The objectives
A multinational infrastructure software provider had been generating content for its go-to-market campaigns for the general market, and the company was interested in customizing this content for specific types of decision-making personas. It had been awhile since the company engaged in any type of persona research and as a result, the personas they had access to were outdated and missing key pieces of information. Thus, our client was looking to conduct primary research to create profiles of specific types of decision makers its marketing team could use to customize their GTM strategies.
Specific objectives of the research included:
- To create a consistent way to target and develop personas using use cases and market problems
- To transition to a persona-first approach to enable more effective messaging
- To better understand the ideal persona profile definition
our approach
Illuminas recommended a two-phased approach that began with holding internal workshops with key stakeholders of the research and ended with conducting qualitative in-depth interviews (IDIs) with 11 types of IT decision makers in the US, Germany and Japan.
The stakeholder workshops enabled us to gather internal stakeholder feedback about current customer motivations and success and allowed us (in collaboration with the client) to build hypotheses about existing customer segments using the internal feedback.
The IDIs allowed us to validate our hypotheses and build profiles of customers and prospects. The results were used to prioritize each persona based on sales opportunity and level of engagement.
- 154 in-depth interviews
- 66 in-depth interviews in the US
- 44 in-depth interviews in Germany
- 44 in-depth interviews in Japan
- Each interview was approximately 45 minutes in length
- The interviews in Germany and Japan were conducted in the native language
the outcome
- For the first time in over a decade, our client was able to leverage primary research to generate custom content for messaging the company’s go-to-market strategy to each persona.
- The research also helped our client ensure they were addressing the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of each of their key target segments.
- The client is currently conducting a follow-up, quantitative study to better understand each persona’s buyer behavior and purchase journey, as well as brand perceptions of our client within the context of the competitive landscape.