The concept of buyer personas has long been applied with success in B2C fields, but now B2B businesses are getting in on the act and identifying personas to improve their advertising results.
When used effectively, buyer personas can increase the success of B2B marketing campaigns, particularly for digital channels such as event marketing, email marketing and webinar development.
B2B marketers face a series of challenges when attempting to engage with prospects and convert them into buyers. The right decisions must be made when investing in marketing activity designed to develop a brand, generate leads, improve customer experience and deliver conversions.
As marketing technology evolves, the nature of marketing goals also becomes more complex. Customers expect to see increasingly targeted and unique experiences that meet their specific needs.
With the right buyer persona, B2B marketers can manage the foundational research work that they need to devise and refine the right online marketing campaigns.
Remember, buyer personas are fictional and example ‘people’ which characterise certain customer groups or users. These personas help marketers to describe audiences, anticipate how they might interact with the brand and identify the solutions which are likely to best meet their needs.
In effect, by aggregating the factors that motivate B2B buyers to buy, the entire prospect lifecycle can be explained within a broader motivational context. This provides the very thing that today’s marketers need more than ever; reliable insight. Personas are created by data mining and interviewing existing customers and prospects to find out what makes them tick.
They take time to develop, but can greatly aid decisions around campaign development, down to specific channels and tactics.
Once in place, buyer personas can be employed in the creation of better marketing campaigns for SEO, content marketing and social media. They can be applied when researching keywords, for example, helping to create more targeted advert copy.
Once the copy is in place, the same personas can be used for content marketing to devise the right content themes, respond to buyer pain points and adapt content to varied environments
For example, a marketer might look at the goals of the buyer persona in terms of their role within the organisation. Are they focused on building ad sales or delivering operational growth? Content can then be tailored to meet those needs. The marketer might ask what a day in their working life looks like and respond with content that provides solutions.
In examining these areas, marketers can craft content and keyword marketing efforts to improve their paid ad and SEO campaigns. The same process applies to other channels such as social media, from organic network development through to influencer marketing.
And for offline campaign activity, the value of buyer personas still holds true. For example, it is far easier to identify a suitable publication in which to advertise or host a thought leadership article if the buyer persona can be applied to ask ‘will our prospects read this title?’
So if your B2B business is yet to invest in its B2B buyer personas, now is the time, for more reliable, more accurate marketing efforts with a higher return.
