Great marketing and branding starts with empathy and logic. With understanding who your audience is, what they need (which may not be what they say they want), their end goal, motivations, and how your product or service helps them get into alignment, to solutions, to a better place. Uncovering this data, and, ideally, original insights is the first action to shaping a powerful brand and taking the first step in catching attention in our busy, overstimulated times.

Of course, we’d also want to understand where they spend their time online and offline. From there, you can start ideating, structuring your messaging and campaign frameworks and segment in the way of digital platforms available to you. Personalisation and account based marketing could not function without these steps - but more on applied segmentation later in this article. First, let’s explore audience empathy for brand strategy purposes.

Audience data and insights informing brand decisions

We’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: a value proposition, values and a brand framework is not there to stick on the wall or let it gather dust in presentation slides. They exist to help your product and marketing team in everything they do, from prioritising features to pricing to fonts. Consistency across all company behaviours is crucial to strengthen brand recognition and appeal - and a brand becomes real by all the actions you take out in the real world. 

But brand markers are only as powerful as well they connect to the people they are trying to reach. As such, to start at the very beginning, a powerful brand is informed by deeply understanding what the audience needs, what generally motivates their buying decisions and how current societal and cultural currents and themes informs choices. (In our latest B2B branding trend report we explore at length how this is true for business to business brand identities too - if not truer, due to the highest stakes a lot of supplier decisions represent.)

And herein lies one of branding’s biggest dilemmas: should you play it safe and familiar, be expected and accepted? Or stand out, take a stand, and risk alienating some? The truth is, there are no hard and fast rules. Just look at “quiet luxury” and its understated looks, inspiring many a high net worth individual and slowly creeping into high street fashion. Some brands will stand out with their outstanding discretion or create demand based on scarcity. However, whichever way you go, you really can’t appeal to everyone and knowing what your core brand personality is as well who do you want to inspire to action will help triangulate the right direction. Boldness might not be for every business or every moment, and understated sophistication is a valid choice for many. Mileage may vary in terms of appropriately professional look and feel - but what your audience thinks and feels should truly inform the positioning and the value proposition. We’ve written previously about theprocess and importance of crafting a strong value proposition, and, of course, this ties directly into understanding your audience.

Who do you really aim to reach?

Looking at long list of potential job titles who compose your target audience - or worse, starting only with the type of companies you are targeting - it is easy to lose sight of whose attention you need to catch first. A simple framework to help focus and prioritise, is the Champions, Economic Buyers and End Users structure.

Champions
These are the people who really get and love what you do. Your solution will help them the most, whether it is via time, effectiveness, visibility or career goals. They’re the ones who lean in during pitches, give enthusiastic feedback, and push for your product internally. They might not be the one signing the contract but they’re absolutely essential to bringing you to the table and sponsoring you through the procurement and setup process. Identifying these people can influence not just your marketing, but even product development.

Economic Buyers
These are the people who sign off the budget. They may be less involved day-to-day, but your messaging must speak to their ultimate motivations: ROI, risk, long-term impact, company vision. Even if they’re not your first point of contact, you need to ensure there is messaging aligned to their objectives, cutting straight to the point and your content answers their unspoken questions.

End Users
Often overlooked, these are the people who experience your product or service directly. They might be the ones doing initial research so SEO and user-level value proposition language can be as crucial as gaining trust from the C-suite. They will also play a role post-onboarding. The smallest user experience detail can tip them into advocacy or frustration. When they’re supported, empowered, and understood, satisfied end-users can become strong advocates for your brand.

At SmallGiants, we often work with clients to identify their champion personas and shape their brand positioning and messaging around them. But this is just the first step, the core value proposition. Working across the framework, messaging is also aligned to Economic Buyers and End Users, to be visible at the right touchpoints in research, sales processes and informative or thought leadership content. Wherever budget allows, or in situations that call for 1-2-1 or 1-2-few ABM planning, we also recommend mapping supporting content and campaign strategies to reach them, because true growth is never driven by just one persona.

Audience segmentation shaping campaigns across disciplines

In order to showcase how mapping these personas and segments onto different campaigns and tools, we asked our internal experts to share how this plays out in day-to-day work, from automation and CRM to paid media and social strategy.

From our Head of Automation

Understanding your audience in the realms of automation and CRMs will directly impact your bottom line. It begins with analyising and understanding your existing data and segmenting audiences based on where contacts sit within your funnel. This helps to identify selling opportunities, plug conversion leaks, and avoid wasting budget storing outdated records. Persona based segmentation then allows for personalised marketing, which leads to more relevant messaging, stronger engagement, and better campaign performance.

Retention also improves - when audiences feel seen, they stay.

To define segments, we start by reviewing existing customer data. What kind of companies already buy from you? What are their attributes: industry, job title, revenue? We then build personas, looking at buying triggers, pain points, motivations, and align messaging accordingly. Every campaign asset is then tied to these insights, enabling better reporting, smarter spend, and continuous refinement.

Grace Gray

Head of Marketing Automation at SmallGiants

From our Paid Media Lead

When it comes to ads, targeting is everything. Without a clear understanding of your audience, you waste budget on impressions that never convert. The right targeting however ensures messaging is relevant, leading to better performance, with higher engagement of the right audiences, CTRs and conversions.

Knowing your audience means identifying the right sectors and job titles to target as well as their objectives. On platforms like LinkedIn we do this through company size, skills and seniority; on Google through user intent and keyword behaviour. From there, we build strategies using a mix of predefined and custom audiences, adjusting over time based on performance.

The best paid campaigns continuously optimise messaging and targeting, using segmentation to ensure every ad speaks to the right person at the right time, on the right platform.

Kanita Copra

Paid Media Lead at SmallGiants

From our Social Media Lead

In B2B, relevance is everything as customer needs can be more specific and objective then for B2C. If your content doesn’t speak to these specific needs of your audience, it won’t engage, and it won’t convert. Worse, it will be to the detriment of your budget and brand authority. Audience understanding on the other hand allows us to personalise content, deliver value, and thereby highlight your industry expertise and position yourself as a thought leader.

We define audiences by looking at firm demographics (industry, size, revenue), key decision-makers and influencers (like economic buyers vs end users), and behavioural data (platform use, content engagement, previous interactions).

We then create targeted messaging, select the right channels, and monitor the full journey - tracking where drop-offs happen, what performs best, and how to adapt. Understanding audience needs and challenges is also key to thought leadership and building a profile people want to follow. If your content speaks to the right pain points, you position your brand as a problem-solver, not just a seller.

Saad Khan

Social Media Lead at SmallGiants

Connecting the dots

Understanding your audience isn’t just a phase in a project plan, it’s the connective tissue between brand, marketing and commercial success. When done well, segmentation doesn’t only improve campaign efficiency or messaging clarity (though it certainly does that too)! It can reveal strategic blind spots. Should inform product decisions. It can spark repositioning, unlock a clearer brand voice, or uncover a whole new champion persona that helps you win deals.

In our work at SmallGiants, we find that revisiting audience insights and really digging into who gets excited about what you do and why often leads to sharper decisions. More focused messaging, better campaign priorities and ultimately, better KPIs. Understanding who you’re speaking to changes how you show up in the world.

And in a landscape as saturated, fast-moving and high-stakes as B2B, that clarity is everything: relevance, memorability and results.