All marketers want to reach the right customer, at the right time, with the right message, but it’s important to note that everything hinges on the foundational element of the “right customer.” So, who is your right customer?
Develop solid customer profiles
One way to establish a usable, accurate picture of your “right customers” is to organize real-world data collected from your existing and target customers into personas. Personas are fictionalized profiles that represent groups within a target audience that marketers use to guide messaging and channel selection, among other things.
You may be more familiar with personas in the B2C space, where they’re typically based on demographics and behavior—for example, the tech-savvy millennial who is always the first to buy the latest smartphone or the eco-conscious Gen Z college student who reliably buys from sustainable brands.
In the B2B space, personas often take a different lens. They’re usually role-based, industry-based, or both. B2B personas should be informed by real customer data, and capture information such as business goals, vendor expectations, key buying factors, motivations, pain points, channels, influencers and differentiators. B2B personas may be influencers (internal champions of your product) or decision-makers (the ones who approve the purchase).
While most B2C brands rely on personas, they’re less common in B2B companies. Many of OneMagnify’s potential B2B clients need help understanding what personas are and how they can be helpful. Read on to discover why it’s worth considering personas for your B2B business.
1. Sharing a common language
Let’s say “Kevin, a Facilities Procurement Manager” is a customer persona for your organization. Using common language, the product team could better understand Kevin’s perspective when it comes to his buying behavior and specific needs, like easy onboarding of new tools. Your sales team would learn about, and plan for, his capacity constraints and “full plate” at quarter-close, and your marketing team could search for industry events where procurement managers might attend. Everyone knows what it means to talk to, or about, “Kevin.”
Identifying and naming audience segments and their profile personality for your organization allows for unified, informed decision-making. With personas, you know what problems you’re helping to solve, and this consistent, shared knowledge positively impacts key decisions from messaging to product development.
2. Effective content creation and messaging
Once you’ve organized customer behaviors and pain points into clear and helpful personas, your marketing team can create content that effectively addresses the specific needs, challenges, and goals of each target audience. This established understanding of each segment’s key buying factors and triggers better equips your business to highlight your competitive advantage where it most resonates in the customer journey.
Ultimately, relatable content resonates. And when that happens, engagement spikes among the quality leads you’ve secured through solid persona building, further reducing wasted marketing spend.
3. Better prioritization of customer segments
It can be tempting for organizations to try and meet the needs of every potential customer, but that often dilutes the message—and marketing budgets are finite. Focusing on a few highly valuable customer segments with prioritized personas can help maximize ROI and keep your business focused on core capabilities and differentiators.
4. Alignment across teams
With shared knowledge of key personas, team members can also better understand and plan for how each department solves customer problems and interacts with their customer base.
For example, when the sales team knows they’re talking to the end user rather than the financial decision-maker, they can focus their messaging on product features instead of contract values.
Marketing content can be crafted for each specific audience based on which persona is more likely to attend a trade show, which is more apt to be LinkedIn, and which persona is more inclined to download a white paper or attend a webinar.
Organizations can also align products and services with different personas to better support the product use case, solving user problems more effectively.
Stay on target with personas
Ultimately, the persona’s power lies in helping a company accurately understand and speak with fluency to their users' needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. The level of clarity and effectiveness that well-developed personas can bring to a B2B can’t be underestimated.
Using personas ensures you have a strong foundational understanding of your right customer. If you need help developing or solidifying your company’s personas, and bringing them to life, contact our OneMagnify team.
Want to learn more about personas? Keep an eye out for our next blog article, where we’ll share when and how to revisit your B2B customer personas.
