and completeness of existing records that can then generate more insight into your leads.

Build Lead Scoring Algorithms

Your original buyer personas are now backed up with hard data and enriched with data enhancement, so it’s time to create the yardstick by which you’ll measure the expected value of incoming leads. Grading prospects on how closely they approach one of your ideal buyer personas gives you a good indication of how to proceed with them. Some leads will be nearly sales-ready; others may need some time to progress through a customized lead nurture program. With lead scoring, you’ll know which is which and send them where they need to be to make sound buying decisions.

Revisit Personas

Data enhancement is an ongoing process, not a one-and-done event. Over time, your buyer personas can change and grow, so review your models periodically and compare personas against your most recent data to make sure you’re still on the right track to be where your best customers are.