Cogo Strategy Blog

Though Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is about targeting entire accounts as opposed to individuals, there are still individual stakeholders that make up the buying team for those accounts. As such, you must understand those buyers; otherwise, your campaign efforts may fall on deaf ears.

To create the highly personalized campaigns that ABM requires, you must speak directly to the individual buyers that make up each target account — and one way to do that is to utilize a persona-based approach by creating ABM personas.

What Are Buyer Personas?

A buyer persona is a fictionalized and generalized representation of a brand’s ideal customer. Creating a buyer persona helps you better understand your target audience more deeply. Buyer personas consider your ideal customer’s goals, needs, pain points, decision-making processes, and even demographics. This enables you to create more targeted, personalized content that speaks directly to your target audience.

Buyer Personas and ABM Strategies

Though an ABM strategy involves targeting an entire account instead of individual customers, it’s important to remember that each account is still composed of individuals who hold the buying power and make the decisions. Thus, by creating ABM personas, you can develop more personalized campaigns that speak directly to the buyers and stakeholders in each account.

If you simply create a persona based on the account as a whole instead of the individuals within the account who hold the buying power, then your campaigns will not be as effective.

Creating Effective ABM Personas

1. Gather and Analyze Account Data

Before identifying the individuals in an account that you need to target, it does help to gather and analyze data on the account as a whole as a first step. You essentially want to do a deep-dive analysis to understand the account’s market, the goals and needs of the account, and any other patterns or trends in the data that feel relevant.

2. Build Out Contacts and Identify Their Roles

The next step is where you’ll start digging even deeper to identify the target contacts in the account, as these individuals are who the personas will be based on. You want to identify the most important contacts and understand their roles. An average B2B contract will have around seven stakeholders, but it could be more or less depending on the size of the account.

3. Creating Your Personas Based on Those Roles

Once you’ve identified the key contacts, you’ll then start labeling them with one of the following personas:

• The Champion: This is the person who is passionate about what you are offering. They will likely advocate for you and your solution to the other personas.
• The Influencer: This is the person who is deeply invested in the outcome of the buying decision, and they will provide critical feedback throughout the sales process.
• The Decision Maker: This is the person who will ultimately make the final buying decision or who is likely to be the buyer.

You can and should, of course, add more detail to the individual personas as you see fit, but these three persona roles are most important as they will help you tailor your content to these individuals based on how they are likely to make decisions or influence the buying decision.

4. Match Your Messaging to Your Personas

The final step, of course, is to match your messaging to your personas so that it resonates with them. You want to ensure that throughout the content you create and no matter what channels you use, each persona receives their own call to action based on the role they will play in the buying process.

The champion, for example, will likely do things on their own and take action to learn more about what you are offering without necessarily consulting the other personas first. This could include signing up for a demo or attending a webinar. However, you must create messaging targeted at the champion that encourages or incentivizes them to bring an influencer or decision-maker along, as this increases the likelihood of converting them.

Effective ABM Solutions

Creating ABM personas will help make your marketing strategy more human, which will make it more effective. The goal of ABM is to create more personalized campaigns for individual accounts, and creating personas is an excellent way to help you better understand the people who hold the buying power within those accounts.

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