Do you want to target the right audience with the right message at the right time?
Well, you need to create an effective buyer persona for your business. And in this article, I’m going to show you the best way to create a B2B buyer persona.
But, first, let me tell you briefly about the buyer persona and how it can help your business.
What is a B2B Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone representing your target customer. Buyer Persona is also known as the customer persona or audience persona.
Whether you are in the B2B or B2C space, a buyer persona is an important element of marketing strategy. For consumer brands, a buyer persona represents their direct consumers while in B2B the buyer persona represents decision-makers or key individuals involved in the buying process for target companies.
Why do you need a B2B Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is crucial for every aspect of a business from product design, and sales, to marketing.
Here are a few ways B2B brands can use buyer persona –
- Target social media ads more effectively
- Create an effective content strategy
- Run targeted Google Ads
- Increase ROI on a marketing campaign
- Find the perfect marketing channel
- Set up effective marketing automation
- Create an effective sales & marketing funnel
For instance, a marketer can use a buyer persona to build an effective marketing strategy, salespeople can use it to create a compelling pitch and the product team can use it to identify the needs of consumers and develop solutions accordingly.
Remember, creating a B2B buyer persona is not just a marketing team’s responsibility – instead every team & department should come together to create an effective buyer persona.
5 Steps to Create B2B Buyer Personas
In this section, I will walk you through every step of identifying your target audience and creating a robust B2B buyer persona.
Ready? Let’s get started.
1. Identify an Ideal Customer Profile for your business
In B2B, the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) plays a crucial role in picking up the accounts that would fit right for your business product.
ICP represents the ideal target company for a B2B company. And B2B buyer persona represents the key individuals in those companies that you or your sales representative will have to deal with.
This is why to create a buyer persona, you first need to define your ideal customer. In case you have a diverse range of target companies, you may have to create multiple ICPs.
An ideal customer profile should include company information like industry, company size, revenue, location, challenges, goals, etc.
2. Group your existing clients based on ICP
Once you have identified your ideal customer profile, group your existing clients & contacts based on each customer profile you have identified.
For example, if you run a website development agency, you can have two different ideal customer profiles for small businesses & enterprise clients.
In this step, you just have to group your existing clients and contacts into two groups belonging to the respective customer profiles.
CRM software like HubSpot enables you to easily create lists using filters like industry, company size, revenue, and other attributes matching your ideal customer profile.
3. Learn about your customers
Next, pick one of the ideal customer profiles and learn everything about the contacts under that profile.
As mentioned earlier, a buyer persona is a representation of your target customers. So, it must be able to answer most of the questions about them.
If you are unsure where to start and how to gather such information, here are a few of my suggestions to get started –
- Survey your customers: Send a set of questions to your customers related to the products they are using and also include some questions to know about their professional goals, performance KPIs, etc., to get insights about their professional lives.
- Interview your customers: Surveying can provide you with useful data about the professional life of your buyers but interviewing them can provide you insights into their personalities.
- Interview your team members: No one can give you better insights into your customers better than your customer-facing teams – Sales & customer service. Interview them and you’ll find out the common objections, market scenarios, customers’ expectations, and a lot more.
- Use social media: You can use social channels like LinkedIn to find information related to educational qualifications, industry experience, and more about your target audience.
The most important thing to remember when researching a buyer persona is to never assume anything about customers. Instead, you should try every possible way to find information or just leave it blank.
Also, before starting with surveys and interviews, sit with your team and create a list of questions that you want the personas to answer.
Here are a few common questions that your B2B buyer persona must answer (feel free to add more) –
- What is the buyer’s gender?
- What is the buyer’s age?
- How does the buyer spend his/her day?
- What does the buyer read for fun?
- How does the buyer consume information?
- How experienced the buyer is?
- What level of education has the buyer achieved?
- What type of company does the buyer work for?
- What is the buyer’s role/title in the company?
- What are the buyer’s biggest challenges at work?
- What are the performance KPIs of the Buyer?
- What are the buyer’s pain points?
- Does the buyer need the approval to make purchasing decisions?
- What are the buyer’s most common objections?
- How can your product or service help the buyer achieve his/her targets?
- How tech-savvy is the buyer?
- Which social networks does the buyer prefer?
- How does the buyer prefer to communicate?
4. Create your buyer persona
By now, you have gathered so much data about your clients. Analyze the data and you will see a common pattern among them.
Based on the pattern you observe, segment your contacts into different groups based on the attributes like job roles, goals, challenges, etc. The key is to figure out the attributes that you can use to define a set of contacts and distinguish them from others.
Once you have segmented the contacts, put the information together for each segment and create your personas. And each buyer persona should have a name and job title.
Using such an in-depth Buyer persona, your team can picture the target audience and create more relevant and convertible content, email, or even a sales presentation.
You can keep your B2B buyer persona as simple as it is or make it visually appealing as I will show you in the next section.