Why Do We Need Buyer Personas?

B2B marketers realized early on that to stand out in the crowd, they needed to understand their audiences better than anyone else. Yet, what about those just starting out? How do you understand a target audience that’s dynamic and evolving? How do you personalize when industries, consumers’ pain points and business goals keep changing with time?

Well, that’s why buyer personas have constantly evolved to ensure personalization is still at the core of B2B marketing. In fact, according to Marketing Insider Group, 93% of businesses exceeding their lead and revenue goals segmented their customer data by buyer persona. Moreover, 56% generated higher quality leads and 36% created shorter sales cycles when using buyer personas - well, that’s always the end goal, right?

So, how did we get to a point where buyer personas became the cornerstone of highly targeted B2B marketing campaigns?

Dive in as we explore the evolution of B2B buyer personas, their influence on decision-making and how you can craft an effective buyer persona for your next B2B marketing campaign!
 

How Did B2B Personas Evolve?

Today, as B2B marketing keeps evolving, it is critical for marketers to create buyer personas that represent the current aspects of the target business. While business-to-customer (B2C) buyer personas are centered around individual consumers, business-to-business (B2B) buyer personas cover several factors such as the industry, company size, decision-making hierarchy and other specific challenges and goals of that business.

B2B marketers know that targeting the right decision-makers in a business is critical, so they must identify, nurture and connect with the most influential stakeholders. This means delivering a hyper-personalized and relatable experience to them.

However, many B2B marketers struggle with personalization, as HubSpot highlighted in its Marketing Trends Report 2023 shown below:


Well, B2B buyer personas can answer each one of these challenges, marketers!

By developing buyer personas, modern B2B marketers can personalize their outreach, marketing, nurturing and sales process. Moreover, it allows for improved optimization of demand generation, lead generation and lead nurturing across every B2B channel and touchpoint, leading to more positive outcomes.

While the goal has always been to deliver personalized interactions, the constant evolution of the B2B marketing landscape has influenced B2B buyer personas. Here's a quick look at how B2B buyer personas evolved to align with modern personalization strategies:
 

• Early Stage (Pre-Digital)

  During the pre-digital era, B2B buyer personas mainly consisted of basic demographic data, including job titles, company sizes, revenues and industries. Interactions with potential leads were guided heavily by traditional methods such as manually gathering information to build relationships.
  
  Think of sales representatives constantly on phone calls and setting up in-person meetings. Back then, digital tools and platforms were either non-existent or limited. Buyer personas were developed entirely using customer surveys, feedback and interactions. They were fine-tuned into customer segments, and their effectiveness gauged across demographics through conversion rates and total sales.

• Mid-Stage (Digital Adoption)

  Once the digital revolution kicked off, it marked a significant shift in the B2B buyer journey. Businesses started recognizing the significance of online behavior and began collecting web data to better understand their target market. According to McKinsey’s B2B Pulse Survey in 2021, B2B customers started using 10 or more channels, including email marketing, video conference, online chat, etc., signaling a change in preference over traditional channels. In fact, today, having just 3 marketing channels delivers a 287% higher purchase rate than a single-channel strategy!
  
  This led to the emergence of metrics such as website visits, email engagement and content consumption, which are critical indicators of B2B buyer intent. As marketers started using digital data to create more relevant buyer personas, the rise of targeted digital marketing strategies was witnessed.
  
  Digitally informed buyer personas were used to tailor outreach, drive engagement, enhance sales enablement, boost data-driven decisions and most of all, personalize touchpoints across digital channels. Moreover, most B2B companies also acknowledged that the complexity of digital activity made it necessary to identify distinct B2B buyer roles within organizations.

• Current Stage (Data-Driven And Omni-Channel)

  Finally, the modern B2B buyer persona is characterized by data-driven, omnichannel interactions. Today, advanced analytics are leveraged to create detailed and dynamic B2B buyer personas that incorporate insights, which go beyond digital demographics.
  
  For instance, organizations now map the entire B2B buyer journey across multiple digital touchpoints and channels, including LinkedIn, social media, industry forums, review platforms and more. To ensure personalized content creation and effective B2B engagement, B2B marketers use data analytics for their buyer personas to reflect the enterprise buyers’ needs, challenges, ambitions and preferences—a much more detailed-oriented profile than ever before.
  
  However, it is critical to note that the evolution of buyer personas has not stagnated. Recent unpredictable events like the COVID-19 pandemic and Hurricane Helene, as well as the emerging economic trends, prevailing geopolitical instability and ongoing industry disruptions demand modern buyer personas to show adaptability and dynamism.
  
