How to Create a “B2B Buyer Persona”
Posted: Sat Dec 07, 2024 5:13 am
To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and get your content seen by the right audience, it's important to understand your customers beyond demographics.
We must therefore ask ourselves a series of questions that are more profound than the simple role in the company, sector or geolocation of the prospect.
In addition to these important questions that represent an excellent starting point, we must therefore ask ourselves, for example:
Knowing these answers is essential to create effective spain whatsapp mobile phone number list B2B marketing campaigns. The way to do this is to create what is technically called Buyer Personas. Buyer Personas are an “avatar” of the typical customer based on demographics, behavior, lifestyle and purchasing motivations based on the role they hold in the company. In a B2B context, buyer personas therefore represent the buyers who make purchasing decisions in the company.
Creating a Buyer Persona in B2B
The basic steps for creating a B2B buyer persona are similar to B2C customer personas, with a few important distinctions. Let’s look at the steps for creating buyer personas that will help you plan and make your marketing campaigns effective.
The image shows the differences between target audience and buyer persona.
There are some important attributes to identify in your buyer personas, as, as mentioned, you need to deepen your understanding of your customers, thinking about their lifestyle, motivations, challenges, and goals. Here are some categories that most marketers include:
Demographics: What is their age, location, and company/industry?
Career: How long have they been in the industry, what is their purchasing power, and what needs to happen to make purchasing decisions?
Lifestyle: What are their main responsibilities and work activities?
Media: Where do they go to find reliable sources of information and networking: conferences, forums, and/or corporate social media?
Motivations / Goals / Objectives: What drives their purchasing decisions and what business goals do they have?
Brands: What brands or products do they already use in their company? What do they like/dislike about these products?
Pain points / frustrations / challenges: What problems do they have that they need help solving?
What challenges do they face in trying to achieve their business goals/objectives?
Objections: What are the frustrations they have with related products or services (or yours)?
Keep the above categories in mind as you move to the next step of researching existing buyers and businesses.
PHASE 2
When looking for your ideal buyer, the first step is to brainstorm which industries and companies your product or service would be suitable for.
First of all, if you have an already established company, you can certainly scrutinize in detail the characteristics of your best customers and then, to support the data obtained, you can start using digital tools.
To research B2B buyer personas, LinkedIn certainly provides an in-depth look at various companies and industries.
By looking at employee profiles, you can gather information about how long they have been in the industry or specific company, what their educational background is, what companies they follow, and much more. LinkedIn, as we have seen, is a great place to share articles, communicate with other professionals in forums, and connect with others.
Listen to what people are saying there, as it can tell you about potential motivations, challenges and problems that people in different industries face on a daily basis. It is
also very important to interview one-on-one or to prepare online quizzes (very valid and used today), even small focus groups are fine.
Use the attributes you want to include in your personas to help you plan your interview questions.
Since you are interviewing Business Buyers, remember to be professional and considerate of their time.
In addition to interviews, you can use a variety of tools to extract data, including Google Analytics to examine keywords, so you can find out what buyers search for when they find your website, or Google Keyword Planner to check (as we saw in the SEO chapter) what and how your potential customers search on the search engine.
Also very interesting to use at this stage is the “ANSWER THE PUBLIC” tool that, by inserting certain keywords, gives us the “search intents” (the entire sentences) most searched by users on that specific topic. Once the research phase is completed, it is time to move on to creating your buyer personas.
PHASE 3
After spending so much time gathering data, you should start to see patterns emerge in your prospect “avatars.” You should now segment these buyers by industry and job title, then pool the information to create 2-6 different buyer personas (depending on the decision-making chain of your business) for your marketing team. Each buyer persona should have a name and face to make your avatar as real as possible.
The profile of a buyer persona
PHASE 4
The whole point of creating buyer personas is that it allows you to target your marketing strategies to a segmented audience. Now the best use you can make of this is through B2B CONTENT MARKETING. With all the previous work done, it should now be easier for you to create content that is specific to each persona’s interests, and tailored to where they are along their B2B buying journey.
The B2B Marketing Funnel Shows the Differences Between B2C and B2B
Let's say we're working on creating content to educate a potential customer who is in the "awareness" stage, that is, he has understood that he has a problem to solve, and has decided to solve it with a specific type of solution from those available on the market and is now evaluating among the various companies that offer that type of solution.
Let's take an example with "MARIO ROSSI" that we saw above: Suppose a SaaS company that provides software for managing marketing in the company, believes that Mario Rossi is a potential buyer.
Looking at the Buyer Persona card, Mario finds reliable information first on Google and You Tube.
You know that your software provides specific solutions to his problems, so you create videos and content on your company blog that showcases those solutions.
This content should then be promoted on Google, YouTube, and LinkedIn (social media that Mario primarily uses, i.e. the “media” where it is most likely to be seen by buyers who have the same problems to solve and of the same type as our “ Mario” avatar.
This is a great way to generate “hot” leads, which are very close to purchasing the software in this case.
When choosing the media and content format for your potential buyers, keep in mind that 65% of all people are visual learners and people will spend 10% more time looking at images or videos on a page than just text.
Visual content marketing is a great strategy for all customers, both B2B and B2C.
For many companies, as we have seen, contrary to popular belief, the end of the purchasing process is not the end of our B2B buyer's "journey".
In this digital age where customers, both B2C and B2B, are constantly bombarded with content and advertising, companies must find a way to stand out from the crowd. Using buyer personas, as we have seen in this paragraph, your marketing team can create specific messages and content that will capture the attention of your target audience, convert them and retain them as a customer.
