Buyer Personas: How to Create Them and Why They Matter for Your Marketing Campaigns

by | December 1, 2023 | Inbound Marketing

Successful marketing strategies don’t have to be complicated. Companies struggling to create effective marketing campaigns benefit from creating buyer personas to understand their customers. Buyer personas are essential marketing assets for B2B organizations and can completely transform your organization’s success with digital marketing campaigns.

Buyer personas can transform a B2B company’s marketing strategy when planned and executed correctly. Creating an accurate buyer persona impacts the success of your marketing campaigns. B2B companies must take a unique approach to craft buyer personas targeted toward other organizations and the services they seek. This article will explain the steps to creating buyer personas and how buyer personas will help your marketing efforts succeed like never before.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a fictional individual representing your company’s ideal customer. Buyer personas are created based on market research, data about your current customers, and an understanding of who you expect to benefit most from your products or services. These personas represent the type of organization and worker your services will most benefit from.

When companies successfully create a buyer persona, the persona becomes an essential part of marketing strategies. Buyer personas can be valuable tools for your marketing team and a reference point for your campaigns. With a deep understanding of your company’s buyer personas, your marketing team can improve its decisions for messaging, product development, and sales strategies for future campaigns.

Additionally, your marketing team can learn about the success of your organization’s products and services to help identify areas where you can adjust your content to better suit specific audiences and their needs.

Download our Buyer Persona Worksheet

Why are Buyer Personas Important?

Before you create buyer personas for your business, it’s crucial to understand why they are an essential tool for your marketing strategies. Buyer personas are important because they allow companies to better understand their customers and what consumers expect from their brands.

Your company can use buyer personas to meet the standards of your current customers and craft marketing campaigns that connect with prospective buyers. A buyer persona goes beyond surface-level information about your customers and requires you to consider what your ideal buyer looks like.

When executed successfully, buyer personas give you all the details you need to know about your target customers. Knowing what customers expect from you and what matters to them is essential to improving your marketing efforts and promoting content that connects with your ideal customer.

Differences Between B2C and B2B Buyer Personas

The primary difference between B2C and B2B buyer personas are the intended audience. A B2B buyer persona is built on strategies that market to other businesses, whereas a B2C buyer persona focuses on the consumer and selling directly to the customer.

Because B2B companies sell to other businesses, their campaigns are tailored to a different audience than B2C campaigns. Therefore, B2B marketing teams must form a buyer persona representing the best interests of an organization. A B2B buyer persona works for a company that benefits from your products or services and who you would typically target in your campaigns.

Additionally, a B2B buyer persona contains characteristics of an employee, such as their role in the organization you are marketing to, who they report to, their company’s goals, and the products and services they need to help their business function. Identify how this persona consumes information and the typical platforms you would find them on. Whether they need new technology devices, software, or supplies, show them why your services are the best for their business goals.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

Creating a buyer persona can help your company thrive and excel in its marketing content. When you create an ideal persona, your marketing efforts are more likely to be successful and reach your target audience.

While buyer personas are essential to your company’s overall success, creating a buyer persona is the first step to a successful marketing campaign. Below is each step you should take to create a successful buyer persona that connects with the right people.

1. Do Thorough Audience Research

You can’t create a buyer persona without thorough research. Understanding your audience means identifying specific patterns and gathering information about your average buyer. To begin your research, go through the contact information of your previous buyers.

For each contact, determine how the customer accessed your brand and found out about your services. Notice any commonalities among these buyers to determine the most effective strategies and platforms to market your product.

Your research must also include personal information about your typical buyers. While not every customer will be identical, your ideal buyer will likely have at least a few details in common with your other customers, making it essential to map out consistent details. For instance, you might pay attention to the typical size of a company you sell to or a particular industry you target.

Customer Surveys and Interviews
Your customers have all of the details you need to form a perfect buyer persona, and one of the best ways to gather crucial information about past customers is through surveys and interviews. Many buyers are willing to complete a short survey after purchasing and implementing your services. These surveys will give you specific insights into the average demographic of your buyers and shared details about each customer served.

Additionally, connect with your past and present customers through interviews to understand what they enjoy about your product and brand. If a customer had a positive experience when using your services, inquire about what made the experience positive and what they would change if they weren’t satisfied.

Gathering all the information you can about the customers you’ve sold to will reveal who you should prioritize in your future marketing efforts. As you gather this data, you will notice many similarities among your average buyer–this information will inform your upcoming marketing strategies.

Interviews With Your Internal Teams
Connecting with your sales department and internal teams as you create a buyer persona is essential to guaranteeing that your persona is accurate and effective. Internal teams likely have unique perspectives on your marketing campaigns and can give you helpful feedback and insights about what they’ve noticed with customer patterns.

Consider specific sales metrics and gather feedback from your sales team about patterns they notice with customers. Your sales team is likely to have a thorough knowledge of specific customers they have communicated with.

2. Identify Customer Goals and Pain Points

Creating a buyer persona goes beyond knowing who a customer is based on jobs and demographics and requires companies to consider what customers want and what they hope to solve through a service like yours. Customer pain points are often the motivating factor that leads to a buyer finding your services online, as they will research your company’s solutions.

Focusing on pain points when creating a buyer persona is essential to targeting audiences experiencing a specific issue instead of catering to a broad, generalized idea of a customer. When you identify pain points, you can determine how your services will help the buyer solve the issue efficiently.

3. Understand How You Can Help

Your ideal customer is looking for a solution and for a company that listens to their desires and understands their struggles. Understand all of the ways that you can help your customers as you develop your buyer persona. Go into detail about specific products, solutions, and support you can give your buyer that other providers cannot offer.

Know what makes your service unique and why a buyer would be drawn to your help over help from your competitors. While your products have excellent value and quality, other organizations are likely offering the same type of products and services. Remember that your target buyer will potentially look at other options before choosing you as a solution, so make sure you sell your company and demonstrate how it will help the prospective buyer more than other services.

Always have a way for prospective buyers to access your team and services. Open dialogue between customers and organizations is essential to showing prospective buyers that you value their time and want to help them find the perfect solution to address their pain points. As you craft your buyer persona, determine what unique value your organization has to offer its clients.

4. Create Your Buyer Persona

When you’ve gathered all of the essential information about past buyers, you can begin developing a concrete example of a buyer persona. As you analyze your market research, create a persona of your ideal customer. Collect every detail you can about your buyer persona, even if it feels disjointed–you can edit down once you complete the first draft of your persona.

Gathering all of the information mentioned above can seem overwhelming. Combing through clients and determining prospective buyers is a hefty task that can significantly help your business grow, making it essential to create a buyer persona that effectively guides your future marketing efforts. To get started on creating the perfect buyer persona, consider some of the following questions essential to a complete B2B buyer persona.

What is your buyer’s role in their company?
Who do they report to in their organization?
What issue are they currently facing?
How are they finding your company? Are there specific platforms or search terms customers typically access you through?
What are the main challenges they face daily?
How do they find their information? What platform are they using?
What are common search terms your buyer persona would use to find the solution your company offers?
What draws your buyer to your company more than your competitors?
How do they prefer to communicate?
What is your buyer’s ultimate goal in solving their pain point?
What features do they want from a solution?
What features do you offer that fit their wants?
What tools do they need to complete their tasks?
What do they expect from you and your services?

5. Revise and Update Your Buyer Persona

Go over your buyer persona with your teammates to identify lacking. As you implement your buyer persona into your marketing strategies, ensure that you regularly check your personas to see if they need to be revised or updated. Because buyer trends shift over time, your buyer persona will also change.

When a significant change occurs in your company or your target audience, it is essential to revise your persona to suit your new goals. Even without notable changes in your company or customers, analyzing your buyer persona at least once annually is essential to guarantee your marketing strategy is still effective.

B2B Buyer Persona Example
Creating an effective buyer persona is easier if you turn to concrete examples of a B2B buyer persona. Below is a detailed example of a comprehensive B2B buyer persona to reference as you create your own and how to break down your persona into different categories.

Name: Emily Smith
Age: 28-35 years old
Job Position: Founder and CEO
Education: Bachelor’s degree
Business size: Small business
Company type: Local startup
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Pain points: Overwhelmed with managing a new business with little staffing, spending time conducting manual tasks like finances and marketing.
Goal: Find software to manage and process payroll and accounts payable
The benefit of your product: You can automate these processes and help her navigate her new business

Connecting with your target audience is easiest when you have an effective and comprehensive buyer persona on which to base your clientele. With a comprehensive buyer persona, you can understand your buyers and how to address their needs and concerns. Creating a buyer persona is simple when you take the proper steps and gather accurate customer information.

Download our Buyer Persona Worksheet