The Importance of Buyer Personas

Buyer personas—what are they and how can they help your B2B company? In this blog post, I’ll go over the importance of buyer personas and how to use them effectively.

The Importance of Buyer Personas

What are buyer personas?

First things first, let’s define what a buyer persona is.

Buyer personas allow you to tailor your content, strategies, and products to a specific person. Think of it as practicing archery. When you are looking at a target, it’s easier to hit a bullseye. If there’s no target involved you’re shooting pointlessly. Buyer personas tie into the move toward personalization in marketing and on websites. Site visitors and marketing audiences are now expecting personalized content and communication focused on their interests, needs, and wants.

Buyer personas use both data and imagination. That is to say, you use data to create a made-up ideal buyer. In the B2B arena, some general buyer persons can be:

• Purchasers
• Business owners and CEOs
• Sales managers
• Product engineers
• Manufacturers
• Designers

How do you create a buyer persona?

To use a buyer persona to its fullest potential, you’ll need to create a beneficial buyer persona. This involves aligning your buyer persona with your business goals and your ideal target buyer. Here are some things to consider when creating a buyer persona (taken from an article on WebStrategies):

• Demographics: Age, income, married/single, hobbies, experience, job skills, family.
• Personality Identifiers: Calm, assertive, decision maker, analyzer, subordinate or manager, thoughtful, researches online, loyal.
• Purchasing Habits: Numbers oriented, needs a custom quote, lots of questions, enjoys shopping around, long-term planner, may need a quick turnaround
• Motivators: Increase production capacity, replace broken units, save money, make more money, make their team look good, improve quality.

Keep in mind that for each step of the marketing cycle, you might have a different buyer persona. This means that there is not just one single buyer persona for your company, but a variety of them that you can utilize throughout your marketing ventures.

To create a buyer persona, find out that information listed above. To collect information, you have two options. One, you can interview existing customers. To do this, meet with them or your sales team to gain insight into their demographics, personality, purchasing habits, and motivators. The second option is to use sales data to get information. You can do this by using analytics and traffic to find out this information about your customers at all points of the buying cycle.

Why are buyer personas effective?

Buyer personas allow your business to focus on the customer. This goes back to a you-view in your marketing and communication. You-view means focusing your messages on the audience. A you-view emphasizes the audience/reader instead of the communicator/writer. Creating a buyer persona allows you to have a specific audience in mind when creating content and marketing strategies. As a result, this allows you to empathize with your audience and really get into their shoes.

What can you use buyer personas for?

Buyer personas are a helpful brainstorming practice of their own. This means that without even doing anything with them, having an ideal and specific customer in mind for your company allows your company to focus in on the same target. In addition, there are four things that are directly improved when using a buyer persona:

• Marketing strategies are tailored to your target customer, making them more efficient and effective.
• Potential customer relationships are benefitted because your sales team has a picture of who they’re talking to.
• Manufacturing choices are informed by specific needs and wants of buyers.
• Customers who are in need of customer support have a customer help team that knows who they are and what they want.

Buyer personas are one of the most important tools in your marketing toolbox. When you’ve studied your current customers, defined target buyers, and used these buyer personas in your marketing strategies, you will be set up for success and meaningful connections.

Please reach out to RedMoxy to talk more about marketing—both in-person and online. If you’d like to talk with us about these (or other) marketing options you’re considering, give us a call at 262-363-4238 or reach out to us at [email protected]. We’d love to talk with you!