Buyer persona
A B2B buyer persona is a full picture of the person in a company you want target with your services or marketing efforts. Creating a buyer persona is essential in B2B marketing. You write out how your ideal buyer looks and how he or she behaves regarding the services or products that you are offering.
Whether you are developing a content marketing strategy, mapping a buyer journey or running a paid advertising campaign, it all starts with the buyer persona. A buyer persona is a full description of characteristics of your ideal buyer: what drives the buyer? What are his objections? How does the buyer do research?
Creating a buyer persona is a joint effort between marketing and sales. Both departments have pieces of information regarding your ideal customer. While sales focuses on closing the deal and negotiating the best deal possible, marketing focuses on make sure your brand is know and trusted by the buyer.
In short: having a buyer persona in place is a crucial element of a good lead generation strategy.
A buyer persona in B2B
The procurement process in B2B environments is often complex and involves multiple decision makers. This means that you need to create different sorts of content with different goals in mind. Creating a B2B buyer persona (together with a B2B marketing agency) is the first step in getting your digital strategy crystal clear.
Is your target the key-user? Or is it the manager in C-level? Or maybe the middle management that decides over the budget spent?
Creating a buyer persona starts with outlining demographics, psychographics, aspirations, objections and more of your ideal buyer. To obtain this information in a B2B context you can use multiple techniques like:
Internal brainstorming and structured interview
Often there is already a lot of knowledge about the ideal buyer in the organization. By having (guided) interview sessions and brainstorms with different departments valuable information can come up. Working with specific templates and well-defined structures make sure you already have a good view on who the buyer persona is.
External interviews with clients and prospects
No better method to know what goes on in the mind of your customer then to ask them right? A key-element to defining buyer personas is to go and talk to your customers. This does not only mean customers that have already bought from your company. But also prospects or companies that maybe did not buy.
By asking the right questions you can uncover what your ideal buyer needs during his buyer journey and how you can give it to him/her.
Your B2B buyer persona partner
If you are looking to make your B2B marketing strategy a success we are here to help you. Weblevels can help you in conducting interviews, structuring buyer research and guiding you in getting a consistent buyer persona template for the whole organization to use. Based on these profiles we can help you to set-up a fitting content marketing strategy. If you would like to start yourself, download a free b2b buyer persona template .
Creating a buyer persona is an essential element of your segmentation and will really help to optimize your buyer journey and generate more leads.
Contact us to talk about creating a buyer persona