The conventional wisdom is that the worlds of B2B marketing and B2C marketing are vastly different. B2C marketing is all about splashy entertainment, consumer awareness and brand building, while B2B marketing is much more about straightforward product information and addressing specific business needs. Right?
While that basic premise is generally true, it ignores the single biggest thing that B2B marketing and B2C marketing have in common: the need to understand your customer. In the same way that B2C marketers devote countless hours and resources to segmenting their customers and then finding out what makes them tick, B2B marketers also need to really focus on understanding their customers and finding out what makes them do what they do.
One easy way to do this is by constructing “buyer personas,” which are essentially profiles of your company’s most likely customers. It helps tremendously to know much more than just the standard demographic information about a potential prospect. Maybe you know that your typical prospect is male, age 40-54, and lives in a major metropolitan area such as London. Ok, great. But what kinds of media does this person consume? How do they spend their free time? What interests do they have outside of business?
That’s where the really interesting information starts to bubble up to the surface and makes your job of generating leads and revenue that much easier. According to a 2016 B2B marketing benchmarking study by Cintell, the most successful B2B companies are 2.2 times more likely to have and document buyer personas than companies that miss their targets for leads and revenue. In short, if you know who your buyers really are, you’re more likely to be successful.
Getting started in putting together those buyer personas doesn’t have to be hard – as long as you put away your misconceptions about the differences between B2C and B2B marketing. For example, take the notion that social media is only for B2C marketers. You’d be missing out on a vast trove of information for your buyer personas, because it’s on social networks where you can really figure out what makes your prospects tick. Constructing the most accurate buyer personas means taking advantage of all the quantitative and qualitative data at your disposal.
Instead of just trying to collect all your information about prospects via traditional channels such as email and LinkedIn, think about expanding your reach to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. See what your company’s fans and followers are posting online, whom they’re listening to, and what motivates them. That will help you fine-tune your buyer personas. You’ll go beyond just raw demographic data to discover whole new “tribes” of individuals who share unique habits, views and approaches.
And it might just lead you to discover things about your prospects that you never knew. Once you have a deep understanding of your customers, you’ll have a much better idea of how to qualify your leads. You’ll be much better positioned to convert those leads into sales. And, best of all, you’ll be ready to transform that one-time sale into a lifetime happy customer!
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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.