How research helps your B2B buyer persona evolve with your business

You want to focus your time, energy and budget on marketing to the right people. You know that B2B buyer personas can be an excellent tool to achieve this. But only if they’re created and used wisely. 

Your buyer personas must be as dynamic as your company. They aren’t character sculptures to be created and left to decorate the foyer. They’re not just another slide in a marketing deck—seen once and stored forever. Your B2B buyer personas represent the real humans that buy your product. They must evolve over time to represent both the changes in your buyers and the growth of your business. 

A B2B buyer persona is a more complex character than its B2C cousin. You need more than demographics to create B2B buyer personas that are useful to your whole organization. A complex B2B service or product offering necessitates several decision makers in the process. You need B2B buyer personas for each interested party and a view on how they interact with each other. 

To get below the surface level and be able to use B2B buyer personas to scale your business, you need to base them on reliable insights from custom research. 

What are B2B buyer personas?

A B2B buyer persona represents one segment of your target audience. Each B2B buyer persona profile is built from data about your current client base and intensive, specific market research. Ideally, you’ll construct an avatar that looks, thinks and feels like your real life ideal clients. 

Each B2B buyer persona incorporates the personality and characteristics of a key member of your target audience. This includes understanding their role in the buying process, their goals within the company, the challenges and stresses they must overcome, the pain points your service or product is relieving. 

Getting a full characterisation of who you’re marketing to means you can target that budget in a much more effective way. And, just as crucially, eliminate wasting time and resources on advertising to the wrong people.  

Benefits of using buyer personas

Constructing B2B buyer personas from NewtonX market research has benefits that apply throughout your organization. 

Communication

B2B buyer personas lead to a greater empathy for your ideal clients which, almost automatically, leads to more authentic communications at every level. You want to communicate the same value proposition to every buyer persona. With these high level insights, you can refine the words and images to best connect with each one individually. 

Staff understanding

Discussions around your buyer personas help your internal staff get to know your clients better. This leads to better understanding and client interactions all round.

Decision making

By digging into the unique specifics of your B2B buyer personas’ needs and pain points, decisions on developing new services and products can be made with more confidence. NewtonX insights guide marketing strategy to target the right people, in the right way. 

How do your buyer personas get along?

Most complex B2B purchases are made by a group decision. After creating buyer profiles for each key player, you can go even deeper and analyze their interaction with each other. Find out where they start, meet and connect on their journey across the buyer landscape. Give yourself the competitive edge by meeting them where they are and directing them towards your offering.

Why are B2B buyer personas important?

Buyer personas play a vital role in the success of marketing and sales strategies for businesses. They offer a deep understanding of the ideal customers, enabling targeted marketing efforts that resonate with their specific needs and preferences. By tailoring messaging to address unique challenges, businesses can engage customers more effectively.

Buyer personas facilitate a personalized customer experience, making customers feel valued and understood. From content creation to sales interactions, aligning communication with buyer personas enhances customer relationships. Sales teams benefit from these personas as well, understanding potential customer motivations, needs, and objections to improve their pitches and close deals successfully.

Moreover, buyer personas influence product and service development by providing insights into customer pain points and preferences. Businesses can identify new market opportunities and unmet needs, enhancing their offerings’ fit in the market.

Allocating marketing budgets efficiently becomes possible when businesses understand their buyers and target audience. With a data-driven approach to buyer personas, decisions become well-informed and effective.

What should a B2B buyer persona include?

A well-crafted B2B buyer persona is a powerful tool that can guide your marketing and sales efforts in the right direction. When developing a B2B buyer persona, it’s essential to include the following key elements:

1. Demographic Information: Start with the basics – the buyer’s job title, industry, company size, and geographic location. Understanding these demographics will help you tailor your messaging to resonate with their specific needs and preferences.
2. Goals and Challenges: Dig deeper into the buyer’s goals and challenges. What are they trying to achieve in their role? What obstacles do they face? Knowing their pain points and aspirations will enable you to position your product or service as a solution to their problems.
3. Buying Behavior: Explore their buying behavior and decision-making process. Understand how they research solutions, the factors influencing their purchase decisions, and who is involved in the buying process. This knowledge will help you craft a more effective sales strategy.
4. Preferred Channels: Identify the communication channels your target buyers prefer. Do they rely on email, phone calls, or social media for business inquiries? Meeting them on their preferred channels will improve engagement and build rapport.
5. Key Motivators: Uncover what motivates the buyer to choose your product or service over competitors. Whether it’s cost savings, increased efficiency, or superior customer support, knowing their key motivators will guide your marketing messaging.
6. Objections and Concerns: Anticipate their objections and concerns during the sales process. Addressing these proactively will build trust and credibility, increasing the likelihood of closing deals.
7. User Persona (in case of software/services): If your B2B offering involves software or services, consider creating a user persona as well. Understand the end-users’ needs, pain points, and desired outcomes. This will help you tailor your product/service to meet their expectations effectively.
8. Feedback and Testimonials: Incorporate feedback and testimonials from existing customers who fit the persona. Real-life success stories can be compelling evidence of your value proposition.

How do you create B2B buyer personas?

