How well do you know your customer? B2B businesses can lose track of their organizational goals and client relationships if they do not know their customers well enough. Although, there are ways to learn more about your customers and understand them – through buyer personas. In this article, we aim to teach you about how you can get to know your customers better through buyer personas, and how buyer personas can be used for marketing activities.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is essentially a detailed description of someone who represents your ideal clientele. Buyer personas are classified by position titles, demographics, psychographics details, interests, and behaviors. They can help you to put into perspective your clients’ goals, pain points, and buying patterns. Thoroughly creating a buyer persona will push you to create marketing messages that are targeted specifically for them. Your buyer persona will guide everything from brand voice, social channels used, and even product development. However, different clients may use your products for different things, so you may have to create multiple buyer personas.
Why is having a buyer persona important?
Having a set buyer persona is important for your organization to understand your clients so you can do a better job of acquiring and assisting them. Accurately defining your buyer personas can generate leads and increase revenue. Statistically, 71% of companies that exceed their revenue and lead goals have buyer personas.
Furthermore, buyer personas can help your organization to shift the focus from companies presenting what they do, to what the ideal client needs. Prospects are going to choose to work with organizations that they know and trust. The best way to build trust with your ideal prospect is to show your genuine understanding that you have obtained through detailing your buyer persona.
How can I develop a buyer persona for my B2B business?
The first step to creating a buyer persona is to do in-depth research based on real-world statistics. B2B businesses should gather data on your existing clients, social audiences, the size of businesses, and who makes the purchasing decisions. Crucial demographics to gather are age, location, language, interests, challenges, what social channels they use, and the stage of the buying process they are in. You can gather this information from social media analytics, your customer database, and any other platform that you use to track analytics.
Next, you should identify consumer pain points. What problems are your buyer personas trying to solve? What is holding them back? To figure out which barriers they are facing, engage in social listening. Social listening is the process of monitoring your organization’s social media channels to track any mentions of your brand, your competitors, products, and more. You can learn how your customers are responding to your products – both the positive and the negative. Moreover, you can meet with your customer service team to see what questions and inquiries they receive the most so you can identify patterns within customer pain points.
Now, it’s time to identify your customer goals. While pain points are problems your prospects are trying to solve, goals are positive things they are trying to achieve. Depending on the products or solutions that your B2B organization offers, the goals your buyer persona is working to accomplish can be either personal or professional. Think of what motivates your ideal client. What is their end goal? Your objective of identifying these goals should be to get to know your customers better, not to match them with the solutions you offer. Their goals are important even if they do not specifically relate to your solutions.
Once you have a deep understanding of your customers’ pain points and goals, it’s time to depict how your product or services can help. During this step, you’ll need to analyze which benefits your products or services can offer to your customers. Consider your products and services from the buyer’s point of view.
Three questions you can ask for each of the pain points and goals you’ve identified are:
- How can we help?
- What are our prospects’ main purchasing barriers?
- Where are they in their buyer journey?
Talking to your team members that communicate directly with your customers can be a great way to learn more. Also, you can consult with your customers and those that follow your organization on social media through surveys.
Finally, you can create your buyer persona by gathering all of your research and looking for common characteristics. After grouping those characteristics together, you’ll be able to turn them into a persona that you can identify with and speak to. Make sure to give them a name, job title, home, and other defining characteristics to make them seem like a real person that represents a segment of your customer base.
How B2B businesses can use buyer personas for marketing guidance
Now that you have one or more buyer personas that represent your ideal clientele, the next step is to use those personas to guide the direction of your marketing activities. Here are 4 ways that buyer personas can impact your B2B marketing:
- Product Development: When building product guidelines, your product development team can use buyer personas to help identify and prioritize any changes that are necessary based on what your customers need the most.
- Strategy: Buyer personas can help your organization develop effective marketing strategies. By focusing on your personas while planning and creating content, you’ll be able to identify and prioritize promotional activities. Additionally, you can decipher which keywords are most important to use to reach your target audience.
- Build Rapport: Building rapport is one of the most important steps of the sales process. Understanding what your prospects are struggling with and being prepared to address this will help your sales team to build rapport and be more effective when closing the sale.
- Serve Your Customers: As we mentioned previously, your customer service team can use the personas you identified to learn how to better serve your customers. Training your customer service department on the problems your customers face can aid them in showing empathy to their frustrations.
Your buyer personas can assist your marketing team in determining the most effective strategies to reach your customers.
In conclusion, researching and characterizing your buyer personas that accurately represent your target audience can help you to understand your buyers, retain client relationships, and stay in tune with your B2B organizational goals. At The Growth Engine, we want to help your B2B thrive and achieve your organizational goals. To learn more about building buyer personas, contact our team.
