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How to Create Your Ideal B2B Buyer Persona? [Checklist]

How to Create Your Ideal B2B Buyer Persona_ [Checklist]

If only there was a way for your business to know what your target customers like, in order to personalize your ads and offerings to meet their needs…

Wait a minute!

There is a way to do exactly that! You can create a B2B buyer persona, which in turn, can greatly benefit your business.

Despite that, you still need to be aware of how to create them properly so they are as realistic and effective as possible. Otherwise, personas can have an opposite effect on your operations.

What Is a B2B Buyer Persona?

Buyer personas are semi-fictional characters that represent your target audience. This makes it much easier to understand your customers and provide them with products/service that appeal to them.

For instance, instead of focusing on “men and women, between 20 and 40”, you can dedicate your marketing efforts on a character named Susan. She’s 29, and works as an SEO specialist in a startup.

Let’s go into more detail about client personas.

How to Create a B2B Buyer Persona? Your Checklist to Success

How to Create Buyer Personas_ Your Checklist to Success

  1. Create a Demographic Profile
  2. Understand Their Pain Points
  3. Find Out Their Goals
  4. Outline Their Buyer Journey
  5. Collect Data and Insights
  6. Build Detailed Personas
  7. Update and Review Regularly

1. Create a Demographic Profile

Collecting key demographic data will help you create a realistic profile of your ideal customer.

Let’s take a look at the example from before, but in more detail:

  • Name: Susan
  • Age: 29
  • Gender: Female
  • Job Title: SEO Specialist
  • Location: New York, USA
  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in Marketing
  • Company Size: Martech startup (20 employees)
  • Industry: Digital Marketing

Some of you might doubt the effectiveness of this exercise, and wonder how will this help our marketing results and business growth?

Well, it’s quite simple:

“Knowing your audience is like knowing which dessert they’ll choose – it makes all the difference.”Seth Godin, Marketing Expert.

2. Understand Their Pain Points

In order to position your products/services as a solution, you must first understand the challenges that your prospective customers are facing.

For example, a few common problems in B2B companies are:

  • Difficulty in attracting high-quality leads, and spending a lot of time and resources on leads that don’t convert.
  • Long sales cycles that may take up to several months, and affect cash income and planning.
  • High customer acquisition costs, which are often higher in B2B, due to the need for more sales efforts and personalized marketing.
  • Keeping up with market competition, including pricing, innovation, and new services.

By knowing this information, you can add more context to your client persona. Let’s say Susan, our buyer type, has a limited budget, and is having a hard time dealing with the huge competition and keeping track of SEO trends.

3. Find Out Their Goals

After you’ve obtained an understanding of the challenges, you also need to learn as much as possible about the goals of your target audience.

Typical goals may include reducing operational costs, improving campaign performance, generating high-quality leads, and integrating new software with existing systems.

In our example, Susan’s goals are to bring high-quality leads, increase website traffic, and improve search engine rankings. She wants to achieve these goals in the next six months.

Combining the info you have gathered regarding the challenges and goals of your buyer persona, you can tailor your offer to match their needs.

For instance, Susan would really benefit from a free consultation that explains how your services can help her reach her goals.

If you are offering software, you can emphasize on how well it integrates with other tools she’s already using, and how you can offer tiered pricing options to provide flexibility and accommodate her budget constraints.

In case you are providing a service, you can place value on your team of experts, showcase other projects you’ve worked on, and share success stories from similar clients.

4. Outline Their Buyer Journey

The buyer’s journey has three main stages: awareness, consideration, and decision. All of which you need to look at from the perspective of the buyer.

In the awareness stage, the main goal is to identify the customer’s problem/need. The consideration phase is about exploring and evaluating available solutions, and lastly, the decision stage is when the final purchase decision is made.

In practice, Susan realizes that her SEO has not been producing the desired results. She starts reading blog posts, white papers, and books on SEO. Maybe she attends a few webinars and industry events, and starts following SEO experts, and thought leaders.

Then, she begins researching SEO tools that can help her reach her goals. She compared different solutions, and tried to evaluate their benefits. It is likely that she’ll look for recommendations from forums and request demos.

Lastly, Susan will review pricing, compare features, read detailed online reviews, and consult with sales representatives for personalized quotes before she finally decides on a tool, and purchases it.

5. Collect Data and Insights

The better you understand user behavior, the higher your chances of success. As Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners says:

“You need to understand the user journey. People don’t buy a product, they buy the outcome they believe it will deliver.”

For the purpose of gathering enough data and insights, you can use:

  • Customer surveys and interviews. Send surveys to your current customers with questions about their job role, company size, industry, challenges, and goals. You can select some of your clients to conduct in-depth interviews that will help you understand their pain points, decision-making points, and motivation.
  • Insights from your sales team. Your sales team have a lot of firsthand experience, since they interact with a lot of customers on a daily basis. Use them to gain better knowledge of customer pain points, objections, and buying triggers.
  • Data from your website analytics. Using tools like GA4 and Search Console, you can get insights about user behavior on your website, including bounce rates, average session duration, conversion path, etc. Additionally, you can use heatmap software to visualize where users are clicking, how far they scroll on a page, and what elements they interact with the most.
  • Social media and online forums. You can find a lot of useful data by just browsing through social media and online forums. Even better, you can participate in industry forums, Reddit, Quora, and LinkedIn groups to engage with your target audience and gather insights. In addition, you can use social listening tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch to closely track conversations about your brand.
  • CRM data and competitor analysis. With the help of your CRM system, you can analyze data and identify recurring patterns in customer behavior, stages, and length of sales cycles, and deal sizes. On top of that, you can analyze your competitors to look for potential opportunities and gaps in their strategies.

6. Build Detailed Personas

Judging by what we’ve covered so far, the more details you gather, the better.

Don’t ignore the details, they could prove to be essential. How does Susan prefer to communicate – does she use email, or prefer phone calls?

What are her buying triggers – is it positive reviews or maybe cost-effectiveness? All these are parts of the puzzle, and you never know which one is going to be decisive.

To quote Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute:

“The more detailed and data-driven your personas are, the better you can tailor your content and campaigns to meet the specific needs and pain points of your audience.”

7. Update and Review Regularly

Last but not least, make sure your personas stay relevant by frequently reviewing and updating them. There are many reasons why you should update your personas:

  • New trends and technologies have changed the market. Five years ago, mobile optimization wasn’t as important as it is today.
  • Changing customer needs and behavior. For example, an older persona, due to events such as Covid-19, might have new needs like a reliance on digital tools.
  • Competitors changing industry standards. A competitor might launch a new feature or tool that changes the entire industry landscape. AI wasn’t used that much a few years ago, but now it’s found its way into every industry.
  • Finding new audiences and markets. As your business grows, and you enter new geographic markets, it’s inevitable that your target persona will also change.

Summary

Creating your ideal B2B buyer persona is like assembling a puzzle – each piece of data fits together differently until the full picture of your target audience is revealed.

Another thing to keep in mind, B2B buyer personas aren’t static. They need to be updated regularly to reflect changing market conditions, evolving customer needs, and new insights.

Is all of this too much for you to handle? Don’t worry, you don’t have to go it alone. At DevriX, we specialize in crafting spot-on buyer personas and creating targeted digital marketing strategies that hit the mark.

Contact us today, and let’s build a persona so precise, it could probably tell you what your customer had for breakfast (spoiler: it’s probably coffee and a LinkedIn scroll.)

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