I’m Martha Mathers, MVP with Gartner for Marketers, and I focus on demand generation, personalization and content marketing.

So one popular question I get from B2B clients all the time is how do we build personas? What information should we put in them? How do we use them? And who do we involve in creating them?

Most clients do a really nice job involving sellers building personas that are really rich in data, behavioral data that they gather from their websites? Market research they might have on pharmagraphics and often understanding about individual stakeholders, their demographics, what their roles look like and that kind of thing.

We see often that folks will build around somebody's priorities at work, enhancing productivity, saving time, reducing risk. But where we really see leaders set themselves apart is focusing on emotions like success and security and pride and work, promotion and those sorts of things.

The second thing that a lot of people miss when they're building personas, is the fact that B2B buying doesn't happen alone. There's no such thing, is a single senior decision maker and so the best personas we see don't just account for the rational and emotional, but they think a little bit about who does this individual interface with. What are their points of connection? Their points of disconnect? What are the priorities that each individual has, both for themselves and in their interactions with others?

Personas can get you in a great spot from a commercial results perspective. If you think about mapping to connect fires together, if you can identify that shared concern that more than one member of your buying group has you can use, that is really ground zero and from there build all kinds of rich content that increases your likelihood of a high quality deal that enables folks to connect with one another and that really focuses your content, not just on promoting how great your products are or how a certain customer should work with you but building content that connects those diverse stakeholders together.

So we're often asked for case studies examples of companies who have done a really nice job with this. Kimberly Clark professional is one of the first companies that shared this type of persona with us and right out of the gates it was so impressive in terms of how they didn't just think about what might make somebody buy or consider a supplier. But they thought about how does this person spend their day? What is success look like in their mind? What are their greatest frustrations? And, of course, who did they work with most frequently? Who do they debate with most frequently? was really inspiring and give us a great jumping off point.

Free takeaways for brands who are building interpersonal personas would be one, understand you're buying group, who are those key stakeholders that you need to understand in the first place? Two, go to the personas you have already? They'll certainly be a great starting point, but have you covered the emotional? Have you covered how these individuals feel when they're making a purchase of this magnitude? And have you covered the extent to which they're interacting with others and how they feel about others? And then three? Once you have those personas updated or refined, take a look and look for the commonalities across each one of them. Where do you see those common threads? Those common concerns and priorities that could provide the foundation for a ton of great campaigns and content designed to win over not just one buyer, but many buyers.