The Ultimate Guide to Creating B2B Buyer Personas

Every organization should have a B2B buyer persona to understand their leads and audience better and ultimately strive to stand out from their competitors.

But what are buyer personas?

How do you use them to elevate your business?

This is your ultimate guide on B2B buyer personas. From who they are to how they can improve your business to the reasons why you should create one, we’ve got you covered.

What Is A B2B Buyer Persona?

First things first, what is a B2B buyer persona? Well, in plain words, a B2B buyer persona is a key description of your target business and customer that includes all information from demographics to their needs, their goals, and even the products they use.

But, there is so much more to a buyer persona than just the description. They are used by businesses and agencies to understand and predict consumer behavior and attitudes. To understand the benefits of persona construction, it is important to understand how brands build customer relationships and why they tend to work in different ways.

Broadly speaking, a buyer persona is the set of attributes that a company wants its product to possess and express in its advert and websites.

The Importance Of Developing A Buyer Persona for Your Business

As your business grows and you begin to have more repeated customers, the need to develop a buyer persona to match their needs becomes even more important.

By understanding your customers and what motivates them to purchase your product or service, you can leverage your experience as a professional to help them understand their needs and desires better.

According to a content marketing eBook by Curata, 63% of marketers create their content being based on their buyer persona template. Needless to say, that’s an important number that deserves to be taken into consideration.

Creating your brand within your business also makes good business sense. A personal brand will allow your business owner to stand out from the competition, allowing customers to recognize who they are dealing with based solely on their own experiences with the business.

By having their own “look” and feeling comfortable with who they are dealing with, business owners have a much better chance of retaining their customers for longer periods.

Building a strong, reliable, and recognizable persona within your business also helps to increase your chances of attracting new customers, which ultimately helps to boost your bottom line.

Simply put, developing B2B buyer personas is one of the keys to the successful operation of many businesses. Customers want to know that the business they are dealing with is established and professional.

Creating B2B Buyer Personas

As you probably understood by now, creating B2B buyer personas is an extremely important part of the business as you’ll be able to understand your clients and what they want and need.

But how to create the perfect buyer persona? Let’s go through the most important steps to consider and follow to ultimately create the perfect business model for your company.

Investing in buyer persona research
Just like any other asset or company equipment, investing in buyer persona research will highly increase your chances of growing your company efficiently.

Send online surveys to your audience, use your social media to ask questions that will help create B2B buyer personas, read market research, or read your competitor’s blogs and comments on it.

The main idea behind the research is to help you come up with stronger marketing messages and, at the same time, build stronger trust among your target market.

Have a correct conception of your buyer persona

If you want to get an accurate understanding of your buyer persona, you should have a correct conception of it in the first place.

First of all, do not assume that every buyer is going to buy your product just because they fit your ideal profile. Keep in mind that some clients won’t even consider your product and, therefore, buyer personas do not guarantee you sales.

However, B2B buyer personas will help you understand the big picture and see the helicopter view of what your customers want and need in general.

In short, be realistic and make sure to understand that the conception of buyer personas is to develop your future products, learn how to properly follow up on sales, and understand other essential factors that influence customer retention.

Getting together a list of all paying customers

When you think about developing your business and the relation with your clients, the first thing that probably comes to mind is getting together a list of all paying customers.

This will help you understand the pattern that drove them to get your product and choose your company over your competitors in the first place.

Was it your outstanding customer support, your after-sale follow-up, your easy-to-use credit card processing, the quality of the services provided, or else?

To satisfy your future customers, you will need to take all paying customers and the value they expect from you as an example.

Start analyzing that list and looking for aims

Once you have created the list, you will be able to start developing your B2B buyer personas and understand what it is they want from you and how to attract them.

Additionally, you will want to look for aims and set yourself goals to succeed. Measure the pros and cons of the service you provide, adapt yourself to your persona, and start developing your business model with the help of this particular analysis.

Segment your customers into relevant groups

To segment your customers into relevant groups, you will need to figure out your customers’ demographics, their goals and their challenges, and what their first necessity is.

Sure, creating groups is a tedious task, but well worth the effort if you want to segment your customers and be more effective in marketing to them.

According to Hubspot, using B2B buyer personas segmenting into groups and focusing on B2B UX design can make websites 2 to 5 times more efficient and simple to use for the targeted audience. This is exactly how a persona can help your strategy strive.

This will, in the long run, make your B2B buyer personas help you see clearly what every group needs and how to market your services according to their needs.

Define your buyer persona

Defining your B2B buyer personas is another one of the key points to create the perfect instrument that will get your business to the next level.

According to an analysis by Forbes, your business should have at least 2 buyer personas to excel. However, and this goes without saying, if your business focuses on multiple fields, you will want to create a buyer persona for each of them.

It’s important to note that too many B2B business personas might harm your sales team as they won’t be able to focus on a single pitch and clear targets.

Analyze your audience, their needs, what they expect from you, and define your buyer persona that will perfectly match what your base and future customers want from you.

Identify customers difficulties

How to identify customers’ difficulties and how to solve them? The answer is one of the factors that can make B2B buyer personas great.

Read the feedback about your product and identify the most common difficulties your customers face, use online surveys and social media to analyze your existing weaknesses, and use them to feed your buyer persona.

The most common obstacles you’re going to have to overcome to sell the people who fit your buyer persona are:

• Differentiate stereotypes and common issues with what the global audience wants.
• To think about exceptions and sometimes adapt your ideas. Buyer personas can be general and are often based on “ideal clients.”
• You will need to continuously upgrade the services products that you’re selling. B2B buyer personas can get outdated and it’s important to follow your latest audience.

To sum up, you need to learn about your products, services, and brand, draw the pros and cons, understand what your audience struggles with, and you’ll then be able to draft a new business model that is in line with what existing and new clients want.

Identify what their goals are

Your clients’ goals and motivations are just as important as any other factor in your buyer personas.

For instance, if you offer an internal communication tool for companies, you will need to understand if they want it to be fast, to keep all conversations forever, to have unlimited participants, or if you offer a visual task management tool, there will be other goals and advantages.

Identifying your customers’ goals will help draft a buyer persona that understands all needs of buyers and that will ultimately make you stand out.

Create a clear picture of how your products and service can help

Of course, one point that can’t be missed when creating B2B buyer personas is to see how your products and service can help them.

Understanding your existing customers’ background, their career path, and what they will use your products for will be beneficial in all your company’s departments.

This will also help your sales and marketing team in the long run as they will be able to advertise your products and services the right way and generate more sales.

Improving your marketing campaigns with buyer personas

The first step in improving your marketing strategy with buyer personas is to understand why your campaigns are not working.

Creating a persona will help your marketing team to identify common questions and understand the content your clients want to see and what sells the most.

Moreover, once your buyer persona is defined and created, you’ll be able to draft more appealing content for all users by email, on social media posts, blog articles, and more.

Once you find out what is preventing your businesses from making profits and implementing marketing campaigns to bring in more profit, you will be able to include it in your persona.

Conclusion

This was everything you had to know to define and create your B2B buyer persona and to help it develop your organization.

To conclude, analyze your audience, measure the pros and cons, identify your fanbase’s motivations, goals, and difficulties, and take your business to the next level with a proper persona.

About the Author:

Maria Mladenovska is a Content Manager at DigitalNovas – an online guide about how to become a digital marketing expert. She is passionate about marketing and her curiosity to learn is ever-evolving.

She focuses specifically on writing and editing engaging articles, blog posts, and other forms of publication.