I'm amazed by how many business owners say; why bother building a buyer persona since it is just a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer?
Buyer personas are more than just fictional characters. They are the foundation of all your marketing strategies. The better you know whom your service or product helps, the more you can personalize your marketing material and offers to appeal to them.
In this article, we will discuss what buyer personas are from a B2B point of view, how they are useful, how to create them, common errors to avoid when creating them, and some statistics on how buyer personas and personalized content have helped businesses increase sales.
A buyer persona is a detailed description of your ideal customer, the people you can help with your expertise, product, or service.
For B2B businesses, the level of consensus needed for purchases is much higher than for B2C purchases. It is normal for B2B buying groups to sometimes consist of 5–10 decision-makers, (depending on the size of the business you serve) who must reach an agreement before gaining organizational buy-in.
A buyer persona helps you have a clear idea of the people involved in making the decision to buy from you. This is so you can tailor your messages to resonate with each one of them or at least the most relevant job titles in the buying unit.
Before building your buyer persona, you should first identify your ideal customer profile (ICP), or let's call this your target market.
Manufacturing companies in Florida with 50-200 employees and 50,000 square feet of space.
Having identified your target market, you can now build your buyer persona using the relevant job titles in those companies to whom your product or service is most likely fit.
Your buyer persona must include information such as their job responsibilities, whom they report to, their goals and objectives, their biggest challenges, and the trusted channels they use to gain information.
Once you understand the responsibilities, challenges, and motivations of your buyers, it becomes much easier to develop marketing strategies and content that will likely resonate with them.
Here's a practical example of how knowing your buyer personas can help you craft a winning marketing message:
Let's assume you are an IT consulting service firm and you'd like to promote a CRM integration service to the CEO of a manufacturing company below is your buyer persona:
Describing your services this way: "We are an IT consulting firm specializing in CRM integration for manufacturing companies" is likely to be overlooked. Why? You're only stating what you do, not how you help solve their problems.
As opposed to saying:
"We assist CEOs (their title) in manufacturing (their industry) to gain a 360-degree view of sales pipelines and allocate resources effectively (their responsibilities) by leveraging modern customer relationship management tools (your service)"
Why is it likely to grab your buyer's attention? You are talking about their needs, not yours.
This example is by no means flawless. Nevertheless, I hope it gives you a clear picture of how understanding your buyer's needs by building a buyer persona helps you connect with them.
Creating a buyer persona is not a one-time activity. It requires research and continual updating as your target customers evolve. Here’s how to get started:
Start with your current clients: The most effective way to get started is to look at your current clients. What do they have in common? What job titles do you or your sales team often interact with? What problems did they all have that led them to you?
Research: Once you've identified the job titles, do some research on them. Look at industry reports, customer surveys, and social groups where they typically hang out.
The easiest way to do this is to use search engines like Google. Enter the phrase "job description for the job title you're researching". There are thousands of resources that describe their roles and responsibilities
You can also type in phrases like "Top Blogs for <job title>", pick out a few top blogs and see the articles that have the most interactions to get insights into the type of content they interact with and start unpacking what they care about and how your service or product fits into this.
Create your buyer personas: Once you’ve done your research, it's now time to create your buyer personas.
Develop personas for each of your prospects by entering detailed descriptions of the information you've collected about them in a spreadsheet. You can also use free online tools like Hubspot's make my persona.
Test and refine: It's not uncommon for your buyer personas to change over time as your business grows so always make sure they’re accurate. Use creative customer surveys and feedback directly from your clients to refine your buyer personas and make sure they’re up-to-date.
We've seen fancy designs for buyer personas before; you've probably seen some yourself, but what matters most is that they are functional and do what they are supposed to do - which is help you sell better.
When creating your persona, it is critical to focus on the information that matters and not be bogged down by trivial details like pictures and names. You don't need to spend too much time or energy on these. Instead, focus on your buyer's specific challenges, fears, and pain points.
Personas should help you understand your prospects' worlds and identify their emotional and business pain points. The more specific you are, the higher your chances of creating marketing material that delivers value.
According to MarketingInsiderGroup, 93% of companies that exceed lead and revenue goals segment their database by buyer persona.
Boardview reports that Persona-based content increased customer engagement almost six-fold when targeting cold leads (10% versus 58%).
In Mark W. Schaefer's estimation, over 90% of a company's sales are attributed to three or four personas. Business Grow
As a result of implementing a targeted content marketing strategy, Skytap, a provider of cloud automation solutions, achieved the following results as reported by HubSpot :
- Sales leads increased by 124%
- Traffic from organic search grew by 55%
- Online leads increased by 97%
- Traffic to their North American site spiked by 210%
Creating a buyer persona is essential for any business. It helps you understand your target potential customers better and tailor your content, products & services with the right go-to-market strategy that eliminates guesswork and delivers results.