CIO Persona: Top Tips for Marketing to the Top Tech Decision-Maker

Speak Agency • May 18, 2023

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Understanding your audience is perhaps the most critical step to creating more successful marketing campaigns. Whether you go to the painstaking effort of developing buyer personas or classify audiences in a less formal way, you need to know your customers inside and out.

If your business sells to other businesses, odds are C-level executives (such as CEOs, CFOs and CIOs) are an important audience for you. That’s especially the case for high cost products, services and technologies.

Although it might be tempting to create a single persona for all executives, it’s smart to consider the unique characteristics and personalities of each individual who has a seat in the executive boardroom. There's a real opportunity to beat the competition to the table if you understand which executive will be eager to hear your story.

The fact is CEOs have very different ideas and mindsets than CIOs, who look at things in completely different ways than CFOs and COOs. By simply lumping everyone together and defining all executives as one, you risk creating marketing messages and content that fall flat.

CIOs have more influence on the broader organization strategy than ever before. Their influence extends beyond your company's technology department and can include everything from operations and analytics to customer service and marketing. If your product or service focuses on the customer experience, analytics, or enhancing line of business processes, you'll need to win over the CIO.

There are already enough barriers that make it challenging to reach busy company leaders. Do yourself a favor and make sure you understand the intricacies of each executive position so you can speak its language.