b2b buyer persona

How To Create Detailed B2B Buyer Personas For Your Business

When it comes to creating a successful B2B business, understanding your buyers is essential. You need to know their needs, wants, and pain points to develop products and services that appeal to them. One way to do this is by creating detailed buyer personas. 

Today’s blog post will show you how to create detailed B2B buyer personas for your business. Let’s get started!

What Is A B2B Buyer Persona?

First things first, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It considers their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points. 

B2C companies have been using buyer personas for years, but B2B companies are now starting to see the importance of creating them as well. In fact, research from MarketingInsiderGroup shows that 93% of high-performing organizations use buyer personas. 

It’s important to note that there are critical differences between B2C and B2B buyer personas. You can’t just take a B2C persona and apply it to your B2B business. The two types of companies have different foundations, so their personas must also be different.

Why B2B Buyer Personas Are Important

When it comes to B2B businesses, creating buyer personas is essential. Of course, they help you understand your target audience better. But they also have a number of other benefits, including

Getting Your Staff on The Same Page

Buyer personas providing a common ground for everyone to reference when they need to know more about the customer. They also help reduce silos between departments. When everyone works from the same persona, it’s easier to align your team’s efforts and create a cohesive strategy.

Improving Your Customer Service

You can use your B2B buyer persona to create targeted resources and FAQs for your customer service team. This way, they’re able to provide better answers that address the specific needs of your target customers. 

You can also use buyer personas to create targeted scripts for your sales team. This way, they know what information to share with potential customers and how to optimize customer satisfaction.

Customizing The Customer Journey

It’s no secret that the B2B customer journey is much longer and more complex than the B2C customer journey. 

Creating buyer personas can help you map out the different steps that your target customers take on their journey. You can create targeted content and campaigns that speak to them at each stage. For example, some customers prefer e-books and whitepapers, while others prefer webinars or case studies.

Creating Better Products or Add-ons

Finally, B2B buyer personas can help you create better products or add-ons. When you know what your target customers are looking for, creating products that address their specific needs is more manageable. 

You can also use buyer personas to come up with new product ideas. If you notice a need that’s not being met by your current products, you can use your persona to come up with a unique offering that meets that need.

How To Create A B2B Buyer Persona

Too many companies make the mistake of creating personas that are too general. They might have a persona for ”small businesses” or ”enterprise companies.” But these types of personas are too broad to be effective. You need to get specific to create a compelling B2B buyer persona.

We’ll go over the specific information you need to gather shortly, but first, you must know how to acquire this information. There are four main ways to collect data for your persona:

Research The Market

The first step is to research the market. You can do this by reading industry reports and conducting your own market research. You can also read trade publications and follow influencers in your industry. That way, you will stay up-to-date on the latest trends and see what’s working for other companies in your industry.

Look Back at Your Data

The next step is to look back at your own data. It includes data from your website, CRM, and marketing automation platform. This data will help you understand who your best customers are and what they’re looking for. It will also help you identify any gaps in your current persona. 

To get started, you can look at your website analytics to see which buyer personas are visiting your site and what they’re interested in.

A/B Test Your Site

A/B testing is an effective way to gather data about your target customers. You can use this data to improve your website and make it more effective for your B2B buyer persona. 

For example, you can create two versions of your home page. One version can be targeted toward a specific buyer persona, while the other can be more general. You can then see which version performs better and make changes accordingly.

Conduct Interviews

Surveys and interviews can give you a wealth of information about your target customers. You can use this information to improve your buyer persona and make it more accurate. To get started, you can send out surveys to your current customers. You can also conduct interviews with customers, prospects, and even people who don’t buy from you.

Consult Your Team

Unless you’re at the heart of your organization, you may not have all the information you need to create an accurate B2B buyer persona. That’s why consulting with other team members, such as sales, customer service, and product development is essential. They will be able to give you a complete overview of your target customers.

How To Implement B2B Buyer Personas Into Marketing Strategy

Before presenting our buyer persona template, let’s first review some crucial points on how to implement your B2B buyer persona into your marketing strategy. 

First, you must ensure that your persona is included in all aspects of your marketing. That means that every single piece of content, every ad, and every email should be targeted toward a specific buyer persona. 

It’s also important to keep your persona up-to-date — as your business grows and changes, so will your buyer persona. Make sure to revisit your persona every few months to see if any changes need to be made. 

Finally, you need to ensure that everyone on your team knows your B2B buyer persona. That way, they can all be on the same page and working towards the same goal.

B2B Buyer Persona Template

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a buyer persona. Different industries, business sizes, and even countries will all have different buyer personas. That being said, there is a general template that you can follow when creating your own B2B buyer persona. 

You’ll notice that basic information like name and demographics are omitted here. That’s because they’re not as important for B2B companies as they are for B2C companies. While you can certainly include them if you want to, it’s not necessary. 

Feel free to add or remove any sections that are not relevant to your business.

b2b buyer persona template

B2B Buyer Persona Example

We’ve included an example below to help you better understand how to create a B2B buyer persona. The persona we’ll be covering is based on Jan-Pro, a commercial cleaning franchise in Canada. They were looking to generate more leads and appointment bookings for their sales team. 

We at Leads at Scale saw this as a pristine opportunity to help them use cold calling services to scale their sales. 

Here’s what the buyer persona would look like for Jan-Pro and similar companies: 

b2b buyer persona example

Are you curious to see how it turned out when we approached this persona? You can read all about it in our Jan-Pro case study.

Main Takeaways

Creating buyer personas is a vital part of any marketing strategy. By understanding your target audience, you can create content that appeals to their needs and interests. 

If you need help creating a buyer persona for your business, reach out to Leads at Scale. We specialize in helping startups, and small businesses generate leads and grow their businesses.

John Dubay

John Dubay is the Managing Partner at Leads at Scale, an outsourced sales support company that helps B2B companies generate well-qualified leads at scale, ready to be closed.

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