Tips For Creating an Accurate B2B Buyer Persona
B2B marketing can be complicated, especially if you're not sure who exactly you're trying to sell to. That's why a B2B buyer persona is one way to get yourself organized and figure out what exactly your target customer wants.
Once you have an accurate picture of your ideal customer, you'll be able to tailor your message accordingly, which makes them more likely to respond to you and turn into a sales lead.
The Importance of a Detailed B2B Persona for Your Overall Strategy
Without your own custom-built buyer persona, you can never hope to reach the right people with the right message.
It's important to have a well-defined target audience to create a marketing plan that can work for you.
Here are some stats that emphasize the importance of a B2B persona:
Utilizing buyer personas in email campaigns gleans 2x the open rate and 5x the clickthrough rate.
Using buyer personas makes websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.
A self-service provider of cloud automation solutions implemented a targeted content marketing strategy and saw the following results:
- 124% increased sales leads
- 97% increase in online leads
- 55% increase in organic search traffic
- 210% increase in North American site traffic.
What to Consider When Creating Your B2B Buyer Personas
1. Identify Their Potential Purchase Drivers
To create your buyer personas, you must first identify their potential purchase drivers.
Start by identifying what type of business they are in and what kind of purchase power they have compared to other companies.
You will then want to learn about their customers and how they interact.
Once you know these things, you can start building up a picture of who this business is as a customer and how your product will be able to help them.
2. Understand Their Organizational Goals and Priorities
Here are some questions to ask yourself when creating your B2B buyer persona:
- What type of organization is this?
- Do they operate locally, nationally, or internationally?
- What are their immediate goals and desired outcomes for the next 12 months?
- Is this company open to complex products and solutions?
- Does our product or solution fit in with their business's culture?
3. Identify Their Problems and Motivators
The best way to create a buyer persona is by first understanding the problem they are trying to solve.
From there, you can figure out what motivates them and how to tailor your marketing campaign to them.
The most important aspect of this is asking questions and conducting research so that you're able to identify the problem and potential solution from their perspective.
One great tool that can help with this process is a B2B buyer persona template.
You can find several examples with a simple search on Google.
However, remember that you must do thorough research for your ideal customer persona.
Some questions you need to ask are:
- How are they currently doing business?
- Is the company trying to grow faster or cut costs?
- What systems do they have in place?
- What kind of problems are their current systems causing?
- Which of our competitors' solutions are they using?
- How can we make their job easier?
- Can we help their company enough that they will make a switch?
- Does our solution help them get to where they are trying to go faster?
Conclusion
A buyer persona is a marketing tool that can be used to create targeted, accurate messages for your business.
The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to market to them and get the desired results.
When creating B2B buyer personas, you should never forget that there will almost certainly be several personas involved in the decision-making process.
This means you may need to develop several personas and understand their interactions regarding decision-making.
You will also need to ensure that your marketing resonates with each persona.
