The global pandemic is profoundly changing the face of the B2B buyer. B2B revenue leaders and marketers are spending a lot of their time focusing on understanding buyer personas. Since B2B buyers have become more cautious, it becomes monolithic to understand them and their changing behavior. One of the best ways to dive deep into your prospective customers is by building a buyer persona insight.
A study by Gartner revealed 80% of the average B2B buyer journey took place online in 2020. B2B buyers will only reach out to an agent once they’ve surveyed the market and done extensive research.
What is a Buyer Persona?
Buyer Persona is a research-backed profile summary of an ideal buyer, based on data and insight. Buyer persona is often described as a data-driven representation of real buyers who influence purchase decisions.
“Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers”.
Hubspot Academy
Buyer personas are one of the most important fraction of any marketing strategy. They allow marketers to focus on the pain points of their prospects and provide them with intricate marketing power.
Now, what is a Buyer Persona Insight?
In simple terms, buyer persona insight is an in-depth information about a particular role in an industry. Buyer persona insights comprise of buyer’s key focus areas, priorities, success metrics and challenges. Buyer persona insight should be treated like a living and breathing document for companies that are heavily inclined towards delivering exceptional customer experience.
Buyer persona insights is the foundation for a successful buyer-centric demand gen strategy. Having a deep understanding of the target buyer personas will set any marketing strategy apart. When we talk about buyer persona insight in action, we are focusing on buyers’ behavior, their specific goals and their motivations.
Why do you need a Buyer Persona Insight?
Ever since Alan Cooper in his highly acclaimed book, “The Inmates are Running the Asylum”, coined the term “buyer personas”, it has become a marketing essential. The process of developing personas has come a long way from the time Alan had developed it to understand his user’s mindset while designing software. Yet, the ground remains the same: deeply understanding the target audience.
B2B marketing is a lot more complex than B2C. One of the biggest challenges in B2B marketing is pinning down your target audience. For that reason, marketers and sales team create multiple in-depth and specific buyer personas. Having multiple buyer personas can make it a lot easier to know the different buying behavior and influence of individuals involved in the decision process. Most Importantly, buyer personas help to pinpoint how best to influence the potential buyers.
Buyers have specific needs and problems that they are trying to solve. Crafting buyer personas and understanding how each persona advances through each stage of the buyer’s journey is crucial for the success of B2B marketing.
When targeting cold leads, content based on personas increased engagement almost six times
For marketing leaders:
Marketing can use buyer personas to build go-to-market strategies. Developing buyer personas will help to strengthen their content strategy along with polishing their personalization efforts. It informs marketing teams with insight that helps them deliver relevant content via best-suited marketing channels to their prospective customers.
For sales leaders:
Buyer Persona Insight educates sales teams on prospective buyers and their behaviors. It helps the sales team better prospect and prepare for demos and meetings. With a buyer persona insight at arm’s length, sales reps can understand their buyer and then create customised offerings and tailored communications for them. Sales team can also have more meaningful conversations and interactions, leading to greater sales productivity.
How to create a Buyer Persona Insight?
Buyer Persona incorporates information like who the buyer is, what they do, what their goals and interests are, and so on. In simpler terms, the buyer persona needs to include any and every aspect of the buyer that will help companies sell better and faster.
Developing B2B buyer personas can help marketing teams focus their efforts and refine their selling process. Here’s an easy 4 step process to create effective buyer personas for marketing and sales teams that have already identified their target buyers.
- Do a thorough research
The first good step will always be to gather as much information as you can on your buyer. There are numerous ways to collect information like interviews, phone calls, or simple yet tedious desk research. But in this blog, we will be focusing on how desk research can help you build a flawless buyer persona insight. Desk research will help uncover information such as demographics, challenges, behavior, or anything that requires human processing. The whole point of building personas is to help your buyer solve his/her problems.
The rationale behind gathering information is to be able to answer the questions that the marketers or sales reps would ideally want to ask their target personas.
Who is the persona?
