Kiss your personas goodbye (and say hello, AI)!

There’s a great cartoon by Tom Fishburne that cuts right to the quick. A marketer is detailing “Al,” a targeted buyer persona: “39-year-old Scorpio, drives an Acura, watches “Game of Thrones,” has a Jack Russell terrier, favorite Beatle is George.”

When he’s asked, “How will this help us sell ERP software?” he replies, “Sales is your job. I’m in Marketing.”’

Up until now, that’s been the core issue for buyer personas. By necessity, they’re drawn up at the macro level, since marketing traditionally operates at scale. They haven’t incorporated the personalization and 1:1 insights that are key to the sales process.

Personas work, of course. They’ll drive results like one marketer’s 900 percent increase in length of visits, 171 percent uptick in marketing-generated revenue and other lifts.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Venkat Nagaswamy

As co-founder and CEO of MarianaIQ, Venkat Nagaswamy brings a long and diverse background in high technology to bear on applying artificial intelligence and Deep Learning to help marketers make account-based marketing (ABM) an at-scale reality. “Big Kat,” as he was nicknamed by friends and colleagues, has led teams in creating analytics, technology and business development solutions at McKinsey, Juniper Networks and GE Plastics, among others. He’s worked in enterprise and digital consumer hardware, SaaS, corporate and business unit strategy, market entry strategy, product development, marketing planning and more, allowing him to understand martech challenges from both the CTO and CMO’s point of view. A proud graduate of the University of Michigan and the Georgia Institute of Technology, he holds an MBA and a Master’s in Aerospace Engineering.

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