Sure wish I’d written this awesome B2B post by Jeremy Victor “Buyer Personas: Where (and How!) to Start”! He does an excellent job of explaining this all-important small business marketing step.
Buyer personas are composites (descriptions or profiles) of all of the characteristics of your ideal B2B customer.
Personas help you to improve your marketing because (in the process) you take a deep dive into understanding your ideal customers as buyers and as people.
- Based on their job function, what are their key concerns and risks?
- What is their role in the buying process?
- What are their trusted information sources for problem solving online and offline?
- How old are they, how many kids do they have?
- What’s their favorite vacation spot?
Importance of the Human Side
When Umpqua bank’s marketing EVP developed its small business owner buyer persona they found that their ideal buyer persona had young children so they created a hugely successful marketing campaign around starting a kids lemonade stand. Or, your first small business. By understanding their buyers as people, they struck a chord and hit a homerun using traditional marketing tools.
Base Your Content on Your Personas
Use your meaty buyer profiles/personas to plan the types of content you’ll create. Look for what’s missing in your current content based on your personas.
Invest your time and resources to develop rock-solid problem solving content that helps your ideal prospects and customers solve problems. From their unique point of view. (It’s not about your view of your personas problems.)
Keep your buyer personas front and center when preparing your marketing pieces and content (articles, web pages, white papers, blogs, online videos, case studies).
Ask yourself and your team: will this piece of content help my buyers to find answers when they need them?
How does this content or marketing piece educate my buyers and prospects? How well does my website content engage prospects to trust the information I provide about how my products and services solve problems? Keep them returning to my website for more information or contact me?
As Jeremy Victor says at B2BBloggers, “Forget social media and content marketing for a moment, the reason buyer personas matter so much is that B2B buyers and B2B buying has changed. So even if you never decide to venture into Twitter or Facebook, you still need buyer personas to effectively create trade ads, tradeshow booth signage, or any marketing material if you want to reach these changed B2B buyers.”
Check out Jeremy Victor’s complete post here. In my next post, I’ll share one of my experiences about creating buyer personas with a 10 person B2B services firm.
Image: istock.com
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