When you talk to B2B marketers about their target audience, they will often talk in terms of personas (and if they are not, they likely need to refine their strategy to be targeted). Below I explain the importance of personas and how you can build your own.
Personas are integral to B2B marketing programs. They offer the ability to provide strategic focus to your marketing efforts. By knowing the who, what, how, why of the audience you’re targeting, it’s much easier to build a campaign that will resonate.
So, what is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is the grouping of individuals who have similar characteristics related to their role.
For example, even if you look at a marketing team, there are various roles the members of a sizeable team. There may be the Marketing Leader (CMO, S/VP Marketing, Head of Marketing, etc); the departmental lead (S/VP or Head of Product Marketing, S/VP or Head of Demand Generation, etc); and the individual contributors (Content Marketing Manager, Marketing Ops Manager, PR & Communications Manager). By finding commonality amongst your target buyers across the business you’re going after, it’ll make it easy to build targeted messaging that drives them to the path to purchase.
How do I start creating personas?
Start off by talking to everyone who comes in contact with your prospects and clients: so sales and client services/success. Sales can give you an idea as to who they are speaking with and what their profiles look like and what they are looking for when it comes to your product. CS can give you insight once you’ve locked in a client with more details around each persona, as well as insight into anyone you may have missed in the sales process.
Who to include
Now remember, not everyone will be a part of your buying group. So don’t go too crazy in figuring out what role each person plays and building a persona for them. Focus on finding the personas that have anything to do with the following buying group roles:
- Decision Maker – The person who says “yes” to the purchase. They may not be fully entrenched in the process, but will come in at least in the end to evaluate.
- Champion – The person who has some sort of motivation (need for solution, ability to demonstrate expertise, etc) to help you through the process and provide information that enables you to sell and influence everyone else in the buying group. They are your fanboy/girl and you should treat this relationship well.
- End User(s) – The person(s) who ends up using your product, whether they had a say in the buying process or not.
- Ratifier/Approver – The person (occasionally this is someone in finance) who has the authority for formal sign-off of the spend & may be the signature of the contract.
What to include
You can collect an exorbitant amount of information on each persona, but it’s best to determine what you’d like to know that will make it easier for the sales team to sell and for the marketing team to build targeted campaigns. It’s easy to get out of control, but sometimes more is better for you to pull it back to create the right persona profile.
- Buying group role (see above)
- Common job titles
- Demographic information (generalizations of age range, location, education, family, work history)
- What they do in their job
- Position on the org chart
- Buying center (generally their department)
- Firmagraphics (example: a CMO at a large multi-national organization is very different than a CMO at an SMB/mid-size business)
- Motivations/wants (what’s their personal motivation to do a good job, or to prevent you from winning business?)
- Business goals & challenges
- Tendencies (what types of things do they enjoy (webinars?)?, what do they read (trades?)?, where can they be found (trade shows?)? – all in relation to work)
Just keep in mind, buyer personas should have information that the marketing team and sales team can leverage – don’t fall into the trap of knowing so much that in the end it isn’t actually actionable.
How do I curate the personas?
Create a framework for what you want and then organize. This may look different in every organization depending on how many categories you’ve created or how many data points you’re looking at.
Once you’ve grouped them together, you can go ahead and start naming them. More often than not, personas will have silly names like “Marketing Margo” or “Tech Guy Todd.” While it may seem absurd, these names are designed to stick out so that everyone in the business can easily recall what it’s referring to and what profile of that persona looks like. Careful though: I don’t recommend getting too out of hand in your naming (then it’s not memorable) OR if a client saw the profiles and the names were the tiniest bit insulting, you may regret it.
I’ve found that the best format for personas is organized into a template (so you can copy and create new personas later) in PPT/Slides.
Which personas do I prioritize?
After you collect all of your information, your team should sit down to determine which personas you want to specifically target with the resources that you have. This doesn’t mean ignore the personas you don’t target forever, just be smart about how you focus your campaigns and add on new personas to message to as needed or when you discover pain points in your buying process.
And don’t forget: you need to train your teams & keep the personas someplace easy to access/find.
How do you use the persona(s)?
Your sales team can use the persona information to identify who they are speaking with and leverage that knowledge to know what types of questions they should be asking that person to unveil more information. Or if they are trying to identify a complete buying group, they can use the knowledge of a “missing” persona to ask the others involved who that person is.
The marketing team should use the personas to build targeted campaigns that resonates with the persona and draws that person in to become a lead.
Examples include:
- Targeted messaging in ad campaigns (e.g.: LinkedIn) to drive awareness and leads
- Specific content that speaks to your persona to nurture them
- Supporting sales (enablement) with tailored sales decks and collateral
This list goes on. Test and iterate. Ideally, as time goes on and you refine your personas, marketing will get a bit easier.
Additional Resources
Header Photo by Chien Nguyen Minh on Unsplash