Need a B2B persona for senior HR Leaders?
Knowing your audience is the first step in constructing strong B2B marketing campaigns. You need to understand their motivations and pain points, but also how you can pragmatically reach them. This series of articles provides deep dives on the audiences we target most regularly here at Velo.
Senior leaders at large organisations who are responsible for HR can have a number of different job titles. This can include:
- HR, including CHRO
- People Management
- Talent Management
- Chief People Officer
What are their responsibilities?
- Talent recruitment, development and retention:
- Aligning with organisational objectives to create an environment for the best people to work, grow and develop.
- Ownership of the employee benefit offer.
- Nurturing an inclusive and diverse culture:
- Fostering a culture that is inclusive, diverse and effective. Owning policies in this area.
- Implementing structures that drive high-quality team performance.
- Cost-effective administrative operations:
- Ensuring compliance across different jurisdictions, globally.
- Managing HRIS systems for efficient operations.
- Workforce development in emerging areas:
- Growing the company’s skills — especially in emerging areas, such as AI.
- Addressing workforce development needs as new technologies emerge to align with the organisational strategy.
- Leadership coaching and development:
- Coaching and developing future and senior leaders.
- Ensuring continuity across the organisational hierarchy.
- Alignment of people policies and strategies:
- Aligning people policies and strategies with the organisation’s culture and objectives.
- Navigating Change Effectively:
- Managing change, including mergers and acquisitions, new offices, teams and capabilities.
- Addressing the sequential impact of constant changes on the workforce.
What are their main pain points?
Senior HR leaders grapple with the challenge of aligning workforce development with organisational ambitions, driving change and maintaining a consistently happy and effective team to meet daily business demands. It’s a broad role that often goes unrecognised.
Many HR Leaders are navigating:
- Regulation changes: not just driven by changes such as Brexit, but around working time regulations. In addition, the growth of AI and other technologies demand new policies and guidance.
- Flexible Working: providing conditions and guidance so the staff continue to perform from locations outside of the office.
- Workforce resilience: post-Covid-19, supporting managers as they lead teams spread across different locations and to drive awareness of mental health.
- Young talent: ensuring new talent that join the company in junior positions is effective. Habits differ across generations, so each wave of new staff requires new levels of support to integrate effectively.
- Team retention and recruitment: perhaps the most important factor is having the best talent as possible in the organisation. This means retaining your best performers and being able to effectively recruit new faces when you need to.
- Employee experience: providing the tools for managers and employees alike to self-service their HR needs and have the reporting information they need at their fingertips. The growth of cloud-based HR tools and digitisation across companies is driving changes in ways of working that show no signs of slowing down.
What is important in messaging?
For B2B marketers, crafting messaging that aligns with business outcomes and recognises the daily challenges of delivering HR services that are fit for purpose and move with the times is essential.
Ultimately, we’re talking about people. As a consequence, there is a lot of scope for emotional, people-driven storytelling showing how the development of individuals and teams leads to better business outcomes. Making sure messaging sees the bigger picture and the “why” to story tell around impact is vital.
The most common channels to reach senior HR leaders include:
- Social media dominance:
- Social media platforms — especially LinkedIn — are vital. HR Leaders network with each other. They share the same challenges faced at other organisations, and their choice of career path means there are limited roles available. The HR function is always significantly smaller than a sales operation!
- Association involvement:
- Active participation in associations for industry insights and networking, like the CIPD, provides opportunities to reach the audience. As regulation changes, continuous professional development for HR leaders is essential. After all, as someone responsible for people’s development, you should make sure that you are developing yourself, too!
- Strategic presence at conferences and events:
- Much of this learning comes from events and conferences, so they’re an important part of your marketing calendar — particularly associations’ events.
- Direct mail in targeted campaigns:
- Deploying tactics like direct mail — especially in Account-Based Marketing (ABM) campaigns — is recommended.
- Influencer-driven inbound content:
- Crafting inbound content by amplifying opinions of influencers from similar organisations.
- Utilising industry surveys to provide an aggregate view on contemporary challenges faced by HR leaders.
- Beyond salary surveys:
- Going beyond basic salary surveys, focusing on overarching trends in people-related challenges.
- Highlighting support and policy recommendations to navigate these challenges effectively.
Would you like to build out a persona, or plan a campaign to find and engage with these personas? We’d love to help. You can read more about our skills here
