Creating a detailed B2B buyer persona for your client base enables effective personalization during your sales process—a must for modern marketing strategies. In fact, 94% of marketers say personalization increases sales, while 96% agree it leads to repeat business.
Given this effectiveness, you’re probably wondering how to develop a B2B buyer persona that reflects your ideal customer base and empowers your marketing efforts.
Let’s unpack the process, highlight the key steps in crafting salient B2B buyer personas, and go over some examples that illustrate how they can benefit your business.
Table of Contents:
The Importance of B2B Buyer Personas
Since it’s not realistic to craft a unique playbook for each and every one of your clients, creating buyer personas provides a template on which to base your sales and marketing efforts.
Buyer personas are fictional portfolios of your ideal customers that you create through market and audience research. Just like profiles of real people, they should contain key information such as:
Demographics
Psychographics
Behavior trends
Values
Desires
Pain points
Affiliations
This data allows you to carefully target different market segments that are more likely to convert on your products and services. Unfortunately, less than half of marketers possess such detailed information about their base.
That’s a shame, as informed targeting is the basis of successful marketing efforts. With a robust buyer persona and effective targeting, you can:
Increase advertising click-through rates (CTRs) by up to 670%
Boost purchase intent by 280%
According to over two-thirds of marketers, generate more leads
Buyer Personas vs. Ideal Customer Profiles
Like buyer personas, Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) are detailed depictions of potential clientele businesses use to inform their marketing efforts and bolster their revenue. Unlike buyer personas, however, ICPs aren’t meant to depict an individual customer but entire companies.
ICPs are representations of companies that are the best possible fit for your business’s services and solutions based on characteristics such as:
Budget
Company size
Industry
Geography
Legality (i.e., if there’s some reason you can’t legally sell to them, such as location)
How well your solutions fit their needs
ICPs and buyer personas both help you sniff out quality leads and inform your marketing plan as you sell to them. They’re really two sides of the same coin: ICPs tell you the kinds of companies you should be targeting with your marketing campaigns, while buyer personas provide insight into the types of individuals you’ll sell to within those organizations.
4 Steps to Develop a Comprehensive Buyer Persona
Buyer personas are, by nature, complex and multifaceted, as they should contain all the key information you need to understand your clients. Luckily, if you break them down step-by-step, they’re not as difficult to establish and implement as you may think.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Identifying your target audience means selecting a subset of companies likely to be interested in your products and focusing your marketing efforts on them. To identify a viable target audience for your business, try:
Considering your offerings – Think about your products and services. What problems do they solve, who do they benefit, and which companies will likely invest in them? Once you have a solid understanding of your own company, you can consider how to best market to others.
Looking to your competitors – Consider other companies operating in the same sector. What types of businesses are they targeting, who do they appeal to, and how can you fill an existing gap in the market? Once you get a sense of what the competition’s doing, you’ll know what types of companies align more closely with your solutions.
Understanding your marketing channels – How do you plan to promote your products and services to your audience? Consider which channels you want to leverage and whether or not your target potential customers use the same platforms.
2. Research Your Audience
Once you’ve narrowed down a target audience, you’ll need to research key sales factors such as their pain points, budgets, locations, and more. To gather accurate, insightful information about your audience:
Interview potential customers – There’s no better way to understand potential customers than to talk to them directly. Ask about their interest in your kinds of products and services, how much they’d be willing to spend on them, and other relevant information that can help guide your marketing strategy.
Send out surveys – If you cannot talk to potential customers directly, sending out quick surveys is the next best way to gather insight into your target market. Concise, effective B2B surveys should take about 10 to 14 minutes to complete and consist of seven to ten questions.
Use digital analytics – Robust sales automation platforms can provide a deeper understanding of your target audience. Leverage the data you gather as a barometer for whether or not your marketing efforts are successful and if your strategy is performing as planned. After establishing a target market, gauge their responsiveness by tracking sales metrics and campaign performance amongst your chosen audience.
