Buyer Persona:
A detailed profile of the target buyer. The buyer persona will go more in-depth than the traditional target audience or demographic. Your personas will guide your marketing, so it’s critical that they’re as accurate as possible. They should be based on data, including customer information, and a test-and-learn approach.
Without a clear target audience, your marketing is likely to fall flat. It’s not possible to make relevant and timely marketing content if you don’t know who is consuming that content. That’s why it’s so important to have a clear vision of your target audience. Your buyer persona should provide you with the guide you need to resonate with your potential buyers.
Depending on your business, you might build multiple buyer personas. It’s important to generate a marketing approach that keeps each of your personas in mind, and build strategies that address each one individually.
Even though buyer personas are so critical to marketing success, only 44% of B2B marketers are generating them as part of their strategy.
However, 93% of marketers that exceed their lead generation goals are segmenting their audiences by buyer persona.
So, what do you need to know about buyer personas, and how do you build one?
Demographics Vs Psychographics
It can be easy to fall into the trap of oversimplifying your target audience. Buyers are savvy to marketing and advertising in the digital world. They know when they’re being advertised to, and can easily disengage when marketing isn’t relevant to them.
You need to target the individual. What does the person on the end of the phone or laptop care about? What are their concerns or motivations? These are what truly make up a person and their decisions.
Demographics are important. Ultimately, you need to know what gender you’re targeting, what age your buyers are, where they’re located, etc. This is all valuable information that you can gather from your analytics tools and metrics. However, you cannot simply target women between the ages of 25-35 and expect to strike gold, for example. Women between the ages of 25-35 aren’t your buyers. Stephanie, the 26-year-old marketing specialist that lives with her husband and son, is your buyer. There is more to her than just her demographics.
This is why psychographic information is so important. What motivates one 26-year-old will be completely different from another. You need to know the individual.
Psychographics could include further details like:
- What are their wider goals, in life or at work?
- What are their pain points?
- What challenges are they facing?
- What would they like to achieve with software?
This information allows you to tailor your marketing specifically. Address the issues that your buyer persona needs you to address, and this is how you will engage with and resonate with them.
Needless to say, this provides very specific information. You’ll likely need to build more than one buyer persona for your business. It’s also important to test these personas, and find the ones that remain engaged with your business for more successful targeting in the future.
How to Build a Buyer Persona
We started by saying that a buyer persona is about more than just demographics. Well, this is still true, but demographics is where you should start.
Gather data from your lists of contacts. These should cover a variety of groups, including current customers, engaged leads, and your competitor’s customers. You should also generate data on your ideal customers. Who would you like to sell to?
Take a look at these groups. Are there any clear similarities?
Take note of the most common demographics in these groups, including the following:
- Gender
- Role
- Location
- Age
- Nationality
- Industry
- Economic Group
These are just a few examples. What constitutes valuable demographic information for your business will be entirely dependent on your buyers. Begin to identify trends here. You might spot small groups, or one clear winner for each category.
With this information, start to draw up an idea of the individual in your head. Some creative license is permitted here. Imagine what that person might look like, and what their life looks like.
There’s no clear-cut way to generate the final buyer persona. It will require some educated guesswork, based on the demographics, and your exchanges with your customers. But, once you’re feeling more familiar with your persona, start to build a profile.
You should include demographic information. But it’s also important to add the psychographic ideas you’ve had during the brainstorming process. Make it clear what drives your buyer persona to a purchase, and what kind of marketing resonates with them.
Here are just a few examples of key points for your profile:
- Favored marketing channels
- Pain points
- Motivators in the workplace and personal life
- Solutions they’re already interacting with
A detailed profile like this will be invaluable to your marketing team as they start to build messages that target your buyers. It’s important to note that a test-and-learn approach is always required. However, your buyer personas will adapt over time to become more accurate.
At Nituno, we work with B2B tech companies to identify buyer personas and value propositions. This allows us to build a holistic marketing approach that is tailored to the individual company. Need help identifying your buyers? Get in touch with us today!