  Knowing how to develop an effective buyer persona is crucial in the ever-changing B2B market. So,here’s how you can do that!

 

Steps To Create An Effective B2B Buyer Persona

Before we reveal the steps to create a top-notch B2B buyer persona, remember that individuals rarely make B2B purchases. Think of the buyer persona as more like a buyer group persona that spans multiple executives and stakeholders. In fact, Forrester Research states that 60% of all B2B purchase decisions involve more than four people!

With that, dive in and explore how you can build B2B buyer personas for more effective, personalized and targeted interactions at each stage of the buyers’ journey:
 

Step 1: Market Research For B2B Buyer Personas

We know it goes without saying, but creating a robust B2B buyer persona begins with thorough market research and in-depth data collection. Start with industry-specific surveys, polls and reports that give insights into your industry’s buyers. Next, participate in trade shows/conferences and industry-specific events to engage with a broad spectrum of stakeholders (think B2B employees, vendors, partners, etc.) from various organizations to understand their challenges and goals.

Also, leverage web analytics to understand the behavior of your B2B customers across various touchpoints. Finally, augment your internal research with third-party data enrichment services and international market research for a comprehensive interpretation of your target B2B buyer.
 

Step 2: Segmentation For Targeted B2B Buyer Personas

Once the data collection is done, grab a cuppa joe and start segmenting your target B2B audiences into distinct clusters based on shared characteristics. These can be buyer personalities, behaviors, goals or needs—in essence, any factor that allows you to create highly focused groups of B2B buyers.

To achieve this, start with data preparation and exploratory data analysis (EDA), invest in data cleansing tools and leverage AI-powered data analytics solutions to streamline the segmentation. Not only will AI automate the analytics and make them more efficient, but it can even create AI-driven buyer personas based on your internal customer database or Customer Data Platforms.
 

Step 3: Development Of B2B Buyer Personas

Well, it’s time to dive into the fun part!

You see, transforming raw, data-driven insights into fictionalized human buyers with deeply nurtured identities is at the heart of creating B2B buyer personas. It is critical that each persona has a rich, detailed background with challenges, desires, motivations, decisions and well, everything that makes us human!

Start by giving your persona a name (no funny business here!) that humanizes them and gives them an identity. Next, highlight the persona's professional history, educational background, work experience, responsibilities and the journey that led them to their current role. Then focus on developing each persona's personality traits that influence their decision-making, buying process and interactions.

This will help you better explore the challenges that each persona might encounter in their profession, allowing you to dive deep into their needs, latent desires, ambitions, long-term goals, aspirations and motivations.

Finally, understand the specifics of each persona’s buying journey. How would this person prefer to receive business information? How would they engage with your brand’s advertising, B2B outreach and marketing campaigns? Whether they would prefer emails, webinars or social media posts? Ask how this persona would respond to B2B communications from channels such as industry forums, professional networks or specific online communities.

The idea is to go beyond their professional identity and explore their personal characteristics, background and choices to uncover hidden insights into similar buyers. That’s how you build a full-fledged B2B buyer persona—but wait!
 

Step 4: Measuring The ROI Of B2B Buyer Personas

Before you give yourself a pat on the back, you also need to understand how to determine the effectiveness of your B2B buyer persona. This is critical to your overall B2B marketing strategies and evolution of your B2B personas.

You must choose specific metrics that allow you to understand how targeting each persona influences your marketing performance, sales and customer satisfaction. For each buyer persona, pay attention to conversion rates, average deal values, customer lifetime value, customer retention rates, etc.

If a certain buyer persona shows high ROI, focus your marketing strategies on targeting similar buying groups. Finally, use multi-touch attribution models to assess the marketing effort needed compared to the conversions and sales generated from each persona group.
 

Conclusion

As we mentioned before, B2B buyer personas have evolved over time to help marketers align themselves with changing consumer behavior, market dynamics, emerging economies, outreach strategies and technological revolutions. Needless to say, your B2B buyer personas should also be dynamic and evolve over time!

We hope we laid the foundation to help you develop better B2B buyer personas: start by collecting data across various sources, analyze your findings to distill them into meaningful audience segments, flesh out personas and assess their impact on your strategies and vice versa, while ensuring you keep updating them with changing preferences among your target audience.

Also, note that a B2B persona should not evolve for the sake of it but involve various marketing teams within your organization to create well-rounded, practical and effective personas.

Our final recommendation? Keep visiting TechDogs to level up your B2B marketing game!