Table of contents:
- What is a buyer persona?
- Why are buyer personas important?
- Types of buyer personas
- Step by step guide on how to create B2B buyer personas
- Conclusion
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona represents your ideal client decision-maker. As you develop your buyer persona, address every aspect and issue that can influence how, when, and why anyone will buy. These factors include information about demographics, behavioral patterns, motivation, and goals. Here is an example of a persona by hubspot.
Why are Buyer Personas Important?
Personas can be considered marketing code for “knowing your audience.” When you really know who your audience is, you create personalized content that brings positive results.
Marketers who use buyer personas and plan content to the buyer’s journey have 73% more conversions than the companies not adopting this strategy.
Buyer personas also are useful for the following:
- Developing targeted advertising campaigns
- Create the marketing messages that will convert
- Customize marketing as per the needs of different targeted groups
- You can humanize a marketing strategy with the help of a buyer persona which will take your business closer to success
Jill Rowley, social selling pioneer and former Chief Growth Officer at Marketo, had this to say: “The new reality is that marketing needs to know more about sales, sales need to know more about marketing, and we all need to know more about our customers.”
Creating a buyer persona helps you to know your target customer better so you know exactly how to sell to them. San Diego digital marketing company helps you create an online marketing strategy to drive more qualified visitors to your site and convert those visitors into leads and sales.
- 93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals report segmenting their database by Persona
- 56% of companies have created higher quality leads using Persona
- 47% of companies who exceeded sales and revenue goals consistently maintain their Personas
- Companies who use personas could see a 97% increase in website lead generation (quuu.co)
Types Of Buyer Personas
A buyer persona template consists of three parts:
- Personal parameters (like gender, age, etc.)
- Work-related data (like a job title, company)
- A more descriptive part (like the buyer’s objectives, values, and pain-points)
Personal parameters
You can get important data about people who interact with your brand with the help of Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, or any other marketing analytics tools.
This data enables you to reach the correct conclusions regarding the lifestyle, values, mentality, mindset of your customer, which is vital information that is required to develop an effective marketing strategy.
It includes personal information about a customer such as:
- What is the customer’s age, gender, and marital status?
- Does a buyer have kids and pets?
- What are the buyer’s interests and hobbies?
- What is the buyer’s average income?
- Where does a customer live?
- Which social networks does a customer use?
- Which websites does a customer usually visit?
- Which means of communication does a buyer prefer to use?
- What purchases does a buyer usually make?
Work-related data
A job occupies a considerable part of the lives of people, which is why they associate themselves with their job and it usually re-shapes their personalities.
To have a complete picture of your target audience, you should know the occupations and industries your customers are involved in.
This data will help you to can target your ad campaigns at the entrepreneurs, personalize the emails particularly for marketers and it will create amazing opportunities for marketing personalization.
Therefore your customer persona should include their work-related data such as:
- What university has a customer graduated from?
- What is the level of education of your customer?
- What is your customer’s occupation?
- What is the industry a customer works in?
- What is the buyer’s job position at this company?
- What is the buyer’s main goal at work?
- What publications or blogs does a customer read?
- Which tools does the customer use at work?
Objectives, values, and pain points
You need to find out the behavioral drivers, motivations, and life goals of your current and potential customers.
- Make the content even more persona-specific by defining the values of your buyers.
- Structure the main pain-points of your customers, which will help you realize how your brand can help potential buyers attain their goals and overcome the challenges.
Negative buyer personas and micro buyer personas are also created by some businesses.
Negative buyer personas:
- A negative buyer persona is a representation of customers you are not going to sell to. They are created for various reasons.
- It might not be a financially sound decision to sell to that market or making headway with such customers is highly unlikely
- Whatever is the reason, negative personas enable you to have a clear understanding of who your ideal customer is
Micro buyer personas:
- Micro buyer personas can be considered to be an extension of an initial persona.
- It helps businesses to offer more depth as they identify different-type customers that fall under the initial persona.
Step By Step Guide On How To Create B2B Buyer Personas
It is still not a small task to create detailed buyer personas. Research, interviews, and hard data are required to gather sufficient knowledge about the target buyers. Then you have to compile all of this data which will take time as well as resources.
1. Questions to ask
Know all about your customers including their motivations, challenges, and pain points.
- A good buyer persona should have personal, industry-specific, and product-specific information about the buyers
- You can get this information by asking general questions and then you can also ask specific questions as you modify them for your particular target market or industry
- You need to understand how customers behave concerning your products and the background behind that behavior
2. Conduct customer research
Use your experience of buyers, interviews, and data from many sources to find answers to questions. Involve every part of your business from marketing to sales to customer relations to have a correct image of your buyer persona.
- You can conduct your research by:
- Conducting internal interviews
- Surveying your existing customers
- Interviewing other real people
- Confirming what you know with online data
3. Segment your customers
Now segment the rich pool of data about your customers into relevant groups.
Now segment the rich pool of data about your customers into relevant groups.
- Segmentation is grouping your customers separately as per their responses
- It will give you a general idea of your buyer groups
- It also makes you realize how many buyer personas should be created from this point
4. Define your buyer persona
You will already have all data about your ideal customer including the most common segments these customers fall within. Now you will have to define your B2B buyer persona.
Figure out what elements should be included in each profile. The following are the common characteristics that are present in a group of customers.
- Name
- Personal data/description
- Identifiers
- Role at work
- Work / industry-related data
- Success factors
- Action points / messaging
Conclusion
Buyer personas can help drive sales and increase revenue growth provided they are used the right way. The in-depth data they provide about your customers will enable you to better structure your products as well as marketing for maximum effect. San Diego internet marketing can help you to promote a brand including its products and services to online audiences using the Internet.
Stats and infographics sources:
https://reverbico.com/blog/buyer-persona/
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/build-buyer-personas
Deepak Wadhwani has over 20 years experience in software/wireless technologies. He has worked with Fortune 500 companies including Intuit, ESRI, Qualcomm, Sprint, Verizon, Vodafone, Nortel, Microsoft and Oracle in over 60 countries. Deepak has worked on Internet marketing projects in San Diego, Los Angeles, Orange Country, Denver, Nashville, Kansas City, New York, San Francisco and Huntsville. Deepak has been a founder of technology Startups for one of the first Cityguides, yellow pages online and web based enterprise solutions. He is an internet marketing and technology expert & co-founder for a San Diego Internet marketing company.
