You want to focus your time, energy and budget on marketing to the right people. You know that B2B buyer personas can be an excellent tool to achieve this. But only if they’re created and used wisely.
Your buyer personas must be as dynamic as your company. They aren’t character sculptures to be created and left to decorate the foyer. They’re not just another slide in a marketing deck—seen once and stored forever. Your B2B buyer personas represent the real humans that buy your product. They must evolve over time to represent both the changes in your buyers and the growth of your business.
A B2B buyer persona is a more complex character than its B2C cousin. You need more than demographics to create B2B buyer personas that are useful to your whole organization. A complex B2B service or product offering necessitates several decision makers in the process. You need B2B buyer personas for each interested party and a view on how they interact with each other.
To get below the surface level and be able to use B2B buyer personas to scale your business, you need to base them on reliable insights from custom research.
What are B2B buyer personas?
A B2B buyer persona represents one segment of your target audience. Each B2B buyer persona profile is built from data about your current client base and intensive, specific market research. Ideally, you’ll construct an avatar that looks, thinks and feels like your real life ideal clients.
Each B2B buyer persona incorporates the personality and characteristics of a key member of your target audience. This includes understanding their role in the buying process, their goals within the company, the challenges and stresses they must overcome, the pain points your service or product is relieving.
Getting a full characterisation of who you’re marketing to means you can target that budget in a much more effective way. And, just as crucially, eliminate wasting time and resources on advertising to the wrong people.
Benefits of using buyer personas
Constructing B2B buyer personas from NewtonX market research has benefits that apply throughout your organization.
Communication
B2B buyer personas lead to a greater empathy for your ideal clients which, almost automatically, leads to more authentic communications at every level. You want to communicate the same value proposition to every buyer persona. With these high level insights, you can refine the words and images to best connect with each one individually.
Staff understanding
Discussions around your buyer personas help your internal staff get to know your clients better. This leads to better understanding and client interactions all round.
Decision making
By digging into the unique specifics of your B2B buyer personas’ needs and pain points, decisions on developing new services and products can be made with more confidence. NewtonX insights guide marketing strategy to target the right people, in the right way.
How do your buyer personas get along?
Most complex B2B purchases are made by a group decision. After creating buyer profiles for each key player, you can go even deeper and analyze their interaction with each other. Find out where they start, meet and connect on their journey across the buyer landscape. Give yourself the competitive edge by meeting them where they are and directing them towards your offering.
How do you create B2B buyer personas?
There are several key questions to consider when you’re creating your B2B buyer personas:
- Who are they? Start with basic demographics.
- What’s their position in the buying team? Make sure you understand what their main priority is within this purchase situation.
- Where do they get their information now? Basically, you need to know where your ideal clients hang out so you can be there too. Your buyer personas should have a list of events they attend, professional associations they belong to, and media, tools and tech they use – as well as any other sources of information they regularly use.
- What are their non-negotiables when it comes to suppliers?
- What brands are they using right now? Why are they using them?
- What are their goals? Explicitly show them how your product makes them look good.
- What’s stressing them? Show how your product or service eliminates the challenges of their needs and pain points.
- What are the barriers to them buying your product? It’s critical to remove any perceived barriers to purchase as early as possible.
Of course, the answers you need are specific to your business. That’s why NewtonX only produces custom findings that address your current concerns. Our proprietary AI-driven search scans over 1.1 billion minds to find exactly the right expertise for your niche.
Successfully scaling business using B2B Buyer Personas
Research and creation
Asking the right questions to the right people, using the right research methodologies is the key to decision quality B2B buyer personas. NewtonX chooses the right combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to really bring your multiple buyer profiles to life.
We use a range of 19 buyer persona survey questions as the basis for your research. Our carefully crafted client retention and loyalty questions can really make it easier to sell to existing customers – driving understanding of future prospects and profitability. A win-loss survey provides another angle, examining the reasons why you won and lost business in the past. This can be quite confronting, but using this competitive intelligence can lead to a considerable jump in your success rate.
Implementation
As a full service B2B market research company, we’ll help you with everything from question design to presenting custom findings with actionable insights. You’ll get the most success from using B2B buyer personas if you update them on a regular basis. This allows you to adapt to a different ideal client as your business changes over time and you launch new products or services.
NewtonX persona survey questions deliver the deep insights you need, but it’s up to you to make sure your team of buyer personas become embedded into your organization. They’ve got just as much to tell your product department as they do the marketing team. But only if they’re discussed, developed and present during key decision-making moments.
Extending this even further, your custom findings give you a perspective of how each of your buyer personas interact in their team environment. This means you’re there to intervene at just the right juncture of their buyer journey.
