Persona development is a well-established part of effective message formulation. It’s an activity I personally find really interesting and love working on with clients. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s essentially about profiling the kind of people involved in the buying cycle, then inventing fictional characters that personify the key attributes of the roles you are targeting.

Sharing personas is a great way to get anyone involved in a campaign to tune into your target audience. They can also be used to map interests and benefits on a role-by-role basis. For example, if your solution can improve operational efficiency, make this a key part of your message to 'Pete,' your notional data centre manager. If your offering can streamline software delivery, that’s something to major on with 'Gemma', the persona that typifies a head of engineering.

Content planning becomes a lot easier once you've defined a set of relevant personas. You can map which marketing assets are likely to resonate with whom, ensuring you have relevant material scoped out for each important role. But when working with personas, I frequently see marketing teams missing something really important. Let’s take a step back so I can explain.

Tapping into the impact and uncertainty of change

Rapid and continuous change is a fact of life in IT. As a result, most IT leaders and practitioners understand that the days of departments, teams, or individuals working in hermetically sealed silos are over. Cooperation and collaboration are essential in today’s dynamic and interconnected IT and business environments. It’s also generally accepted that disruption of the status quo is inevitable with the continued march of automation and AI.

Some of the people you want to reach and engage see all this as a threat, while others view it as an exciting opportunity. Either way, many are hungry for insights, tips, and tricks to help them navigate an increasingly joined-up and automated world. Against this backdrop, some of the most sought-after content deals with topics tangential to people’s core responsibilities. Material that addresses what goes on at the intersection of different roles is also highly valued.

To illustrate this principle, I recently received an interesting perspective from someone responsible for their organisation’s storage infrastructure. They told me, "Everyone in my group now has to work much more directly with application, development, and data science teams. One of my priorities is getting them up to speed on things like cloud, AI, and DevOps. I don’t need them to become experts in these areas, just knowledgeable enough to hold their own when making storage-related recommendations."

Another example comes from a head of software development I interviewed as part of a research project. She said, "As part of our overall 'shift left' strategy, my team now has to think more about security, quality management, and other activities that used to be taken care of downstream by specialist groups. They’re also having to collaborate with operations on software stability and performance, which is new for them."

Think laterally to engage on a different level

So, as you craft or revise your personas and put your content plans together, I’d encourage you to think laterally about the interests of the people you’re targeting beyond their core responsibilities. Educating or encouraging someone on a topic that’s outside of their comfort zone is one of the best ways to win their heart as well as their mind.

In my work as an industry analyst, I've often been asked for insights and tips on how to influence other people's agendas and how to get the buy-in of different stakeholders and decision-makers. This underscores the value of a well-rounded approach to persona-based marketing, one that takes into account not just what people need to do, but also what they need to know to do it well.