How systematic persona development moved this global marketing platform way closer to its customers
TL;DR
A B2B2C marketing tech (martech) platform connecting major global sports and entertainment brands with tens of millions of engaged end users had grown organically without systematically discovering who those users actually were. Its next key challenge was an ambitious period of scaling. But, the business lacked a clear idea of who its end users were. Customer iQ was brought in to develop a set of evidence-based personas, focusing on their situation, needs and key behaviours. The outputs gave the business the ability to articulate their users’ motivations with precision, communicate to them more effectively, and walk into enterprise client conversations with a compelling, evidence-backed picture of the audience they deliver.
About the client
The client is a world-leading B2B2C technology platform operating at the intersection of consumer engagement, data and communications. They serve hundreds of major enterprise clients across sports, entertainment, media and events, providing a service those clients use to reach and engage their own audiences directly.
The challenge we accepted
The client’s value sits in the middle of a three-way relationship: the platform, the enterprise clients who pay to reach audiences through it, and the end users who engage with the service day to day. Enterprise clients need to understand the value of that end-user audience to justify ongoing investment. And the platform itself needed to understand user motivations to sharpen its own communication and product strategy.
The problem: despite operating at significant scale, the business had no systematic, research-backed framework describing who its users were. Anecdotal knowledge existed, but it hadn’t been validated or structured in a way that could drive decisions. As the business entered its most ambitious growth phase, the gap between what they knew and what they needed to know became impossible to ignore. They needed user insight they could act on internally, and present externally to clients.
How Customer iQ partnered with the client
We designed a survey deployed to the client’s existing user base, with dual purpose: to gather broad quantitative data on user characteristics and motivations, and to recruit a qualified sample of participants for follow-up qualitative research. This approach meant the discovery interviews were grounded in representative data from the outset, rather than relying on self-selected volunteers.
Discovery interviews were then conducted across a range of user types, exploring the motivations, habits and attitudes that sat behind the survey data. From that qualitative layer, a set of user personas were developed, and critically, each persona was mapped back against both the survey data and the client’s user database, giving the personas statistical weight rather than leaving them as impressionistic sketches.
The final deliverable was a messaging playbook: a practical guide translating persona insight into communication strategy, giving the internal team the tools to apply what had been learned.
What we discovered
Specific findings from this engagement are confidential. The section below describes the nature of the discoveries without disclosing the content.
Users are not a monolith – and treating them as one has a cost
The research revealed meaningful distinctions between user types that weren’t visible in aggregate platform data. Different users engage with the service for fundamentally different reasons, and those differences have direct implications for how to communicate with them.
Motivation, not behaviour, is the most useful signal
What users do turns out to be a less useful predictor of engagement and loyalty than why they do it. The interview layer surfaced motivational patterns that the survey data alone couldn’t have revealed – patterns that are now central to how the business thinks about its audience.
Enterprise clients need a story, not just statistics
The research confirmed that the client’s enterprise customers wanted more than demographic data about end users. They wanted to understand the audience as people: what drives them, what they care about, and how the platform helps reach those people more meaningfully.
What happened next?
Immediate Actions
- Adopted the persona framework as the internal reference point for communication planning
- Began applying the messaging playbook to user-facing communications across channels
- Integrated the validated personas into enterprise client conversations as a proof-of-audience tool
- Used database mapping to quantify the size of each persona segment within the live user base
Business Results
- A clear strategic framework in place to support the business’s next phase of growth
- The ability to present enterprise clients with a research-backed portrait of who their shared audience really is
- Direct impact of the work is to follow, watch this space
Cultural Impact
The research moved the business from operating on assumption to operating on evidence. The persona framework has given internal teams a shared language for talking about users – something that previously didn’t exist despite the platform’s scale.
Why this partnership worked
Three things made this engagement effective:
- The survey-to-interview pipeline meant the qualitative findings had quantitative grounding from the start
- Mapping personas back to the live user database (with their permission of course) gave the business something deployable, not just descriptive
- We kept the dual audience in view throughout – the internal team who needed to act on the insight, and the enterprise clients who needed to see it
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