Tailoring Marketing for Diverse Personas at Scale

Shownotes

Matthew Leopold from LexisNexis shares how they segment their messaging for different stakeholders in the buying process, from managing partners to IT directors to users. He discusses challenges around data privacy and attribution in B2B marketing. The importance of understanding sales teams and aligning marketing and sales goals is also covered.

Best Moments

• 07:52
  How LexisNexis measures marketing impact beyond lead generation, discussing conversion rates and retention.
• 12:32
  The challenges of targeting the right audience for a new product launch while ensuring data privacy compliance.
• 16:37
  How LexisNexis brings different stakeholders like managing partners and users together to collaborate more effectively.
• 23:50
  Valuable advice from Matthew on improving sales and marketing alignment through understanding each other's goals, challenges, and feedback.

About the guest

Matthew is a strategic marketer specializing in technology marketing for B2B and B2C blue-chip corporates. He has been involved in shaping and implementing brand strategies and communications for most of his career. He has driven brand marketing for FTSE 100 and NYSE-listed businesses in the UK, USA, and several countries.

Connect with Matthew Leopold

Key takeaways

• Personalized marketing is important for diverse personas in professional services firms like law firms
• Understanding the buying journey and different needs of stakeholders like partners, IT directors, and users is key
• Attribution is difficult in B2B but tracking engagement, conversion, and retention is important
• Regulated industries face data privacy challenges that marketing must work within  
• Aligning sales and marketing goals through collaboration and understanding each team’s perspectives improves effectiveness
• Thought leadership should provide relevant insights sales can leverage with clients

Quotes

“I think no matter how many meetings I have with our clients, or with lawyers, I will never have as much time on the front line, as our salespeople will.”

– Matthew Leopold on why marketing should understand the sales perspective.

Highlights from this episode

Can you share some specific examples of how Lexus has segmented its messaging to reach different personas like managing partners, IT directors, and users?

Matthew provided some specific examples of how LexisNexis segments its messaging to reach different personas within law firms:

• For CTOs/IT directors, they focus on explaining how their SaaS product will work with the firm’s technology stack, how implementation will be managed, and how LexisNexis can support onboarding and enhance the firm’s tech roadmap. 
• For senior lawyers/partners, the messaging focuses more on how the product supports winning more business, working faster, and mitigating the risk of error by leveraging LexisNexis’s large legal content database. 
• For managing partners, the discussions center around how to make the firm more innovative, utilize the best technology, and retain staff through supporting the strategic goals of reputation, budget, and morale.

He noted tailoring the messaging to address the specific needs, priorities, and level of understanding of each persona within the buying process.

How does Lexus manage the impact and measure the success of marketing initiatives? What are some of the key metrics you focus on?

Matthew shared that LexisNexis goes beyond lead generation metrics to measure marketing impact and success. Some of the key metrics they focus on include:

• Conversion of leads to opportunities and sales, including what was purchased and at what price point.
• Retention and renewal rates for existing customers. 
• Senior leadership engagement through relationships built with key decision-makers.
• Usage and adoption of new products to gauge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. 
• Attribution modeling to understand which marketing activities contributed to a sale and where opportunities exist.
• Tracking engagement with content and understanding which messaging resonates through digital analytics tools.

The goal is to measure impact across the entire customer journey and determine what role branding, communications, and content play in moving prospects through the funnel.

How do you combine the need for personalization in digital marketing with data privacy challenges? What tactics have you undertaken?

Matthew explained that as a provider of legal and business intelligence services, LexisNexis handles a vast amount of sensitive customer data and sits at the center of their clients’ technology systems. Due to this, the company takes an extremely rigorous approach to data privacy and compliance with regulations.

He noted they do not view it as “overcoming” the challenges of personalization within these constraints, but rather carefully operating within legal and ethical bounds. Where a highly personalized digital marketing message may not be possible without access to specific individual-level customer insights, LexisNexis aims to craft broader brand campaigns that can still resonate across diverse personas.

The sales team then plays an important role in having more tailored conversations once engaged with a lead, now privy to relevant details. Matthew also described how they leverage aggregated analytics on content consumption patterns and conversions to understand messaging effectiveness, without targeting individuals directly.

Through this multifaceted strategy of compliant broad branding paired with personalized sales discussions informed by insights, LexisNexis strives to balance data-driven personalization with its responsibility to clients’ privacy as a leader in the sensitive legal sector.

How are you enabling different stakeholders within law firms to collaborate more effectively?

Matthew shared that as a single supplier with relationships across technology and legal stakeholders, LexisNexis is uniquely positioned to facilitate collaboration. Some ways they enable this include:

• Helping solve firms’ internal problems by connecting roles like CTOs and senior lawyers to address similar issues. 
• Building networks for stakeholders like CTOs and innovation specialists across multiple firms to work together.
• Hosting discussions bringing together different roles within a firm, like presenting AI thought leadership to a group including managing partners, senior partners, CTOs, and senior lawyers. 
• Sharing insights and best practices from other firms to spur internal conversations on strategic topics like AI adoption.
• Acting as a trusted partner that all stakeholders rely on, creating a common point of interest to help different functions within firms work more cohesively.

From your experience, what advice would you give to improve the relationship between sales and marketing teams to better align their goals and metrics?

Matthew advised that the most important thing is for marketing and sales teams to get to know each other well. He recommended marketers get to understand the real-life challenges salespeople face when meeting with clients and making calls. Marketers should listen to what materials and support would help sales engage clients more effectively. 

He also stressed the importance of involving the sales team in marketing planning, not just handing over leads. Having two-way conversations to understand each function’s perspectives and goals is key.

Additionally, Matthew suggested marketers create content like thought leadership that provides relevant insights sales can leverage in conversations. Gathering feedback from sales on resonating topics helps with this.

The ultimate goal, he noted, is facilitating profitable sales. So both teams must work closely together to understand opportunities that exist to improve lead generation, conversion rates, deal sizes, and renewals through better alignment.

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