There are several key questions to consider when you’re creating your B2B buyer personas: 

• Who are they? Start with basic demographics.
• What’s their position in the buying team? Make sure you understand what their main priority is within this purchase situation. 
• Where do they get their information now? Basically, you need to know where your ideal clients hang out so you can be there too. Your buyer personas should have a list of events they attend, professional associations they belong to, and media, tools and tech they use – as well as any other sources of information they regularly use. 
• What are their non-negotiables when it comes to suppliers? 
• What brands are they using right now? Why are they using them?
• What are their goals? Explicitly show them how your product makes them look good.
• What’s stressing them? Show how your product or service eliminates the challenges of their needs and pain points. 
• What are the barriers to them buying your product? It’s critical to remove any perceived barriers to purchase as early as possible. 

Of course, the answers you need are specific to your business. That’s why NewtonX only produces custom findings that address your current concerns. Our proprietary AI-driven search scans over 1.1 billion minds to find exactly the right expertise for your niche. 

Improve existing B2B buyer personas

Improving existing B2B buyer personas is an ongoing process that involves continuous research, data analysis, and customer feedback. Start by gathering data-driven insights from website analytics, customer surveys, and sales data to better understand customer behavior and preferences. Conduct one-on-one interviews with customers and engage sales and customer support teams to gather firsthand feedback and uncover new information. Refine your segmentation based on industry, company size, job title, and pain points to create more specific and targeted personas.

Analyze competitors to identify gaps and areas for differentiation, and validate your updated buyer personas with real customers to ensure accuracy. Implement customer feedback loops and monitor social media for additional insights. Collaborate across departments to gain diverse perspectives and stay updated with market research to access real-time data and market insights.

How to use B2B buyer personas?

Using B2B buyer personas is a strategic approach that empowers businesses to enhance their marketing and sales efforts. Here are several ways to effectively leverage buyer personas:

1. Tailored Messaging: With buyer personas in hand, businesses can craft targeted messaging that resonates with specific customer segments. Understanding pain points, challenges, and motivations allows marketers to create content and campaigns that speak directly to the needs of their audience.
2. Personalized Customer Experience: Buyer personas help businesses understand their customers better, enabling them to create personalized customer experiences. Whether through personalized emails, tailored product recommendations, or customized sales pitches, businesses can make customers feel valued and understood.
3. Informed Content Creation: Content marketing becomes more effective when guided by buyer personas. By addressing the interests and concerns of target customers, businesses can create content that attracts and engages their ideal audience.
4. Improved Sales Strategies: Sales teams can utilize buyer personas to gain deeper insights into potential customers’ pain points and preferences. Armed with this knowledge, sales representatives can tailor their pitches and solutions to meet customer needs effectively.
5. Product Development: Buyer personas provide valuable insights into customer needs and desires, guiding product and service development. Businesses can align their offerings with customer preferences, ensuring better market fit and higher customer satisfaction.
6. Targeted Marketing Campaigns: Buyer personas allow businesses to identify the most relevant marketing channels and strategies for reaching their ideal customers. This ensures that marketing budgets are spent efficiently and campaigns are more impactful.
7. Customer Journey Mapping: Mapping the buyer’s journey becomes more effective when based on buyer personas. Understanding how different customer segments progress through the sales funnel helps optimize marketing and sales touchpoints.
8. Refining Lead Nurturing: Buyer personas help in segmenting leads and understanding their unique needs. This enables businesses to nurture leads with targeted content and engagement, ultimately increasing conversion rates.
9. Identifying New Market Opportunities: By analyzing buyer personas, businesses can uncover unmet needs and untapped market opportunities. This allows for strategic expansion into new customer segments or industries.
10. Customer-Centric Decision Making: Buyer personas inform business decisions, ensuring that strategies are aligned with customer needs and preferences. This customer-centric approach fosters loyalty and builds long-term relationships.

Successfully scaling business using B2B Buyer Personas

Research and creation

Asking the right questions to the right people, using the right research methodologies is the key to decision quality B2B buyer personas. NewtonX chooses the right combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to really bring your multiple buyer profiles to life. 

We use a range of 19 buyer persona survey questions as the basis for your research. Our carefully crafted client retention and loyalty questions can really make it easier to sell to existing customers – driving understanding of future prospects and profitability. A win-loss survey provides another angle, examining the reasons why you won and lost business in the past. This can be quite confronting, but using this competitive intelligence can lead to a considerable jump in your success rate. 

Implementation

As a full service B2B market research company, we’ll help you with everything from question design to presenting custom findings with actionable insights. You’ll get the most success from using B2B buyer personas if you update them on a regular basis. This allows you to adapt to a different ideal client as your business changes over time and you launch new products or services. 

NewtonX persona survey questions deliver the deep insights you need, but it’s up to you to make sure your team of buyer personas become embedded into your organization. They’ve got just as much to tell your product department as they do the marketing team. But only if they’re discussed, developed and present during key decision-making moments. 

Extending this even further, your custom findings give you a perspective of how each of your buyer personas interact in their team environment. This means you’re there to intervene at just the right juncture of their buyer journey.