It’s essential B2B marketers understand their audience in order to create marketing campaigns that cut through the noise and ultimately drive sales. Joseph Livingstone, head of content at Axonn Media, outlines how to successfully create B2B buyer personas
How do you create buyer personas? Much has been written by marketers in an effort to answer this question. If you’re new to the concept of persona profiling and have opted to do it all in house, it won’t take long to establish there is no simple answer or fool-proof approach. Thorough research and close examination of your findings is essential if you’re going to gain any real insight into your customers’ behaviour.
Draw hasty conclusions and you run the risk of letting hazardous ‘false positives’ and cognitive bias skew the accuracy of your results. Overlook a data source and you may miss something crucial to understanding your audience.
Make no mistake, persona profiling demands ruthless scrutiny of your research methods, as well as your insights. Approach the task without sufficient care and not only do you risk ineffective and inaccurate buyer profiles, you will have to devote further resources to repeating aspects of your research.
Follow these steps to create successful B2B buyer personas:
Get to know your buyers
With an overwhelming number of research techniques and tools available, it is easy to overlook the most obvious source of customer and client insights: your own employees.
Take care to ensure the purpose of the exercise is well understood by those you’re speaking with to maximise the chance that you’ll get what you need. Although you want to understand successful buyer journeys from the perspective of those who deal with them day-to-day, that is not your only goal.
Some of the most valuable persona insights will be into those who were put off: the almost-buyers. Their objections, hesitations and their barriers to purchase need to be explored. Your personas only exist to help you understand your audience. Identifying where and why people dropped out of the buyer cycle is as important as identifying the success stories.
So who do you speak to? Client-facing sales people and account managers are the obvious choice. However, it pays to dig a little deeper. For example, you may have spotted a trend in exits from your website, but there’s only so much you can learn about what motivates these decisions through Google Analytics. If you have a customer support team, find out what kinds of complaints they receive about the website to better understand barriers to customer online journeys.
Ensure your data is reliable
Quantitative research plays an important role in persona profiling and there are lots of easy-to-use tools, particularly online, that can provide you with valuable insights.
Google Analytics is an obvious starting point, while social listening tools such as Followerwonk, Quora and Twtrland can offer insight into your audience’s offsite behaviour, including what they are saying and how they’re interacting with other web users and companies.
When dealing with any large amount of information, it’s important to be mindful of false positives or mistakes in the data. In the case of persona profiling, you’ll want to discard any data from users who are not part of your target audience.
Twitter is a good example of this, because you’re not just dealing with human followers, but also organisations and fake accounts. In small proportions, it is unlikely these will have a significant effect on quantifiable results. However, it is not uncommon for businesses to have a Twitter following consisting almost entirely of people or organisations they have no interest in targeting.
It is also important to focus only on pertinent characteristics. While it may be true that your target B2B buyers tend to have the same qualifications or are the same age, this is only relevant to the extent it affects their buyer journeys, decisions and interactions. Above all else, you want all your insights to be actionable.
Identifying false positives is less straightforward with Google Analytics. Tools do exist to help you identify and then block or filter out invalid website visitors (e.g. web crawlers) from your results.
Too little data is also a red flag, and while it is possible to gain insights by researching the audience of your direct competitors, take care to check these provide insights into your own customer interactions. Whatever you do, resist the temptation to embellish buyer profiles when confronted with too little data. Personas are not ‘created’, they are built on well-understood, trustworthy information.
Define your audience groups
Key to understanding any audience is the distinction between buyers and influencers. For B2B brands in particular, your buyer is a human person, but their decisions are heavily influenced by their role as a proxy for the company they represent.
Understanding the individual involved in the process of making that decision is important, but there’s also a need to understand the organisation itself. An organisation’s strategic priorities, decision-making hierarchy and operational structure all have implications for persona profiling. If more than one person is involved in an organisation’s buying journey, then it should be reflected in your persona segmentation.
Influencers are not responsible for making the final purchasing decision, but they often play a significant role. Whether they are a middle manager building a case to invest in something for someone more senior, a trusted industry expert followed by your buyers, or an assistant keen to show respect at their organisation – influencers should not be overlooked.
Even if you decide against creating a persona for significant influencers in your target audience, being aware of their presence is crucial when scrutinising your data insights, both qualitative and quantitative.