You can write to us to enter the waiting list and nominate your B2B company to receive a personalized Strategic Marketing consultancy to correctly plan the path to take at the B2B Digital Marketing level here:
We must therefore ask ourselves a series of questions that are more profound than the simple role in the company, sector or geolocation of the prospect.
In addition to these important questions that represent an excellent starting point, we must therefore ask ourselves, for example:
Knowing these answers is essential to create effective spain whatsapp mobile phone number list B2B marketing campaigns. The way to do this is to create what is technically called Buyer Personas. Buyer Personas are an “avatar” of the typical customer based on demographics, behavior, lifestyle and purchasing motivations based on the role they hold in the company. In a B2B context, buyer personas therefore represent the buyers who make purchasing decisions in the company.
Creating a Buyer Persona in B2B
The basic steps for creating a B2B buyer persona are similar to B2C customer personas, with a few important distinctions. Let’s look at the steps for creating buyer personas that will help you plan and make your marketing campaigns effective.
The image shows the differences between target audience and buyer persona.
There are some important attributes to identify in your buyer personas, as, as mentioned, you need to deepen your understanding of your customers, thinking about their lifestyle, motivations, challenges, and goals. Here are some categories that most marketers include:
Demographics: What is their age, location, and company/industry?
Career: How long have they been in the industry, what is their purchasing power, and what needs to happen to make purchasing decisions?
Lifestyle: What are their main responsibilities and work activities?
Media: Where do they go to find reliable sources of information and networking: conferences, forums, and/or corporate social media?
Motivations / Goals / Objectives: What drives their purchasing decisions and what business goals do they have?
Brands: What brands or products do they already use in their company? What do they like/dislike about these products?
Pain points / frustrations / challenges: What problems do they have that they need help solving?
What challenges do they face in trying to achieve their business goals/objectives?
Objections: What are the frustrations they have with related products or services (or yours)?
Keep the above categories in mind as you move to the next step of researching existing buyers and businesses.
PHASE 2
When looking for your ideal buyer, the first step is to brainstorm which industries and companies your product or service would be suitable for.
First of all, if you have an already established company, you can certainly scrutinize in detail the characteristics of your best customers and then, to support the data obtained, you can start using digital tools.
To research B2B buyer personas, LinkedIn certainly provides an in-depth look at various companies and industries.
By looking at employee profiles, you can gather information about how long they have been in the industry or specific company, what their educational background is, what companies they follow, and much more. LinkedIn, as we have seen, is a great place to share articles, communicate with other professionals in forums, and connect with others.
Listen to what people are saying there, as it can tell you about potential motivations, challenges and problems that people in different industries face on a daily basis. It is
also very important to interview one-on-one or to prepare online quizzes (very valid and used today), even small focus groups are fine.
Use the attributes you want to include in your personas to help you plan your interview questions.
Since you are interviewing Business Buyers, remember to be professional and considerate of their time.
In addition to interviews, you can use a variety of tools to extract data, including Google Analytics to examine keywords, so you can find out what buyers search for when they find your website, or Google Keyword Planner to check (as we saw in the SEO chapter) what and how your potential customers search on the search engine.
Also very interesting to use at this stage is the “ANSWER THE PUBLIC” tool that, by inserting certain keywords, gives us the “search intents” (the entire sentences) most searched by users on that specific topic. Once the research phase is completed, it is time to move on to creating your buyer personas.
PHASE 3
After spending so much time gathering data, you should start to see patterns emerge in your prospect “avatars.” You should now segment these buyers by industry and job title, then pool the information to create 2-6 different buyer personas (depending on the decision-making chain of your business) for your marketing team. Each buyer persona should have a name and face to make your avatar as real as possible.
The profile of a buyer persona
PHASE 4
The whole point of creating buyer personas is that it allows you to target your marketing strategies to a segmented audience. Now the best use you can make of this is through B2B CONTENT MARKETING. With all the previous work done, it should now be easier for you to create content that is specific to each persona’s interests, and tailored to where they are along their B2B buying journey.
The B2B Marketing Funnel Shows the Differences Between B2C and B2B
Let's say we're working on creating content to educate a potential customer who is in the "awareness" stage, that is, he has understood that he has a problem to solve, and has decided to solve it with a specific type of solution from those available on the market and is now evaluating among the various companies that offer that type of solution.
Let's take an example with "MARIO ROSSI" that we saw above: Suppose a SaaS company that provides software for managing marketing in the company, believes that Mario Rossi is a potential buyer.
Looking at the Buyer Persona card, Mario finds reliable information first on Google and You Tube.
You know that your software provides specific solutions to his problems, so you create videos and content on your company blog that showcases those solutions.
This content should then be promoted on Google, YouTube, and LinkedIn (social media that Mario primarily uses, i.e. the “media” where it is most likely to be seen by buyers who have the same problems to solve and of the same type as our “ Mario” avatar.
This is a great way to generate “hot” leads, which are very close to purchasing the software in this case.
When choosing the media and content format for your potential buyers, keep in mind that 65% of all people are visual learners and people will spend 10% more time looking at images or videos on a page than just text.
Visual content marketing is a great strategy for all customers, both B2B and B2C.
For many companies, as we have seen, contrary to popular belief, the end of the purchasing process is not the end of our B2B buyer's "journey".
In this digital age where customers, both B2C and B2B, are constantly bombarded with content and advertising, companies must find a way to stand out from the crowd. Using buyer personas, as we have seen in this paragraph, your marketing team can create specific messages and content that will capture the attention of your target audience, convert them and retain them as a customer.
You can write to us to enter the waiting list and nominate your B2B company to receive a personalized Strategic Marketing consultancy to correctly plan the path to take at the B2B Digital Marketing level here: