Driving Growth through Integrated Marketing
This blog presents information, techniques and guidance on how to optimize marketing for your business.
Overview Buyer personas are a useful tool to have in any marketer’s toolbox, as they help you understand your customers better. However, many marketers don’t know how to develop a buyer persona or even how to get started. This article will provide you with an overview of what a buyer persona is, and outline the basic steps needed to develop a buyer persona. Note: this blog focuses strictly on developing buyer personas for B2B, but most of these directions can be applied to B2C persona creation as well. Introduction Developing a buyer persona, a.k.a., a marketing profile, is something that all marketers should know how to do and all marketing organizations should be engaged in. Why? Because it helps you understand your buyers and your customers better. In today’s world there are so many ways to connect and engage with buyers, both in-person and in the digital world that many marketers forget they must have an in-depth understanding of them prior to beginning any marketing activity. While that sounds obvious, the fact is that many marketers forget that step. Due to that, much of what is created by marketing misses the mark when delivered, as it is not optimized for or relevant to the buyer. This in turn creates problems for the business, as marketing is not delivering what is required to help move the buyer through the various stages of the buying cycle. This is where the creation of a buyer persona comes in. The Who, What and Why of Buyer Personas Before we begin developing a buyer persona, we need to understand a few basic facts: Who A buyer persona is a fictional character, developed by marketing, to represent the cumulative characteristics and behaviors of a typical buyer at a company in the targeted audience for a product or service. In other words, a buyer persona represents the average targeted buyer and his/her behaviors and influences that a sales person might encounter. What A buyer persona is a tool used by marketing to drive greater in-depth understanding of the targeted customers and the buyers who work for those companies. In short, it’s a compilation of all the research that marketing has done about target markets, market opportunity, buying preferences, behaviors, biases, etc., distilled into a representative fictional character. The persona can be created, modified, or discarded as needed. Depending on the need, there may be one or more personas developed. Why A buyer persona is needed because it forces the marketer to develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of the buyer’s motivations and behaviors. This enables the marketer to develop marketing that optimizes how the product or service being sold is positioned. However, before developing a persona, the marketer must do the necessary research across several areas. The marketer has to not only understand the product or solution being sold, what it does, what technology is used (if that information is relevant to the customer), and what the characteristics and features are. He also has to understand the value and benefits that his product provides, what the competitive products are (including pricing, positioning, features, capabilities), and how his product is different/better than the competition. Of course, that’s only the starting point. That level of detail is just the basic information that any marketer must know and understand before beginning the development of any marketing activity. The marketer then has to dive deep into the targeted customers to research, discover and understand what their problems, issues, pain points, motivations and challenges are. He must know about the customer’s industry, buying and approval cycles, and more. He must also know and understand what the objections might be and how to respond to them, as well as all other factors that might influence a buying decision. This includes additional items such as: what is the existing technology infrastructure, are there issues with backwards compatibility, and are there any other technology issues. In short, the marketer needs to know everything and anything that could affect or impact the purchase decision. This depth and breadth of knowledge is part of the effective development of any marketing activity, so that the desired outcome is achieved. It’s also critical to the development of a buyer persona. How to Develop a Buyer Persona This is where the real fun begins. A buyer persona can be as superficial or as detailed as you make it; that choice is up to you. Just remember that the more detailed the persona is, the more likely you are to use it, as it provides much greater insight into the buyer’s motivations, biases and behaviors. The key point to remember when developing a persona is that buyers are motivated by a business need. More specifically, the buyer needs to make a purchase that will solve some sort of a problem that affects or impacts the business. The easiest way to illustrate that point is by recalling the old adage, “A customer doesn’t buy a drill because he needs a drill, he buys a drill because he needs a hole.” That motivation is what must be remembered when researching the characteristics to successfully create a buyer persona. In the business world, buyers are not looking for your product or service because they like your company. There is some sort of business issue or problem that your product or service can solve for them. That’s the real reason for the purchase. So how do I start? Getting Started If the target market for your product or service is segmented, you may find it useful to create more than one buyer persona. This allows you to accurately reflect the different buyer behaviors and characteristics of companies in the various segments of your target market. If market is not segmented, you may need to only create one buyer persona. When developing a buyer persona, it should represent as accurately as possible all of the various inputs that are considered by or could influence the buyer when making a purchase decision. That’s also where it gets a bit more complicated, as there are numerous factors that can affect that decision. Regardless of how many personas you need to develop, begin the process by gathering the relevant details that are representative of the targeted buyer. Depending on the product or service, you may begin with basic demographic information, such as:
From that point, you continue to broaden the scope of your research as needed. You may also want to include personality traits (whether the buyer is detail-oriented, process-oriented, focused on numbers, driven by cost, driven by saving money, wants the latest technology) or other characteristics that help the persona become more reflective of the targeted buyer. Note that a lot of the demographic information that is typically used in B2C customer persona development (such as gender, income, education, whether they are married, whether they have kids, how old the kids are, where they go to school, etc.) is not relevant in the B2B world. Those factors do not impact the business buying process, so they are not typically included in the buyer persona development process. However, in the B2B sales cycle there are typically many more inputs and influences than there are in B2C, so you may need to include additional information, such as:
Developing the Buyer Persona After you’ve done the necessary research and gathered all the information, then you can begin to develop the buyer persona. This is done by incorporating as much information into the character as is needed to accurately represent the typical targeted buyer for your product or service. During the development of the buyer persona, many marketers find it useful to give their personas names, as that helps them become more “real” and easy to understand and relate to when developing marketing materials and activities. It’s also helpful to remember that depending on the company, the buyer might or might not be in a traditional Finance department or role. Instead, he might actually have a completely different function and is responsible for making the purchase for his department. Because of that, the name chosen for the persona should indicate the representative characteristics of that type of buyer to help you easily remember them. Here are a few examples of how this can be done, using some of the information that might have been gathered:
These examples show you how developing the right buyer personas can provide guidance on the type of marketing that is necessary for each buyer type. By having this level of insight into your buyers, you’re able to much more accurately target the type of marketing materials and actions required to help move that buyer through the sales funnel, regardless of where they sit within the organization. Summary Buyer persona development is an extremely useful tool for the marketer, because it drives an in-depth knowledge and understanding of not only the customer, but also the buyer and his/her influences and motivations. The more detail you include in the development of the buyer persona, the more realistic and valuable that persona becomes, which in turn helps you better understand your targeted customer. By using a buyer persona, your marketing development process will drive the creation of more relevant and targeted materials and activities, which in turn will positively impact your business and help drive sales. © 2020 – Richard Hatheway, Catalyst Strategic Marketing & Tyler Creek Consulting Catalyst Strategic Marketing All Rights Reserved
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AuthorsDaniel Kern and Richard Hatheway both have more than three decades of background and experience in businesses ranging in size from startups to global enterprises in numerous functional areas including Marketing, Sales, Operations, Management and IT. We write our blogs to share our experiences and to drive benefits for our clients. Archives
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