What is a buyer persona?
Why are buyer personas important to B2B marketing?
Many marketing teams ignore the small planning tasks for creating B2B marketing campaigns. One of those often-ignored steps is the creation of buyer personas. Although missing this step may not be critical, it may mean that your blogging, nurturing and content generation efforts will be less efficient and generate fewer results for your campaign. In short, buyer personas help marketing teams and writers better frame content, pitches and scripts around the potential client.
Buyer personas are research-based archetypal (model) representations of customers or prospects. The act of creating buyer personas helps marketing teams better understand buying behavior, needs, reactions and triggers. By creating buyer personas, your marketing efforts can be more results-driven. Additionally these personas can improve your business blogging practice as well as help nurture leads through the sales funnel.
Definitions and requirements of a buyer persona
- Buyer personas make the sales process more specific to the buyer and their needs.
- They are research-based models of customers and prospects
- They are specific representations, and their specificity helps improve the specificity of your marketing content.
- They can be built-off interviews with past, current and prospective clients
- They focus on pain-points in hopes of engaging prospects by addressing their needs specifically
- They contain archetypal patterns of what buyers are striving to achieve through their roles, responsibilities, focus areas, key initiatives, and strategies
- Buyer personas may contain attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, feelings, motivations, and guiding philosophies that relate to the buying process.
- Buyer personas may examine or explore the conditions under which a purchase is made.
- Buyer personas can make it easier for content to be generated and be of a higher quality for the marketing process. Buyer personas can be an inspiration for blogging.
- For content and marketing teams, buyer personas help the team write more specifically and accurately for the marketing to sales process. They are part of our tips for getting employees involved in content and social media.
- Defines motives for purchase.
- They may contain representative photos of a prospect or buyer (like stock imagery) to "paint a picture" and make a writer feel like she/he is writing for a specific person.
Simple buyer persona model
- Name
- Demographics
- Title or role
- Pain points or challenges
- Goals