One of the best ways to understand your core audience is to go about creating a buyer persona, which is really a shorthand way of understanding the needs, pain points, behaviors and preferences of your customers. With just a few buyer personas, you can vastly improve the overall efficiency of your marketing activities – which might explain why nearly two-thirds of all marketers use buyer personas.
Here’s how it works: instead of sending the same message to every customer, you can tailor messages according to certain customer segments. Each customer segment is based on a buyer persona. According to a July 2016 B2B marketing survey by LinkedIn, one-third of marketers use buyer personas for content segmentation.
But how do you go about creating a comprehensive B2B buyer persona?
One common tool is using secondary research from analysts or from sales team recommendations. You’re essentially cobbling together notes, insights and comments and using them to construct your personas. This is the same type of information that might already exist in your company’s CRM system, but in a much more unstructured form.
Another common tool is to use current customer interviews or surveys. In short, ask your customers a series of questions and see if any patterns start to emerge. You might know quite a lot about your customers in terms of demographic data (location, age, gender, income), but a number of surprising trends and behaviors may emerge when you start to ask them about their ideas, beliefs, and needs.
You can also use social media data to construct more sophisticated buyer personas. That’s because each customer will leave behind a wealth of social data that you can mine for unique insights. Take Facebook, for example. Here it might be possible to get a much finer-grained look at the entire network of a customer – or at least, how they interact with you on your main Facebook page.
You could use a tool like Janrain, which helps to unlock customer identities. If you know who your customers are, you are then able to deliver personalized interactions to keep them coming back.
Another important tool is the growing amount of mobile data that you might have on customers. Here, it might be possible to cross-reference geographic data with demographic or psychographic data to see how customers interact with you.
The final element in the mix are recommendations from the marketing team, honed after many campaigns in which they have found out what works, and what doesn’t. According to eMarketer, in fact, 52 percent of all B2B marketers use marketing team recommendations in constructing their buyer personas.
Next, it’s time to put all this data together and see where different patterns emerge. Your goal is to construct at least 2-3 different types of individuals who are using your products or services. The more that you know about their tastes and preferences, the better you can tailor your message to them directly.
Ultimately, this offers you an additional opportunity to customize and personalize your marketing content. And that’s going to help you in boosting your sales conversions rates. That’s because it has been proven that customization and personalization are important tools in guiding buyers along the sales journey. Not matter where they are on this journey, a message that has been specifically tailored to their behaviors and preferences will help to move them along and increase your chances of a conversion later.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.