Derived personas

Persona classification transforms raw customer data into semantic buyer understanding that AI can use to generate context and drive personalized decisions across every channel and journey. This unified profile empowers:

  • Journey branching – Split paths route leads by persona, engagement depth, and role
  • Journey arbitration – Determines which nurture journey a lead belongs to right now, avoiding message collisions across concurrent programs
  • Content personalization – Content that is role-specific narratives (“for an executive” or “for a practitioner”)
  • Sales Qualifier context – Business development representatives (BDRs) receive a one-screen summary showing the individual’s identity, their interests, and their current stage in the buyer journey

Default personas default-ersonas

For the Beta release of Marketo Optimizer, the following default personas are defined according to the job title attribute:

Persona
Job titles
CXO / EVP
CEO, CIO, CTO, CMO, CFO, Executive Vice President of Strategy
SVP / VP
SVP of Marketing, VP of Sales, SVP of Operations, VP of Product, VP of IT
Senior Manager / Manager
Senior Marketing Manager, IT Manager, Operations Manager, Sales Manager, HR Manager
Individual Contributor
Account Executive, Software Engineer, Marketing Specialist, Customer Success Representative
Analyst
Business Analyst, Data Analyst, Market Research Analyst, Financial Analyst, Operations Analyst
Developer
Front-End Developer, Back-End Developer, Full-Stack Developer, Mobile App Developer, DevOps Engineer
Professional Staff
HR Specialist, Legal Counsel, Compliance Officer, Project Manager, Procurement Specialist
Consultant
Management Consultant, IT Consultant, Business Process Consultant, Marketing Consultant
Other
Industry Specialist, Independent Advisor, Freelance Consultant, Subject Matter Expert
NOTE
In the upcoming General Availability release, you can edit any of these default personas according to the needs of your organization. It will also support custom persona definitions and mapping.

Filter by derived persona derived-persona-filter

Marketo Optimizer derives a persona for each person record by evaluating the record attributes against the defined personas. You can use the inferred result — the Derived Persona — as a filter when defining the audience for a people list or for segmenting in a person journey.

The Derived Persona filter appears in the filter panel under the Person attributes category.

People lists people-lists

When managing members in a static people list or defining rules for a dynamic people list, you can filter by Derived Persona to target all people whose attributes match a specific configured persona.

Derived persona filtering for a people list {width="750" modal="regular"}

Static list — Add members

  1. Open the static list and click Add people at the top right.

  2. In the filter dialog, expand People attributes and drag Derived Persona onto the canvas.

  3. In the filter condition, choose is and select one or more personas from the list.

  4. Click Done to apply the filter and qualify matching people into the list.

Dynamic list — Set membership rules

  1. Open the dynamic list and select the Rules tab.

  2. Click Edit rules.

  3. In the filter dialog, expand People attributes and drag Derived Persona onto the canvas.

  4. In the filter condition, choose is and select one or more personas from the list.

  5. Click Done to save the rule.

    Membership is updated automatically as person records are evaluated against the rule.

Person journeys person-journeys

When you configure segmentation for a person journey in a Split paths node, you can use a derived persona as a person profile filter to control which people enter the journey path.

Derived persona filtering for a split path condition {width="750" modal="regular"}

  1. Click the Split paths node in the journey canvas.

  2. In the node properties panel on the right, click Apply condition or Edit condition for a path.

  3. In the filter dialog, expand People attributes and drag Derived Persona onto the canvas.

  4. In the filter condition, choose is and select one or more personas from the list.

  5. Click Done to save the filter for the path.

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