Personas, Profiles & Scoring Models: Marketing Automation

I’ve written past blogs about the different components of Marketing Automation. That topic is made up of 1) E-mail Marketing 2) Dynamic Landing Pages 3) Scoring Models and 4) CRM Integration or at least the ability to send leads to sales. Let’s focus on Scoring Models.

You’ve heard of customer Personas. You’ve heard of customer Profiles and now we’re throwing scoring models at you?! What’s the differences between them all?

Many people focus on building out a Persona based on the past. That’s important, but put the time in for a scoring model. This will also show you the present and future state of a persona and get immediate use.

Customer Persona

Customer Personas are research-based archetypal representations of who buyers are, what they are trying to accomplish, what goals drive their behavior, how they think, how they buy, and why they make buying decisions. In other words, it’s a general group of people you’re targeting based on a mix of 1) Who they are 2) What you know they need and 3) what you think they need.

To put it in the typical B2B example, you would have different persona’s for Buyers and Engineers.

Customer Profile

Depending on who you talk to, Customer Profile is the exact same thing as a Customer Persona. Not Quite. The Profile aspect is one piece of the persona pie. It helps you identify the individuals that fit the criteria for being in the persona.

Using our example, the following titles would go under the Buyer Persona: Sr. Buyer, Buyer, Associate Buyer, Sourcing, Sourcing Manager, Supply Chain, etc. You could also add additional attributes based on previous data you have. Have it more detailed by age group or location or any other attribute you currently have access to.

Scoring Model

Scoring Models are a Marketing Automation function that make developing Persona’s worthwhile. There are two parts. The profile piece as covered above. It identifies who YOU as a business want to target. The second piece is Engagement. This helps identify of the persona, who wants to do business with you and in most cases, it’s based on digital activity. Did they submit a form? Did they attend a webinar? Click certain urls? Open certain e-mails?

The Buyer Persona rates the following titles based on Alphabet: Buyer (A), Sourcing (B), Supply Chain (C) and Other (D). It rates the following online activities as numeric: Form Submit (1), Link Click (2), E-mail Open (3) and Nothing (4). A1 is a Buyer who is very interested and D4 is a non buyer title who is not at all interested. A1’s tend to fill out forms that lead to sales, whereas B2’s tend want to talk on the phone. Now you know how to direct your sales organization on how to interact with certain personas.

Coming full circle, a customer profile is a scoring element that falls under the customer persona. The scoring model allows you to both learn about the customers in the persona group and then target them with relevant information based on their interactions. My advice? Focus on developing a scoring model and see what results you garner from it. This will create a persona for you that is real, current and ever evolving.