Part 2: The importance of the buyer persona in B2B Inbound marketing
You may know that it's important to have a B2B buyer persona created as part of your inbound marketing strategy, but how do you go about creating one? Here are 4 tactics to get you started:
What is a B2B buyer persona?
Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of an ideal customer, based on real data and some educated speculation about demographics, behaviours, motivations, and goals. Within a business-to-business context, the buyer persona represents the individual who has the purchasing power for their company.
But… where’s the info?
Fleshing out and developing a good target persona should involve a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research.
1. Tracking Tools
Through HubSpot’s tracking tools, you can determine how often your ideal clients spend on your site before they make a purchase. You can also improve ways of gathering useful information — for example, making ‘Job Title’ a mandatory field they must complete before granting access to a valuable content upgrade. This kind of smart tracking and data request will help you determine what level they’re at in the organization, what actions they're taking and how to improve the experience for future engagement. Tools like ‘progressive profiling’ in forms can help you learn more about your prospects at different touchpoints.
2. Client Interviews
You might also choose to interview trusted clients about their challenges and what motivates them when they are making important purchasing decisions. Find out what compliance processes they have to go through for major spending, and how many people need to sign off. Ask what their specific top concerns are in evaluating solutions and vendors. You should be interviewing as many clients as possible to ensure the information you have collected during your research is rooted in reality.
3. Leveraging Other Teams
Your Sales team is an invaluable resource in this context. They interact with your clients more directly and may be able to fill in some of the blanks for you on the questions they get asked most often, and on what their clients' priorities are. Additionally, getting feedback from other client-facing teams such as finance and legal will help create a well-rounded view of the types of challenges your target client might face.
4. Social Listening
Social listening can also play a role — what are your potential clients asking about in the comments sections? What posts do they most frequently like and share? These are valuable indicators of what’s important to them.
"Often, your customers do the work for you. When many customers start complaining about the same problem -- or rooting for the same win -- it's a sign that that's something to take note of and run with. Rather than simply monitoring these changes, you can use social listening to find ways to innovate on the changes."
- HubSpot leading CRM company
The key here is, you don't want to be pushing features and capabilities towards your prospects in a way that represents what's important to you. They will tune you out. Your audience is likely already being inundated with pushy sales tactics by other vendors. Instead, you want to know how you can help your prospects the best way — and demonstrate this understanding in your messaging to them.
When you start to align this approach end-to-end with a 'helpful' sales experience - you start to really change the game. Prospects will be more likely to trust and come towards you as the value and relevance to them is self-evident and seamlessly presented.
Titan One is a creative and digital agency helping clients across North America drive results.
