Before diving into your Inbound Marketing strategy, one of the most important steps is identifying your primary audience, or buyer persona.
Your buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer and will help ensure that every member of your team knows who they are engaging with and, more importantly, how to engage with them successfully.
While you can market and sell to every person you can find, chances are you won’t be successful. Not everyone wants what you are selling and you don’t want to spend time and money try to attract the wrong person. By developing a buyer persona, you will be able to focus on your right type of customer and specifically target them.
Most B2B organizations who do Inbound Marketing, have at least 3 to 5 primary buyer personas.
But, don’t stress. The number of personas varies by industry and company, so if you have more or less, it’s fine.
If you don’t currently have any personas, our advice is to start slow. Focus on one or two buyer personas first, and see how that goes. Once you’re happy with the outcome, move on to the next one.
The better you know your persona, the easier it is to attract, convert, close and delight them.
Whether you’re creating content, developing offers, nurturing leads or following up on a recent sale, how well you know your buyer persona can make or break the moment.
When creating a persona, you want to make them as memorable as possible. Everyone in your company should know their persona story and should be able to recall their specific characteristics, needs, challenges and pain points quickly.
If you can, try and use market research or interviews with actual customers (good and bad) to gain insight into your audience.
If you can’t do this easily, take a look at your own databases. You may be surprised to see what you can uncover. Maybe your ideal customers all have a specific job title or work in specific industries.
Next, talk to your sales team and account managers. They can probably make generalizations about the types of leads they interact with and which ones your company best serves. The more points of view that you can include in your buyer persona research the better – try and get input and feedback from at least one person in each customer facing department of your organization
Lastly, take a look at any analytics platforms you use. Google Analytics can be a great tool for segmenting your audience and finding out critical information about your buyer personas, such as what devices they most often use, where they are from and what their interests are.
There is a ton of information you can gather about your B2B buyer persona, from their gender to their job title to their pass times.
To help you on your way, here are 45 questions that you can ask about your buyer persona. If you don’t know the answer to all of these questions right away, that is okay. The great thing about buyer personas is, like the people they represent, they are always developing and changing so, you should update your buyer persona documents frequently.
Demographics
Psychographics
Personal Background
Role & Responsibilities
Company Profile
Challenges
Goals
Marketing Triggers
Common Objections & Questions
Information Search
Segmentation Question
How You Help?
Once you have gathered your persona’s information, bring it all together to create a well-rounded and easy to remember buyer persona story in a document that can be shared right across your organization.
And, as we said before, be sure to always update and add to your buyer personas as you move along! The more information you have, and the more up-to-date they are, the more successful your Inbound Marketing strategy will be.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a B2B Inbound Marketing Agency providing Inbound Marketing, Inbound Website Design and Inbound Sales services to companies around the world. We're focused on growing website traffic, qualified leads and sales, using the Inbound lead generation and marketing automation process.
THE BRIT AGENCY is a certified Gold Tier Hubspot Partner, a HubSpot COS certified Inbound Website Design Agency, a Shopify eCommerce Partner, and a certified "Google Badged Agency Partner". We have offices in Toronto and Barrie, Canada, and Salisbury, UK.