Businesses who have taken the time to establish and solidify their target buyer persona can reap the rewards of their efforts year after year. Investing time and energy into this discovery process is an essential B2B marketing and sales strategy for the long-term growth of your business.
Today’s B2B buyer has all the technology and tools at their fingertips to make an informed buying decision on their own. As marketing and sales professionals, it’s our job to track and understand this behavior so we can intervene at just the right time.
The concept of targeting a specific buyer persona may seem obvious, yet many B2B marketing campaigns continue to deploy without a clear reader in mind. In this post, we’ll explain the importance of understanding your ideal buyer persona when it comes to B2B marketing and sales.
Why is A Buyer Persona So Important?
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the building process, it’s important to understand why it’s such a powerful way to streamline your lead generation tactics. When you are able to understand your audience’s pain points, you can create stronger content that assists the reader through the buying process.
B2B marketing is all about influencing the purchasing decision by speaking directly to your ideal customer. Isolating your ideal customer’s buyer persona has many advantages both in terms of lead generation and reaching revenue goals. Some immediate impacts of the persona-based B2B marketing strategy include:
- an increase in overall website traffic
- increase in email campaign performance and engagement
- an increase in conversion rate
The concept of a buyer persona is simple, it’s a semi-fictionalized description of all of the commonalities of your ideal lead, prospect, and client. This includes everything from their job title to their estimated budget allocated to solving a specific problem. Businesses that offer a very specific solution to a niche market often have a crystal clear buyer persona. B2B businesses with a broader audience must cater to a wider range of personas, within a targeted group of industries.
The key to a strong buyer persona is to build an accurate description of the core needs of a specific situation. Focus less on who they are, and more on the problems they need to solve. Understanding certain buyer behaviors will help you isolate the B2B leads worthy of your marketing attention.
Whether you’re speaking to businesses in need of an attorney, a web design agency, or any industry in between, understanding the needs of your target customer will streamline your marketing and sales approach.
Understanding Today’s B2B Buyer
“Buyer 2.0” is armed with knowledge about your products and competitors before they ever contact you. They read reviews from thought leaders, industry-related blogs, and white papers.
A website visitor tracking tool like Website Visitor Intelligence™ (WVI) – which is included at no extra cost with Clickback’s email lead generation (ELG) platform – can help you uncover the prospective leads that are exploring your content, so you can anticipate their next move. It gives you the opportunity to provide them with the targeted information they need to move through your sales funnel.
Start With the Basics
First thing’s first, you’ll need to get each department to weigh in on what they consider to be the perfect customer. A better buyer persona can rise to the surface if you look at what makes up your ideal customer at every stage of the customer relationship. Start building your ideal B2B buyer persona on a primary level, by identifying the basics of your target audience.
Industry
Start to build your buyer persona with the broadest category first. Which industry are they in? If you have a compelling case to target several industries, categorize them into smaller groups. The idea here is to understand which industries hold the best chance of a perfect fit for your products and services.
Business Size
Businesses can vary greatly in size, so go with a number that makes sense for an industry at the stage you can help most. There is no right answer here, but you should start to notice some similarities between the size of businesses that could benefit from your services most.
Common Problems
What do all the companies you provide a solution to have in common? For example, at Clickback, we target medium-sized businesses that are looking to accelerate their B2B lead generation efforts. So we look for businesses that are growing, but not at the rate they could be with a consistent and effective lead generation strategy.
It’s All In the Details
Once you’ve got the basics covered, you can start to hone in the fine details. It’s impossible to find a prospective customer that matches all of these factors exactly, so try to stay focused on the ones that check off the most number of boxes on your list.
- What is their job title?
- Do they have a preferred method of contact?
- Are they a decision maker for the company?
- What is their budget?
Naturally, the deeper you go, the narrower your audience gets. By channeling your marketing efforts towards prospects that best fit your targeted buyer persona, you speak directly to those that could benefit from your services the most.
Ask the Right Questions
Here are some powerful questions to ask yourself when building a targeted B2B buyer persona:
- What are each buyer persona’s top technical priorities for the year?
- What specific words and phrases do they search for when seeking solutions?
- Which blogs, social media accounts, and publications do the buyer personas read?
- What types of content marketing does each buyer persona subscribe to?
- What sales approaches resonate best with each buyer persona?
Once all of your departments have agreed on all of the traits your ideal buyer’s possess, you can start putting them into action. As you roll the strategy out, you start to notice any holes you may have missed in your logic. This is a great time to take a second look at your ideal buyer persona and make any adjustments needed based on these findings.
Changes in technology, competitor offers, and product advancements mean that the buyer persona will always be evolving. Audit your targeted buyer persona often, as a small change in behavior can have a dramatic impact on your marketing and sales strategy effectiveness.
The following infographic shared by B2B News Network provides some powerful statistics when it comes to marketing to a targeted B2B buyer.
It Has A Tremendous Impact On Digital Marketing
Establishing an accurate buyer persona will help every channel of digital marketing. It will not only help the guide the creative process for writing new content but act as a guidepost to the information that’s most valuable to your customers. Starting from the buyer persona’s perspective puts you in your customers’ shoes, so you can give them the information they need at exactly the right time.
Creating content that speaks directly to your ideal B2B prospect will have tremendous benefits to your digital marketing strategy. Building quality content directed at your ideal customer will help everything from your sites organic search rankings to the conversion rate on your contact forms.
Consider the B2B buyer persona you have built to understand how new prospects will first encounter your brand. The early buying stages are critical, so make sure that when they research your company, they get what they need (fast). Offering free premium content in exchange for an email address is proven way to nurture leads that aren’t ready to close.
Fast Track The Process
Clickback’s proprietary WVI software can target, track, and nurture unconverted contacts that land on your website after receiving your ELG campaigns, and provide you with insights about how they’re interacting with your website to help you make smarter marketing and sales decisions. It can be a remarkably powerful sales prospecting tool to increase the volume of new B2B leads entering the sales funnel.
The software tells you which pages of your website a user has visited, so you can cross-reference the topics that strike a chord with certain audiences. You may just find some new industries that are a perfect fit for your business, that you never knew existed.
WVI is an extremely powerful tool that can be invaluable in helping to create your next detailed buyer persona. See for yourself how Clickback can help you grow your lead base by signing up for a free 1-on-1 demo today.
