For years marketing has always been about the marketer talking about how great they are, which worked given the circumstances. With thousands of marketers competing for the same audience’s attention, marketers are now shifting their attention to the audience to know what they care about and who they are.
By gathering this information, the marketer can create the buyer’s persona, which helps in aligning their marketing strategy to fit the buyer. This approach helps ensure you get better-qualified leads and can offer the best return on investment.
If you are running an online campaign, this post highlights critical things about building a buyer persona you may need to know.
But, What Is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your audience or ideal customer based on what you offer and industry data. Sometimes the buyer persona can be referred to by other names; customer persona, marketing persona, or audience persona.
Building a buyer persona helps classify your leads based on who they are and where they are in your lead generation funnel and thus tailor your lead nurturing messaging accordingly.
With lead generation being a critical driver for B2B business growth, it is always important to ensure that you get every aspect of it right to keep the funnel drop-off rate as low as possible.
If you are struggling with lead generation, this guide on lead generation by Leadfeeder can be helpful for you.
Things to Know About Your Buyer Persona
1) Who Are They?
The initial step in building a buyer persona is identifying who they are. Knowing the buyer doesn’t necessarily mean knowing them by their official names. While identifying names is part of knowing your audience, the first stage of creating a buyer persona involves identifying your target audience’s demographic such as age and geographical location.
You will also need to look at things like language, purchasing power, spending patterns, stage in personal life, occupation, interests, and challenges.
Also, you will need to know what social media platforms they are likely to be at and the competitors looking to net the same audience. With this information, you can know how to tailor your approach to lead generation.
2) Their Goals and Pain Points
Every business has its ideal audience, depending on its products or services. But irrespective of your audience, you must align your marketing strategy with your audience’s goals and pain points.
To address your audience’s goals, you have to answer the question of what motivates them and what they hope to achieve. The same applies to their pain points. You have to identify what is holding them back from their goals and the problems they are trying to solve.
The best way of understanding your audience’s goals and pain points is by engaging in social listening. Social listening involves paying attention to what your audience is saying about your brand online.
For example, you may want to pay attention to sentiments on your business website reviews and comments on your social media posts about what your audience hopes to achieve, what works for them, and what doesn’t.
You can also seek to understand what your audience is saying about your competition. You can then use this information to tailor your products or services to address the pain points and target your audience with content that offers solutions to the issues that matter the most to them.
3) Job, Size of the Company They Work for, and Responsibilities
Once the person becomes a lead, it is important to identify their job, role, and the size of the company they work for. This information can help give you a rough estimate of their purchasing power. For B2B marketers, identifying title, role, and responsibilities are critical because your ideal buyer will need to be a person with a critical decision-making role.
For example, if you are looking to sell marketing software, your ideal buyer would be someone in a sales and marketing department leadership position. The reasoning behind this is simple; they can influence decision-making on matters that can help boost their marketing efforts.
While a junior member of the marketing staff can help you identify some marketing departments’ pain points, they will not have the power to influence the purchase of tools. The same goes for the CEO. While they could be in a position of influence, running the sales department may not be their thing, so targeting them may not be as effective as it would if you target the sales and marketing team leader.
4) Shopping and Communication Preferences
Different demographics of people have different preferences regarding shopping and communication. Identifying their preferences can help you target them better. However, identifying preferences comes when the persona becomes a lead.
Email is the most preferred option of contact for many customers. However, if their inbox has hundreds of emails, there is a high chance your email will get lost in a pile. In that case, you may consider following up an email with a phone call.
Also, it can help to identify how a lead heard about you because it can help you identify the most effective method, which should dictate where you put your money for maximum ROI.
