Buyer personas are a fundamental part of understanding your audience and your b2b buyers. Despite their importance, only 44% of b2b marketers are using buyer personas (ITSMA). They can take a lot of time and effort to get right and a lot of times companies bypass creating personas all together. This post is dedicated to convincing you that buyer personas are imperative to your business. In it I’ll present to you the benefits of creating accurate buyer personas, how to create them and how to use them.

B2B Buyer Personas & ROI

Utilizing buyer personas in email campaigns glean 2x the open rate and 5x the click through rate (BrightTALK).

According to the 2014 B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report, “Audience Relevance” was considered by 58% of b2b content marketers as the most important factor in determining content marketing effectiveness.

The top 3 drivers of blog content strategy include: buyer personas, audience demographics and buying stage (Curata).

Using buyer personas makes website 2-5 times easier to use for targeted users (HubSpot).

Buyer Persona is the 2nd most popular criteria for segmenting content for b2b marketers, with 40% of b2b marketers segmenting content by buyer persona (2014 B2B Content Marketing Spotlight Report).

Need more proof that buyer personas are worth it? Check out Rob Peterson’s post on Mark Schaefer’s {Grow} blog: 31 Business Building Benefits of Buyer Personas.

How To Create B2B Buyer Personas

Interview your customers – your company got something right with your customers, otherwise they wouldn’t have bought from you. While your customers may not be your perfect ideal, they are a great place to hone that ideal. What are your customers’ needs, goals and challenges (that your business can solve)? What does your customer like about your company? How could your company help your customer more? Need help knowing how to interview your customers? Learn about the 5 Essential Questions To Include in B2B Buyer Persona Interviews.

Talk to your sales team – your sales team is the front line of your company. They interact with people that end up loving your company and leaving it. If they’ve been doing it for long, they probably have some insight into what kind of person your company works well with and what kind it doesn’t (check out this article on the importance of negative personas).

Research your contact database – Are you an introvert? Not comfortable interviewing people? No problem! Lucky for you, there is a thing called the internet where you can research your prospects, leads and customers. Look them up on Linkedin and Twitter; check out their company website. Look for patterns among your contacts that correlate with someone being more interested in your company.

Get insights from Google Analytics – If you go to the Audience section of your Google Analytics account you can see a lot of information that is helpful to developing your personas. Go to the “Mobile” dropdown and see what percentage of your website visitors are using mobile, desktop or tablets, and what browsers they’re using. Under the “Geo” dropdown, what locations are your searchers coming from? Under the “Interests” dropdown, what affinity categories are they in? All this is good info to be aware of when creating your personas. Want more ways Google Analytics can help you define your personas? See How To Create Buyer Personas With Google Analytics.

Ways To Use Your B2B Buyer Personas

Remember, buyer personas are just a starting point; it’s what you do with them that delivers the ROI.

Write content for them – write content that speaks to your buyer’s needs, pain points and goals. Make sure to write content for each of your personas.

Consume what they consume – where do they go for information? The Wall Street Journal? NPR? Fox News? Find out and start tuning into those channels and quoting those channels in your content.

Segment your contacts – Make sure you segment your contact database by your buyer personas. Knowing the persona of your prospects, leads and customers can be a huge help to solving their problems.

Hone your branding – Your buyer personas can be a huge help in honing your brand. Are your personas modern and edgy? Or more old school and traditional? Answering these kinds of questions will help your brand be more relatable.

Update Your UX/UI – Make sure your website is as usable for your persona as possible. Is your primary persona over 60? It might be helpful to increase the font size. Does one of your personas have a first language other than english? Maybe you should have a Spanish version of your site for visitors coming from South America.

Conclusion

Today’s buyer is always changing, and it takes work and research to address their needs and pain points. If you aren’t using buyer personas yet, it’s never too late to start. Need help creating personas? For a very in depth and technical guide, check out Mike King’s article Personas: The Art and Science of Understanding the Person Behind the Visit. Feel free to check out our tool below.

Also, make sure you don’t fall into the 4 Common Pitfalls of B2B Buyer Personas.