When Do CIOs Respond to Marketing Messages?

Best-in-class marketers leverage persona exercises to form an understanding of a customer segment that enables powerful audience-based communications and personalized content to be shaped. The more granular and specific the understanding of the buyer persona, the more meaningful the messaging created for that persona will be.

The apex of our b-to-b persona template is job role. The SiriusDecisions 2012 persona study found that 29 percent of CIOs are most likely to respond to a marketing message when it is relevant to the CIO job role. What this means for marketers is that, when targeting CIOs with content and campaigns, the value proposition should include the CIO’s functional responsibility in the organization and how he or she is measured. Understanding a “day in the life” of the CIO persona is crucial.

Relevance to current CIO initiatives was the next most important messaging criterion identified by the study. 26 percent of CIOs reported that they are likely to respond to marketing messages that are relevant to initiatives they are working on. Another 19 percent of CIOs reported that they are most likely to respond to a marketing message when it relates to a problem they are facing.

Finally, 26 percent of CIOs stated that they would respond to a marketing message when they are currently exploring solutions and the messaging matches a need. Even when the content focuses on the business issues, don’t forget to clearly connect the messaging to the related offering in some way, so that CIOs in active buying cycles don’t get missed.