Creating Buyer Personas: B2B Marketing Tips
Research says 80% of your customers find you rather than the other way around — and that it’s been that way for the past five years! Buyer personas can help you understand and better target these B2B buyers.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is an amalgamation of all the different factors that affect your buyers and motivate them to buy. What makes B2B buyer personas so unique is their ability to help you conceptualize your buyers through multiple factors, such as threats, priorities, personal details and motivations.
Why Buyer Personas?
They add humanity to the marketing process, which enables you to engage your buyer in a way not otherwise possible.
They force you to see your buyer not as a number, but as a multidimensional person with personal goals, social goals, professional goals, etc.
They force you to see marketing to your buyers as a multidimensional process, full of varying perspectives and motives. This is key, because it enables you to see there is never just one solution, and it forces you to think about those solutions based upon your buyer.
Buyer personas are especially important in B2B, where decisions your buyers make affect many more people than just themselves, and are thus very complex and multidimensional.
How Do You Create One?
In order to create a B2B buyer persona, you have to do your research. Ask such things as:
Who or what can propel or stall a buying decision?
What threats do they have? What solutions are available?
Where do they go for information (e.g., social media, online resources, offline relationships)?
To better understand how to get started, take 20 minutes and watch this B2B Quick Study Webinar (20 minute presentation + 10 minute Q&A), presented by B2B marketing strategist Ardath Albee and moderated by Martine Hunter. It was the source of this blog and is full of important takeaways to help you start building buyer personas today.
Vann Morris is the Director of Buying Behavior Studies with the Atlanta B2B advertising agency, MLT Creative. She is a Social and Behavioral Scientist who is currently working on her PhD in Communications, and uses her strong theoretical background in order to show how scientific theory should be used to develop strategy and effective B2B marketing campaigns.