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B2B persona discovery and brand awareness
Until they were acquired in 2021 by a global entity, CDS Visual was a start-up focused on 3D visualization services to help industrial suppliers grow their businesses online. After the acquisition, management had a vision for expanding its services, elevating its brand, and dramatically increasing its exposure to potential new customers.
cat&tonic was tasked by CDS’s leadership team to bring that vision to life by refreshing their brand elements, designing a new website, and developing a lead generation campaign. Learning about and understanding the personas that made up that audience was a critical component of this project.
Research
With the customer data and anecdotal audience information provided by CDS as our foundation, we conducted further research by tapping into various online data sources, and we interviewed several of their customers. From this work, three main personas rose to the top of the list: Marketing Leaders, Manufacturing Executives, and Manufacturing Salespeople.
Top Personal Values
Achievement
Authority
Advancement
Top Psychological Drivers
Proving Competence/Skills
Recognition from Peers
Living an Exciting Life
Insights
We fed this into an AI-driven data platform to determine demographics, behaviors, attitudes about technology, personal values, and psychological drivers of each persona. We learned that the Marketing Leaders (the primary persona) possess attributes such as determination, ambition, open mindedness, and are in search of variety and status.
Interpretation
Our interpretation of this data told us that those in this group are stimulated by challenges, prefer to act as a primary influencer on decision makers, and are advocates of new technology within their company. We also determined that themes of adventure, inventiveness, excitement, and variety in life would resonate best with the audience.
The (intelligent) creative
We developed a creative strategy focused on innovation and the multiple ways CDS’s capabilities could support the business of their target audience, from ecommerce to sales and beyond. We aimed to position them as a company driven by innovation and focused on the desired outcomes of their customers to acquire prestige and prosperity. Visuals illustrated the ability of enhancing perception of any product, even those otherwise considered uninteresting.
We encouraged the development of more in-depth technical content for second-level purchase influencers who have a primary personal value of achievement, meaning that the people most likely to champion CDS as a company are the ones for whom it’s most important to look well-informed and successful to their internal audience.
On a broader level, we elevated the brand to a level more in line with the new CDS vision and strove to keep a consistent look across all channels to form a solid foundation for brand awareness.
Activation
Like many B2B buyers, the top social media network for this audience is LinkedIn, so we utilized that channel heavily for prospecting. We learned that many of them spend 40+ hours online per week, so we added digital display advertising to the mix. When developing retargeting ads, we focused on audience characteristics to develop creative testing.
Other findings about the audience include a high propensity for travel, and a preference for reading the Wall Street Journal over other publications. A longer-term prospecting strategy for this group could take these and other data into consideration.
Upon deployment of the new website and the initial marketing tactics, we kept a close eye on analytics and response data to determine primary areas of interest and made further recommendations around content development.
