B2B Buyer Personas: Why?
Buyer personas must be an important part of your B2B marketing arsenal. Your target audience has changed, and you must be able to speak to this new type of buyer in order to make a sale.
Buyer Behavior Today:
Due to the economy, many people are absorbing multiple jobs just to stay afloat. Multitasking has become a way of life; your prospects are busier now than ever.
The majority of their time is spent keeping things running smoothly — not thinking strategically.
Their time is limited so, they only read emails with relevant subject lines from senders they know. If it isn’t relevant and they don’t know you, you will be deleted.
They are being asked to solve problems that are not within their core competency.
As they become more informed, the complexity of the issue becomes overwhelming.
This is where you come in!
Your target audience does not have time to listen to you about how much you can help them with their problems; you need to show them. Buyer personas facilitate your ability to do this by forcing you to think about all the different stages of the buying cycle, and how to develop relevant content to speak to those stages.
For details on how to create buyer personas, I recommend reading my source for this blog: Ardath Albee’s book, eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale. In it, she details how to create buyer personas and utilize them as a part of your own B2B marketing arsenal.
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.