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: My Brand Doesn’t Need Personas
by MGB2B
The Myth: My Company Doesn’t Need to Develop Buyer Personas
The Truth: Buyer Personas Help You Produce Content That Works
“Why do we need personas when we know our target audience like the backs of our hands?”
This is a question that many Marketing Directors and CEOs are quick to ask. After all, no one knows your customers better than you, right? But buyer personas bring a lot more to the table than a general target audience can. And with the constant evolution of ways to target buyers, personas are essential for developing a strong content marketing plan.
As B2B buyer behavior continues to change and marketing tactics change along with it, it’s important to know more about your audience than ever before. Personas are fictional characters who represent your brand’s potential buyers or customers. Make them highly detailed with information based on solid research. Details can include everything from name and age to pain points at work to how they spend their spare time. Since personas contain so much detail, they enable your brand to segment your content. Which ensures that the content you create resonates with the persona it was created for.
Here Are the Benefits of Developing Buyer Personas:
- Personas provide a deeper understanding of buyer wants and needs. Although personas are fictional, they are based on the behaviors and preferences of real buyers. Therefore, they are able to provide important insights into what buyers are looking for from your brand. Personas include detailed information about both demographics and behavior patterns. Thus, they enable you to focus on forming connections with your audience. It’s important to include information about responsibilities at work, family dynamics, and media consumption. This will ensure your persona receives messages from your brand that will resonate.
- Personas allow you to segment your audience with more ease. CEO Richard and Millennial Kevin face very different challenges while on the job. Their home lives are different. And the way they consume information is different as well. So why would you deliver a piece of content to Millennial Kevin that was written for CEO Richard? You wouldn’t. But he is an important part of the decision-making process. So you need content for him as well. And that content won’t likely resonate with CEO Richard. By creating personas that define age, buyer behavior, media consumption, and pain points, you’ll be able to segment with more ease. And hit more home runs with your content program.
- Personas help you create the right content. Once you have an idea of your ideal customers, you will be able to create content that is appealing to them. You need to get your audience interested in the content you create. Otherwise, you’ll get more unsubscribes and fewer converted leads. Get insight into the types of content that pique their interest by including details like your persona’s role at work or what they do in their spare time. A well-done persona will help you create specifically targeted content that appeals to the individual that it represents.
- Personas show you where your audience is spending time online. When you’re trying to reach potential buyers, it’s important to know what types of media appeal to them and where they find information. If your persona is a CEO who doesn’t understand how Twitter works, then you should put your time and money in a different direction when targeting him/her. Creating detailed personas will show you where you should be spending marketing dollars to generate the most leads. Your company will save time, money, and resources if you are aware of the specific places your personas visit – both online and off.
- Personas create consistency throughout your whole company. Share your personas with your marketing team. But also include other departments. Your sales and product development teams, for example, should fully understand your brand’s personas and how to appeal to them. Some brands – like MailChimp – even have portraits of their personas on the walls to remind employees on a regular basis about their importance. It’s essential to familiarize your employees with the personas so they know how to interact with potential buyers. Personas ensure that everyone in your company is on the same page about who your audience is and how your brand can help them overcome challenges and seize opportunities.
These are some of the benefits to keep in the back of your mind while developing your brand personas. With accurate and realistic personas, you won’t just be shooting in the dark with your marketing program. You’ll motivate your leads to buy and increase the likelihood that they’ll come back to buy more.
Continue ReadingB2B Myth of the Week: My Company Needs 3 Blog Posts a Week
by Emily Swet
The Myth: My Company Needs 3 Blog Posts a Week to Achieve Our Goals
The Truth: Your Blog Sweet Spot Is All About Quality, Not Quantity
You’ve decided it’s time to ramp up your content marketing strategy. Your first thought? We need blog posts, lots of them, stat! Right?
Well… yes and no. Your blog is the workhorse of your content marketing program. You need strong, informative content that entices and engages your audience. What you don’t need is a bunch of filler that leaves them unsatisfied, misled, or annoyed. How you find your magic blog post number is directly related to both. Just as it’s unwise to let your blog collect tumbleweeds, it’s also a poor strategy to flood your followers with dozens of useless posts.
So How Do You Find Your Sweet Spot? Start By Asking Yourself These 4 Questions:
- What are your resources? You’ll need a writer that understands how to write for SEO while still comfortably speaking to your company’s buyer personas. Most of all, you’ll need time: a well-researched, edited blog can take upwards of four hours to write. How much or how little budget dedicated to content is your first indicator of how frequently you can successfully post.
- What are your goals? Brand awareness. Brand loyalty. Customer engagement. You’ve got to know what goal you’re posting for and how to leverage it. But the core goal of every content program must be to resonate with your audience – which brings us to the next question.
- What does your audience want? If you’re in a fast-moving industry, short and sweet updates might work best – in which case, you’ll likely be able to post more often. If your pace is slower, lengthier info pieces posted less frequently may be more worthwhile. But more importantly, what kind of content does your audience crave? What are their pain points? A blog post that addresses these things is a thousand times more effective than a post filled with fluff.
- What is your competition doing? You don’t have to beat how often your competitors are posting. Instead, look at what they’re posting and see how you can differentiate your brand. How are you different? How are you better? Use competitive analysis to capitalize on your strengths.
If the value of your content is consistently high, publishing more often will likely bring more traffic. More posts mean more content to keep your readers happy and more indexed pages in search engines. However, if you find your resources are too limited to dedicate to several quality posts, once a week is sufficient to keep your audience tuned in to your brand. Content marketing is meant to entertain, educate, and provoke questions. It’s next-level marketing that readers actually want – but only if it’s done well.
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