Definitive Guide to B2B Buyer Personas

A target audience is a particular group of individuals who share traits that make them likely to purchase a product (in other words, they are who benefit the most from the offered solutions). The main difference between a target audience and a buyer persona is that the latter refers to an archetypal individual. Therefore, it is more detailed than a target audience (and is usually built within a certain target audience’s scope).

Marketers who create target audiences take into account geographic and demographic characteristics such as gender, age, location, interests, annual income, opinions, problems, and solutions. As a result, target audiences can be leveraged to uncover priority accounts to be targeted in ABM initiatives, for instance.

An Ideal Client Profile (ICP), also known as an ideal buyer profile, includes the firmographic and demographic criteria of an ideal client—a business that is most likely to benefit from and purchase your goods. It includes details such as company size, industry, budget, job title and tech stack.

A buyer persona is a fictional representation of the decision maker within your ideal target accounts. Unlike the ICP, the focus is on an individual rather than on the company as a whole, which means their job role and aspirations are of utmost importance.

These are idealised versions of the people your sales team will engage within the buying groups of your target accounts, such as the buyer persona examples below:

These personas represent the key decision makers within target accounts. They will likely feature in most of the interaction between an organisation and prospective buyer and be responsible for initiating, supporting, or possibly even making the final purchase decision.

Today’s buying committees are composed of multiple individuals, many of which will not have the final say in a purchase, but that nevertheless may influence the primary buyer persona with feedback and insights about the product they are considering.

Given their role in the decision making process, securing the approval of these influencers is crucial. After all, leads who have received sufficient nurturing are more likely to become advocates who drive purchases.

Finally, a negative buyer persona contains a collection of characteristics that portray leads who are not suitable for your business. This may be because it does not make sense to focus on their market, or because your brand strategies are unlikely to get far with these buyers. Nonetheless, negative buyer personas can be beneficial when it comes to effectively focusing marketing initiatives to save time, budget, and resources.

By understanding what your potential buyers want to know, what might pique their interest, and the solutions they yearn for, you can offer clients and prospects alike engaging, comprehensive information. Hence, it is essential for a company to maintain its personas up-to-date and data-driven, accounting for the ever-changing state of the market, and delivering on client expectations.

B2B buyers typically consume an average of 13 pieces of content before deciding a purchase (Martech, 2020), which demonstrates the importance of content marketing. A solid, data-backed buyer persona offers brilliant guidelines for your content strategies.

Buyer personas make it easier to regularly adapt and customise messages, content, and preferred channels, to avoid out of date, irrelevant, or generic information. This will result in increased value and performance from strategies and budgets by reducing wasted spending.

Guiding your prospects throughout the buying process with lead nurturing helps to both educate them on topics and products of interest, as well as establish your company’s value and earn their trust. Giving your prospects a special, individualistic experience will keep them coming back for more and eventually drive their conversion to a client.

Effective lead nurturing is made possible by clearly defining and comprehending your buyer personas, since they offer clear guidelines by which to personalise nurturing strategies. This way, your campaign avoids generic messaging, a fatal flaw of non-data-driven lead nurturing efforts.

Next, it is crucial to leverage the data collected in the research step to segment your audience, i.e., group buyers separately according to the data you have about them. This will give you a general idea of your buyer groups and how many buyer personas you may need to create.

Below are some variables leveraged by the most common segmentation methods for B2B enterprises. Be sure to visit the linked guides to learn more about each technique.

Now that you have completed all of your research and determined the various market segments to target, it is time to define your buyer personas.

Start by identifying correlations in your data—this will serve to build your distinctive buyer personas.

Below are some relevant elements to include when defining your buyer persona:

HubSpot states characteristics such as fake names and pictures can introduce bias, and can be scrapped entirely without representing any loss to the personas' efficiency. Instead, this section should focus on observable data such as job title and age, any recurrences that appear during research; as well as the relevant psychographic data that you gathered.

Firmographic segmentation plays a big role in answering fundamental questions for creating buyer personas, such as the following:

Review your concise statement of the main goal your persona is attempting to achieve one more time. Prospective buyers must understand your solution will actually help them achieve this goal, otherwise it is unlikely they will buy it. It is therefore important to answer the following questions:

Buyers' needs and behaviour fluctuate and are subject to external influences. Thus, the accuracy of your personas should be assessed regularly to ensure their efficiency to ensure that necessary changes and updates can be actioned.

For instance, recent changes in the buyer's journey in the wake of the pandemic increased the average number of touchpoints prior to a purchase from 17 to 27 in the space of two years—changes like these must be accounted for in your buyer personas to keep them effective.

Ensuring the quality of your data is crucial to maintain the accuracy of marketing efforts. Errors such as incomplete or missing information, duplicate entries and out of date elements, among others, are some data challenges that plague many companies and may keep them from fully relying on data-driven initiatives. However, many of these issues are avoidable with the correct tools, leaner techstacks and a data governance policy that enforces a quality standard.

For example, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning technology has already evolved to become a viable solution for helping to clean your database, purge duplicates, and autocomplete any missing information. Organisational alignment can also aid your company to avoid data silos—by streamlining work platforms and keeping different departments on the same page, you can avert the lack of compatibility between disparate systems and reduce duplicate entries. Furthermore, data enrichment services must be leveraged to ensure your data pools are updated—which is especially relevant with the fast-paced market changes happening in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

By attending to these best practices, you can rest assured that your data-driven initiatives will provide healthy ROI and drive results.