3. Analyze and Segment Your Findings
Identifying and researching your audience provides the insights you need to accurately segment and market to them. Segmentation is breaking your target audience down into smaller, more manageable groups to refine and focus your marketing efforts on.
Segmentation is crucial to your marketing efforts. It allows you to more carefully target your campaigns and personalize messaging for interested subsets of your audience. It’s also a proven marketing strategy that:
Over 70% of modern marketers leverage
Leads to increased profits for 80% of companies that try it
Reduces the cost of acquiring new customers while simultaneously boosting conversion rates
4. Create Detailed Persona Profiles
At this point, your audience should already be subdivided into small groups of similar clientele. To get the job done, go one step further and craft individual buyer personas around their shared:
Demographics – Where they are, their industry, what they have to spend, and other relevant factors
Goals – The objectives they’re trying to achieve by utilizing your product
Challenges – The issues and objections clients may face when using your solutions
Preferred communication channels – How you’re going to contact them to facilitate the sales process
Once you’ve set your buyer persona’s attributes, you can then incorporate the information into your marketing campaigns and steer your sales efforts to prioritize relevant clients.
Examples of Effective B2B Buyer Personas
Buyer personas will vary widely based on your industry, products, target audience, and other factors. Nonetheless, a solid example of a fully fleshed-out buyer persona may look like this:
Name – Aarav
Age – 40
Location – San Francisco, California
Education – Master’s
Job title – Owner
Income – $100,000–$125,000
Family – Partner, no kids
Needs – Wants to automate time-consuming sales tasks such as fishing for new leads and ranking prospects
Goals – Wants to double business over the next three years
Other relevant details – Aarav found your company via a social media recommendation. He is active online and responsive on social channels. He generally works around 60 hours a week and is limited on time, therefore interactions should be concise.
How to Implement Buyer Personas in Your Strategy
If you’re just starting to implement buyer personas as part of your sales strategy, the whole process can seem time-consuming and overwhelming. Once they’re a core piece of your marketing playbook, however, your campaigns will run much more smoothly, and your sales teams will be empowered with the information they need to close deals.
To begin implementing buyer personas in your business:
1. Integrate Personas Across Marketing Channels
Your buyer personas are foundational to informing the content and messaging you broadcast across your various marketing channels. When crafting an ad, post, or any other form of communication for your base, use your buyer personas to inform:
The tone of the writing
The kinds of products you put on display
The geographical locations you want to promote in
Other similar factors that can make your brand more relevant and appealing to potential clients
2. Continuously Refine and Incorporate Feedback
Because your business and personas evolve with time, it’s good practice to revisit them regularly to ensure they still align with your goals. Keep tabs on changes in your customers’ locations, budgets, goals, and other factors to reassess how well your current personas fit the realities of your base. If you find that their demographics and business needs have shifted, refine your personas to reflect the current state of your clientele.
3. Train Your Team
Buyer personas empower your marketing and sales teams with the information they need to know about your base—but only if they understand how to use them effectively.
Train your sales reps and marketing professionals to read, understand, and implement your buyer personas' information to facilitate their tasks. Show marketing teams how to craft campaign content that appeals to relevant decision-makers within your base. Likewise, teach sales reps to use buyer personas to pursue the hottest leads, give context to their sales calls, and complete other relevant tasks.
Leverage Nimbler to Build Buyer Personas and Reach Engaged Customers
Building effective B2B buyer personas informs your sales and marketing teams with the relevant client data they need to craft effective campaigns and land more conversions. B2B decision-makers expect understanding and personalization from their vendors, and buyer personas empower your staff to deliver the experience they crave. When combined with ICPs—buyer personas built for companies—they can help you identify businesses within your target market and sell to the individuals who operate them.
To simplify your marketing and sales operations, leverage Nimbler to automate time-consuming organizational tasks. Nimbler enriches your market data to inform your buyer personas and helps you optimize your promotional efforts for your target audience.
Register today to try it for free and see the difference an effective sales automation tool can make for your bottom line.
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