Creating Buyer Personas for Your B2B Business

Developing strong buyer personas is a big win for B2B marketers. Thorough fictional representations of your customers provide immense value for understanding your audiences and creating resonant messaging.

In this guide, we’ll look at crafting effective B2B buyer personas and why they’re so useful for guiding your strategy. We’ll cover:

• What buyer personas are and their role in B2B marketing.
• Key elements to include like demographics, pain points and goals.
• Smart research methods for accurate personas.
• Tips for focused persona segmentation.
• Real examples of impactful B2B personas.

With well-developed personas, you will create tailored content, offers and messaging that truly connects with your prospects’ motivations. This helps drive more relevant engagement.

Crafting precise B2B personas gives you a clear picture of your customers. It ensures you always market and sell with your real audiences in mind. Use this guide to build personas that capture your buyers and power your strategy. Let's do this!

Before you begin developing your personas, you must identify what you want them to do. Without goals, creating your buyer personas is a waste of time. Incorporate the SMART goal framework to create attainable goals for your personas.

SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. When you create your goals, cross-check them with these five necessities to ensure best results.

A customer segment is a cluster of customers with similar firmographics and needs. By putting your existing customers into these buckets, you gain an understanding of who you are reaching.

You may know all there is to know about a client and their respective industry. However, it’s also important to consider the person behind the business. Are you talking to the CEO, the CMO, the head of HR, or someone else at the company? Who is the person who pulls the trigger when it comes to using your products or services?

Separate your customer base into segments based on firmographics like their industry, company size, and role.

To grasp what customers need, you need a strong understanding of your business through their eyes.

The most valuable information comes from interviews, surveys, win/loss analysis and customer segmentation.

Conduct interviews and focus groups with current and prospective clients. These interviews will tell you how your business is doing well, how it can improve, and what types of customers are using or want to use your services.

Identify and set up interviews with your most loyal clients. What makes them loyal to you? How do you stay connected with them? 

Examine your prospective clients and the clients that got away. Set up interviews with them to determine what your business needs to improve.

Say you host an interview with Amy, the CEO of a large company. Amy has been using your services for years, and you can have regular, non-work related conversations with her. She will be able to give the honest perspective of a loyal client. 

Kim is the client who got away. She considered using your services, but she went with a rival company instead. Kim can inform what would have converted her into a client and what your business needs to improve. 

Conduct analysis on the sales that you won or lost with specific clients. What factors contributed to this win or loss?

For these types of interviewees, and others in between, consider how they interact with your business as well as firmographic data. What is their job role? What is their level of education? What type of industry are they in? Use this information to answer these questions on behalf of your personas.

Your personas should not be based entirely on the people you interview. However, you can draw their opinions, loyalty, attributes, habits, and more from your conversations with them.

When you conduct interviews and focus groups, you will have an elevated understanding of your audience.

Gaining client feedback is a valuable way to improve your business as a whole. When it comes to buyer personas, feedback surveys inform their development. Include questions in your survey that give you qualitative and quantitative answers, such as:

• Why did you decide to use our products or service(s)?
• Did you consider competitors’ offerings before choosing ours? 
• How long did you consider purchasing before making your final decision?
• Have you used similar products or services in the past?
• How would you rate your overall experience with our business on a scale of 1 to 10?

Brainstorm questions that will give you more information about your audiences and their opinions of your business and services.

In 2023, 41% of marketers and business owners said that competitor analysis influenced the success of their strategy. Examine the audiences your competitors are reaching and how they interact with them. You can also take inspiration for the keywords they target, the content they produce, and the products and services they offer.

To perform analysis, choose a company that is similar to yours in size and offerings. Research the following aspects of their company:

• Their number of employees
• Their target customers and the offerings marketed to them 
• What messaging they use and what it looks like
• Aspects that make their product or service unique
• Their pricing

This will give you background information about your own prospects and customers that will inform your buyer personas.

As a business that serves other businesses, you must become aware of industry trends both in your industry and your clients’ industries. Who does your client serve, and how do they interact with their audience?

A great place to perform this research is on social media. On social media, you can follow trending content for your industry and others and see the way your clients and prospects interact. Knowing where to meet your audience is essential to creating your buyer personas.

What does the journey look like for your buyers? For each of your customer segments, this process will look slightly different. 

Generally, buyers go through three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

In the awareness stage, the prospect identifies that they have a problem. They are performing research to better understand their issue. Next, they move into the consideration stage, where they have clearly defined their problem or opportunity. They are looking into a solution for the problem. Finally, in the decision stage, they have decided upon their approach to a solution and are looking for products or services that will help them with their problem. 

Of course, this is a basic step-by-step of the buyer’s journey. When marketing to a business, you must understand the stakeholders that hold power in the decision-making process. In the next step, use this information to help flesh out details about your personas. Determine who your persona talks to during their journey, where they go for information to build their awareness, and how they compare options.

Apply your research to your buyer personas. With our buyer persona template, you can include your personas’ age, industry, interests, goals, challenges, and the best ways to reach them. Use this process as a brainstorm; you will revisit and refine your personas later. Develop three to five personas that cover your target audiences.

Once you have a rough draft of your buyer personas, communicate them with your team. Anyone who interacts with clients and prospects will have insight. Gather feedback from sales, marketing, and customer service departments to refine your personas before moving on to the next step.

Personas aren’t just a brainstorm. Once you refine the provisional personas, take them to the next level. Add details like photos, quotes, and descriptive details to make them useful.

With our template, summarize each persona’s age, industry and role, interest, goals, challenges, and messaging platforms. Describe how each persona would use different platforms, whether they be emails, blog posts, or value exchanges.

Congratulations! You finished your buyer personas. Next, it’s time to actually apply them to your marketing strategies, messaging, product and service roadmaps, and developments. 

Develop strategies while considering your buyer personas. How? Find part two of our comprehensive guide on our blog.

Use your buyer personas to form a strong marketing strategy. Send us a message to get started.