Nothing beats a well-crafted buyer persona. A buyer persona allows you to target your ideal customers and craft content that engages them enough to build a relationship with them and ultimately convert them into buyers. While learning how to create a buyer persona may seem daunting, it is actually quite simple, and today, we’re going to show you how to do just that.
Key Takeaways:
- Well-defined buyer personas can help your marketing and sales teams to better focus their time and resources on prospects most likely to convert into customers.
- Only about 48% of high-performing B2B organizations provide their sales team with buyer personas, which is a major factor in why their lead generation efforts are not as effective.
- A single buyer persona is not enough. Today’s B2B buyers are complex and comprise six to eight distinct personas, each needing a tailored approach.
Do You Need a Detailed Buyer Persona?
B2B companies need a detailed buyer persona. Without one, it’s difficult to know exactly who your target audience is, including their needs, wants, and expectations.
A detailed buyer persona provides invaluable insight into your ideal customer and allows you to tailor your marketing, product development, and customer service to meet their needs.
Research shows that B2B marketing leaders use buyer personas for four reasons:
- Formulate more focused demand generation and account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns with a strong value proposition and compelling messaging.
- Maximize the relatability of the brand and product/service communications.
- Assist in creating targeted customer loyalty incentives and programs.
- Help the sales team understand their prospects’ needs to make decisions and close deals.
With these points in mind, marketing and sales teams need to understand that today’s B2B buyer is increasingly complex and consists of multiple individuals, each with unique needs and expectations. Therefore, you need to create more than one buyer persona to get a complete picture of your target audience.
Consider the following individuals when creating a B2B buyer persona:
- The initiator: Responsible for discovering a solution to the problem and the first to come into contact with the product or service.
- The buyer: Ensures the product or service is the best option.
- The decision-maker: Approves the purchase after making sure it’s the best solution.
- The influencer: Capable of swaying the decision-maker’s opinion.
- The gatekeeper: Manages the purchase process and is typically the contact point between the company and the buyer.
- The user: This is the actual product or service user and has an indirect influence on the buying process. They are the ones who will use the product or service and report back on its performance.
Meeting each buyer’s diverse needs is essential for gaining long-term customers. Once you’ve identified your buyer personas, you can combine them into an ideal customer profile.
Source: HubSpot
What Makes a Buyer Persona Effective?
A detailed buyer persona enables you to understand your target audience’s needs, motivations, and challenges, as well as their preferred communication channels and buying behaviors. This information allows you to tailor your marketing and sales strategies to your target customers and ensures you are targeting the right people with the right messages.
Video Suggestion: How to Create B2B Buyer Personas That Actually Connect
How to Create a Buyer Persona in 5 Steps
From franchise companies to B2B SaaS providers, a well-defined buyer persona will help you craft the right message to attract and convert your ideal customer.
Not sure where to start? Here are five simple steps to creating an effective buyer persona to help you connect with your ideal customers.
1. Know Your Buyers
While this may seem like a no-brainer, you may be surprised to know that under half of the top-performing companies have a clear picture of their target audience. This can lead to a disconnect between you and your customers and an increased likelihood of overspending on marketing campaigns.
To understand who your buyers are, begin with audience research to learn about your existing customers. This can be as simple as sending out a survey to your current customers or using a focus group. From there, you can build a picture of your target audience and how they interact with your business.
2. Segment Buyers
Segmenting buyers is an important part of creating an effective buyer persona. Understanding the variations in different buyer personas’ needs, interests, and motivations allows you to craft more tailored content.
Segmenting buyers can also reveal potential customer segments that have gone unnoticed, giving you a chance to gain more growth opportunities.
3. Outline The Persona
When creating a B2B buyer persona, capturing all the relevant information about your target buyers is important. This includes demographic information such as age, gender, occupation, and geographic location.
It also includes psychographic factors such as interests, values, and motivations. Additionally, you need to include specifics about how the buyers use your product or service, their purchasing behavior, and how they interact with your brand.
Understanding these buyer persona elements can help you better target campaigns, develop more effective messaging, and understand how to serve your buyers better.
4. Fill in The Buyer’s Persona
It’s time to fill in the buyer’s persona. Depending on your business’s size and the customer base’s complexity, you may have multiple personas.
Be sure to include the following information when creating a buyer persona:
- Demographics – Gender, age, marital status, location, etc.
- Interests – The type of content they prefer, products they are interested in, etc.
- Motivations – What drives their decisions?
- Challenges – What problems do they face?
- Goals – What are their goals in their interaction with your business?
5. Use Your Buyer Persona to Inform Your Marketing & Sales Strategies
Once you have created your buyer personas, use them to develop marketing and sales strategies to help you reach your ideal customers.
For example, you can use the demographics, interests, motivations, and challenges of your buyer personas to create targeted campaigns and content that will appeal to your ideal customers.
You can also use the buyer persona’s goals to determine which products and services your customers are likely interested in.
Additionally, you can use buyer personas to understand purchasing behavior better and develop more effective messaging and marketing materials to build trust and credibility with customers. This ultimately increases the chances of generating more conversions.
Source: Lean Labs
Understanding Your Audience is a Critical Step that Can’t Be Missed Come 2023
We must recognize the critical step of understanding our audience and creating buyer personas as we move into 2023.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, you need to stay up to date on the latest technologies, services, and products out there and carefully identify where your brand fits into the market. From there, you can create buyer personas that reflect the needs and wants of your target audience and help your marketing and sales teams connect with potential customers better.
