Why Buyer Personas are Important for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Posted by Tom Davis on April 01, 2020

Is your company struggling to understand how to engage its customers? Are your marketing teams, sales departments and product developers failing to understand what your customers are looking for?

It sounds like it’s time for your organization to develop buyer personas.

Buyer personas are highly beneficial for your organization, and will help your company develop a strategy that leads to growth. In fact, according to Hubspot, using marketing personas can make your website 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.

So, what is a buyer persona and why exactly is it so important for your B2B business? The Brit Agency answers your questions in this blog.

What is a buyer persona?

Hubspot defines a buyer persona as a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.”

By creating an in-depth buyer persona through extensive market research and interviews, your organization will be able to clearly understand what drives a customer to your company, why they choose to purchase from your business and what you need to do to improve your company’s customer experience (CX).

That’s because your buyer persona will be developed from important customer information such as demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations, their goals, what challenges they experience, where they look for information and much more.

There are five elements of buying insight that reveal the buying experience of a persona:

  1. What triggers a buyer’s investment: This is what causes the buyer to decide that it’s time to invest in a solution.
  2. How the buyer defines success: This is what the buyer expects to be different, and what goals they hope to achieve, once they make the investment.
  3. The buyer’s perceived barriers: These are the concerns that prevent a buyer from believing they can achieve their goals with the solution that they are considering.
  4. The buyer’s decision criteria: These are the attributes of a product or service a persona focuses on when weighing the offering against its competition.
  5. The buyer’s journey: This is what influences the buyer at every step of their journey. It takes into account all resources that the buyer uses and trusts as they weigh their options, as well as who influences, or is involved, in the decision-making process.

Why are buyer personas important?

Buyer personas are the foundation of your company’s inbound marketing strategy and will set the tone for all of your company’s marketing material, content creation and interactions with its customers. Once created, a detailed buyer persona provides a template for how all departments in your organization interact with your ideal customers.

Through your buyer persona, your company will know exactly where to focus its time, what relevant content you need to develop, guide your sales team and allow for complete alignment across your entire organization.

Understanding your target audience will help you to strategize your entire CX and marketing strategies. This will include everything from your brand voice, the information you post on your blog, which channels you use to interact with your audience and much more.

By developing a detailed buyer persona, your company will be able to understand what your customers’ challenges are, how they prefer to find information, how they interact with your brand and what they expect to experience with your company.

With this information, your business will be able to see where your marketing, customer experience and customer strategies might be underperforming and what you need to do to attract, convert and delight more customers.

Want to learn more about buyer personas, and why they are so important for every department within your organization? Contact The Brit Agency today. Our team of marketing specialists would love to answer any questions you may have.

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Topics: B2B Inbound Marketing