Building B2B Buyer Personas: 6 Key Questions to Ask
by MGB2B
Using Buyer Personas to Cut Marketing Waste
Is there a lot of waste in your company’s advertising? That is often the case for B2B brands. Your audience can flip past ads. They can scroll past banners. When you produce a general marketing campaign with one message to a broad audience, it can be overlooked by a good portion of the audience. Instead, arm yourself with targeted Buyer Personas. A Buyer Persona is a detailed profile of your ideal buyer. It usually includes demographic and psychographic information, media consumption, and purchasing behavior. Often, it’s necessary to do extensive market research (both qualitative and quantitative) to establish an effective Buyer Persona. And in most cases, you’ll want to create multiple buyer personas to target different verticals or decision makers.
Take a Look at These Key Areas to Investigate When Developing Buyer Personas:
- What Are the Demographics?
Before you dive into needs and wants, it’s crucial to establish a demographic profile for your Buyer Persona. Get to know the typical age, education, job title, and industry of your buyers. These all play a major role in who they are as a B2B decision maker. - What Are Your Buyers’ Goals?
It’s important to gain an understanding of what your Buyer Personas are looking to achieve on the job and what they need in order to be successful. The information you gather will help you to better understand how to help them achieve those goals. And you can create marketing content with these goals in mind. - What Do They Value Most?
Once you know their goals, you’ll want to identify the key attributes that drive a buyer’s decision-making process. Ease of use. Support. Price. Identify what your buyers value most. Then, you can use it to develop products and services they need and messaging that resonates. - What Are Their Pain Points?
This is one of the most important areas to identify for your Buyer Personas because it gets to the root of the benefit you can provide. When you know pain points, you can work to help your buyers overcome their most difficult challenges. Pain points are a great way to fuel both product and content development. They inspire fodder for blog posts, white papers, videos – you name it. - How Do They Feel About Your Competitors?
It’s not only critical to understand the demographic and psychographic profiles of your Buyer Personas. You also need to understand their relationship with your competitors. To get started, ask questions that help define your competitive landscape and identify holes in the marketplace that your brand can fill. - How Do They Like to Be Reached?
Lastly, once you’ve created detailed profiles of your Buyer Personas, it’s important to know the best way to reach them. Do they prefer face-to-face contact with your sales reps? Or is a monthly email their preferred means of staying updated? Do they like videos? Or follow brands they like on Facebook? With so many means of communication, you can get a leg up by allowing your Buyer Personas to identify where they are and what they’re looking for. It’s the best way to make sure your message gets through the clutter and directly to your target.
It may seem like a lengthy process to develop Buyer Personas. However, the reward of a streamlined, highly targeted marketing program is well worth it. You’ll see increased engagement and return on investment, as well as happier customers. After all, even B2B buyers like to receive helpful hints and content designed specifically for them, as opposed to a mass-market campaign that casts a wider net. And happy customers make for a happy brand.
Continue ReadingB2B Myth of the Week: Research Is Overrated
by MGB2B
The Myth: Research Is Overrated
The Truth: Research Is More Important Now than Ever
Is B2B research necessary? The answer is a resounding “yes.” The needs and perceptions of your audiences are constantly evolving. If you want to create content that resonates with your audience, you need solid research. Research isn’t a one-time thing. It needs to be continuously updated to keep up with changing market demand. What research can do is help you create engaging content, generate leads, and grow your company. While it may be expensive and sometimes time-consuming, the information you can gain is invaluable. And as social platforms allow you to hyper-target with more accuracy, research becomes even more important, allowing you to deliver the right message to exactly the right prospect.
Here Are 4 of the Most Important Things That Research Can Tell You:
- Who Your Audience Is and Where they Consume Information. The first thing you should focus your research on is understanding your audience. And you may find some surprises. Today, nearly half of B2B researchers are millennials. This shift has taken place in the last few years and has completely changed buyer behavior. If you don’t know exactly who your audience is, you won’t be able to create content that interests them. When researching your audience find out who they are, what the want from you, where they get their information, and any pain points that they may have on the job. Understanding your audience and where they get information will help you determine the best way to spend your dollars and what to say to your audience when you do. Knowing the right places to share content will engage your audience and generate leads.
- What Your Competitors Are Doing. If you don’t know what’s happening with competitors, you will inevitably fall behind. Look into prices and quality of their products, their online presence, and the kind of content they’re sharing. Having an idea of what your competition is doing will also help pinpoint what makes you different. Your company needs a unique brand positioning that separates you from the competition. In essence, competitive research helps you define your brand. When you survey prospects, you can also find out which brands they prefer and why. This will show you where you fit into the competitive set, and help you figure out where you want to go.
- What the Purchasing Process Is Like. Unlike B2C, B2B buyers very rarely make impulse purchases. Buyers spend a good amount of time comparing prices, quality, and suppliers before making a decision. As the purchasing process gets more and more complex, it’s important to help simplify it for buyers. In order to do that, you need to do some research. Understanding the buyer’s path to purchase will help you fix any issues or challenges they face along the way. It’s also important to know what variables influence buyers at which point in the sale funnel. Is it price? Convenience? Quality? Knowing this information is crucial to guiding buyers through the process and improving customer experience.
- How People Perceive Your Brand. Public opinion is one of the biggest influencers of brand perception. Many companies think they know how customers feel about their brand, but it might not always be the reality. There are a couple of simple ways to research how customers feel about your brand. One way is by monitoring what people are saying about you on social media. There are tons of social media listening tools that can help you track your social media presence. Customer surveys can be even more helpful when measuring brand perception as you can ask questions about specific areas you are interested in.
Research gives you the information and data you need to connect with your audience and position your brand as a strong competitor. If you want to keep up with the changes happening in your field and in the industries you sell to, your company needs to conduct in-depth research on a regular basis. It can make the difference between lagging behind and rising to the top.
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