We must therefore ask ourselves a series of questions that are more profound than the simple role in the company, sector or geolocation of the prospect.
In addition to these important questions that represent an excellent starting point, we must therefore ask ourselves, for example:
Where do they go to look for reliable sources of information?
What motivates them to purchase?
Knowing these answers is essential to create effective B2B nigeria whatsapp number data 5 million marketing campaigns. The way to do this is to create what is technically called Buyer Personas. Buyer Personas are an “avatar” of the typical customer based on demographics, behavior, lifestyle and purchasing motivations based on the role they hold in the company. In a B2B context, buyer personas therefore represent the buyers who make purchasing decisions in the company.
Creating a Buyer Persona in B2B
The basic steps for creating a B2B buyer persona are similar to B2C customer personas, with a few important distinctions. Let’s look at the steps for creating buyer personas that will help you plan and make your marketing campaigns effective.
The image shows the differences between target audience and buyer persona.
PHASE 1
There are some important attributes to identify in your buyer personas, as, as mentioned, you need to deepen your understanding of your customers, thinking about their lifestyle, motivations, challenges, and goals. Here are some categories that most marketers include:
Demographics: What is their age, location, and company/industry?
Career: How long have they been in the industry, what is their purchasing power, and what needs to happen to make purchasing decisions?
Lifestyle: What are their main responsibilities and work activities?
Media: Where do they go to find reliable sources of information and networking: conferences, forums, and/or corporate social media?
Motivations / Goals / Objectives: What drives their purchasing decisions and what business goals do they have?
Brands: What brands or products do they already use in their company? What do they like/dislike about these products?
Pain points / frustrations / challenges: What problems do they have that they need help solving?
What challenges do they face in trying to achieve their business goals/objectives?
Objections: What are the frustrations they have with related products or services (or yours)?
Keep the above categories in mind as you move to the next step of researching existing buyers and businesses.
PHASE 2
When looking for your ideal buyer, the first step is to brainstorm which industries and companies your product or service would be suitable for.
First of all, if you have an already established company, you can certainly scrutinize in detail the characteristics of your best customers and then, to support the data obtained, you can start using digital tools.
To research B2B buyer personas, LinkedIn certainly provides an in-depth look at various companies and industries.
By looking at employee profiles, you can gather information about how long they have been in the industry or specific company, what their educational background is, what companies they follow, and much more. LinkedIn, as we have seen, is a great place to share articles, communicate with other professionals in forums, and connect with others.
Listen to what people are saying there, as it can tell you about potential motivations, challenges and problems that people in different industries face on a daily basis. It is
also very important to interview one-on-one or to prepare online quizzes (very valid and used today), even small focus groups are fine.
Use the attributes you want to include in your personas to help you plan your interview questions.
Since you are interviewing Business Buyers, remember to be professional and considerate of their time.
In addition to interviews, you can use a variety of tools to extract data, including Google Analytics to examine keywords, so you can find out what buyers search for when they find your website, or Google Keyword Planner to check (as we saw in the SEO chapter) what and how your potential customers search on the search engine.
Also very interesting to use at this stage is the “ANSWER THE PUBLIC” tool that, by inserting certain keywords, gives us the “search intents” (the entire sentences) most searched by users on that specific topic. Once the research phase is completed, it is time to move on to creating your buyer personas.
PHASE 3
After spending so much time gathering data, you should start to see patterns emerge in your prospect “avatars.” You should now segment these buyers by industry and job title, then pool the information to create 2-6 different buyer personas (depending on the decision-making chain of your business) for your marketing team. Each buyer persona should have a name and face to make your avatar as real as possible.
The profile of a buyer persona
PHASE 4
The whole point of creating buyer personas is that it allows you to target your marketing strategies to a segmented audience. Now the best use you can make of this is through B2B CONTENT MARKETING. With all the previous work done, it should now be easier for you to create content that is specific to each persona’s interests, and tailored to where they are along their B2B buying journey.
