The benefits of developing a set of ideal buyer personas are huge if you’re looking to attract more prospects and generate more leads for your B2B company. This applies if you’re using traditional marketing, social media marketing, or both. (Here is an excellent post on ‘humanizing’ your buyers.)
Your marketing, sales and customer interactions will improve after you’ve documented an exact, complete view of your ideal buyers’ profile. Then use the buyer personas to guide every aspect of your marketing.
A buyer persona is an overall description of everything you know about your most profitable, ideal buyers.
I promise you that you’ll create more valuable content for your customers and website visitors by going through the ideal buyers personas process. You’ll zero in on exactly who your ideal buyers are.
- You and your team will focus your creative energies specifically on what’s most important to your ideal buyers
- You will stop creating marketing and sales information for EVERYONE in your industry
- You will become more competitive by drilling down to the essential info most valued by your ideal buyers when creating content
So if you decide to create your buyer personas, here’s one idea for how to approach the project. This buyer persona profiling process worked successfully for a 10-person B2B company that I worked with recently.
1. Make a list of your top ideal buyer ‘types’. Choose buyers and influencers that have the biggest impact on your company’s revenues and bottom line. Focus on your most profitable customers including:
– The customers that love your products and services.
– The ones that recommend you to others.
– The customers that are most loyal to your brand.
– Do not include the customers that are a constant drain on your people and resources—unless (somehow) they are also profitable.
For a B2B company your ideal buyer personas list might cover job titles such as, Director of Operations/COO, Chief Technical Officer or IT Director, head of human resources, VP of sales. Also, you may include the two to three key types of people that participate in the research phase of the buying process for your products and services.
2. Create a draft of your ideal buyer personas (profiles)
Prepare buyer persona profiles that you will use inside your company with your team. You’ll outline or describe a composite profile of each of your ideal buyers.
Develop these personas for your top three to five ideal buyers. Make it fun! Come up with a fictitious name for each persona.
Start with basic demographic information about each persona such as title, gender, age, marital status, geographic location and educational background. Describe their role in purchasing. Decision maker? Influencer? Researcher?
Add more in-depth characteristics about each one’s business style, challenges, priorities, and attitudes:
– What are their main concerns?
– What are the top hurdles each persona faces when working to achieve their goals and metrics?
– What is this person’s decision-making process?
– What are her/his views on the state of your industry?
– How would you describe their work ethic?
– What do they read? What are their trusted industry sources?
Include questions about the human side of your ideal buyers.
– Do they have children?
– What are his/her non-work activities?
– When visiting his/her office, what do their photos and mementos say about them?
– What are their favorite sports or past times?
– What are they passionate about?
You’ll end up with a profile or persona description for each of your ideal buyer types that includes 25 to 35 characteristics or more.
3. Get your team’s input. Ask your team members to add to your draft profiles. They’ll provide even more insights based on their own impressions from conversations and experiences during customer interactions.
In our case, we got the entire team’s input during a working lunch session. We had wide-ranging discussions about the draft personas over pizza. Everyone provided feedback and added facts and observations to the CEO’s buyer persona drafts. Each team member contributed valuable additional details by sharing their experiences with key clients that fit each persona.
4. Use your final ideal buyer personas as guides for all things customer. They will keep you on track when creating marketing content. Are you meeting the needs of your ideal buyers?
At the end of our process, the 10-person company had a good handle on its customers’ priorities. It was a surprisingly easy and fun exercise for everyone. The final personas were used by the B2B company to create content for a revised website including case studies.
What are your experiences in creating buyer personas?
Image: istock
I agree with you that buyer personas are important and as an advertising student we always used these as a key point of information in our campaigns. But do you have any recommendations for new businesses that don’t know very much about their customers yet? How would they approach getting this information from their currents customers?