The foremost actions should be to gather elemental information such as:
- age group the buyer persona belongs to
- industry and company size
- job title
- daily activities
- areas of interest
- job responsibilities
- how purchase decisions are made
Spend some time going through the LinkedIn profiles of prospective buyers and learn about their job titles, their skills, education and professional background. It is always best to understand the team structures and map the common factors identified after looking at numerous LinkedIn profiles. Uncovering details like who they report to and are they a budget holder or not also plays an important part. Identifying their job responsibilities will help to acknowledge what matters to them the most.
The next thing to figure out is some basic details about the size of the industry they belong to. Marketers and sales reps also gather information such as whether the buyer is an individual contributor or has people reporting to him/her and what influence s/he can make in purchase decisions. One of the crucial tasks is to find where your buyer persona spends most of their time on the internet and what could be the best mode to communicate with them.
What is the main goal of the buyer persona?
Once you have gathered some basic information, now is the time to peel another layer of the onion. Dive a little deep to find out the buyer personas goals and aspirations, try to understand the changing dynamic within their industry and their role.
What are the hurdles that the buyer persona is facing?
While creating buyer personas, it is important to understand buyers pain points and challenges. The correct way is to recognize all the different problems, the buyers involved in a B2B purchase are trying to solve.
- Understand the buyer persona
As of now, the buyer persona will have become highly fleshed-out and in-depth. With all the information gathered from different sources, try to match the similarities and sort them into different categories or segments. After doing this, the following step will be to create a buyer persona insight based on the common traits. This stage is like getting inside the head of the buyer persona that is being built and analyzing how they might behave.
- Humanize the buyer persona
Now, is the time to develop a visual representation of the buyer persona. Many marketers make use of different tools to make it visually appealing and break down all the insights gathered into digestible chunks. Taking the time to create a well-researched and data-backed persona is more powerful than many might think. Buyer personas ensure that there is a strong alignment between sales and marketing to form a deep connection with its target audience. Buyer persona insight must be easy to grasp. Include no more than 10-12 pieces of information for each buyer persona, with a combination of basics and details.
At the end of every buyer persona creation, two takeaways have to be there:
- Buyer profile: unearthing the demographic and psychographic details of the ideal customer
- Buyer insight: revealing what triggers the ideal customer to make purchase decisions
Buyer Persona Insight Template
Why Buyer Persona Insight for Account-Based Marketing (ABM)?
Buyer Personas and Account-Based Marketing are a match made in marketing heaven. It’s a no brainer that ABM is one of the most effective marketing strategies. ABM is all about targeting a few, valuable accounts, rather than trying to engage with as many accounts as possible. For B2B marketers and sales teams who are adopting ABM, building buyer personas will help them personalise their messaging to individuals within the buying team at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
A bedrock for any account-based strategy is in-depth industry research and account profiling. The very first step in the ABM strategy is gathering a target list – assuming that an ICP already exists – an ideal customer profile, which goes side-by-side with a deep understanding of the industry and the goals-behaviors-challenges and decision making processes of the buyers. We now have arrived at buyer personas.
Creating the perfect ABM strategy based on buyer insight is the foundation. The overall aim of doing ABM is fostering better relationships with target accounts so buyer personas can certainly help in building good rapport within each account. This will help marketers to understand not just the company name and titles but will allow them to work together to develop persona-based journey maps.
Conclusion
Buyer Persona Insights have become even more in demand after the pandemic. Since a lot of companies that were doing one-to-one ABM are now shifting to one-to-few and one-to-many ABM campaigns. It goes without saying that one-to-one ABM requires a lot of time and resources, and has no guarantee of 100% sales. But with other ABM approaches, companies can run targeted campaigns and do a certain level of personalization. With the decision process becoming more and more complex in B2B, it is only safe that sales and marketing leader trying to understand the buyers and their pain points rather than just focusing on the account itself. Buyer Persona Insight should be a living document and has to be revised timely. This will be a fun process as sales and marketing teams will get a chance to educate themselves on the ongoing trends and opportunities for them.
We have added sample buyer persona insight reports on CIO and C-suite of an automobile giant. Feel free to explore through them from our reports library.