Buyer Personas – what is it all about?

Know your audience. It is one of the first rules of marketing. In order to market your product successfully you need to think yourself inside your customers’ shoes. Buyer personas are evidence based profiles of those who are buying, and critically are not buying, from your sales people. Often they can be exceptionally useful for understanding customer intent and motivation throughout the sales cycle.

Buyer personas are developed by talking to a sample of past, present and lost clients. By conducting deep interviews with these groups, trained researchers can spot identified patterns of behaviour and use them to develop the personas. Information such as why they purchased, why they didn’t purchase, what need the product or service filled, where it fell short, how the decision was reached and what sales enablement material they referred to is gathered, analysed and refined. From here, the buyer personas are developed.

Basing the initial research on real clients allows the buyer personas that are subsequently developed to be grounded in reality. This is key to them being any kind of use to your marketers going forward. As well as being recognisable, the skill to creating buyer personas is to keep them simple. Fifty different buyer personas will confuse marketers and sales people alike. A good and workable amount of personas would be around five or six. This would paint an illustrative picture of your audience which can be used to further your understanding of them.

Buyer personas are about finding common definitions. They are a way to understand customers in shorthand. They offer B2B marketers the opportunity to develop a more customer centred approach to their marketing. With newly defined customer profiles available to use, they can actively target core audience groups instead of taking a scattergun approach to marketing. This means that your demand generation becomes more honed as more positive buyer personas can be identified earlier in the sales cycle. Instead of constant push messaging, marketers can entice leads by appealing to core identified needs.

The personas can help re-focus attention on key areas within the business. They can help shape web and blog content, help hone pre-existing services or indeed develop new ones. They can even help develop internal sales training as information on how to identify a client that may buy is put to use. Knowing who buys and why, and just as importantly who does not buy and why, gives B2B marketers an amazing insight into how the whole business can be driven forward.

By understanding their customers, marketers can think like them. By thinking like them, they can win their business. In this age of ever decreasing clients, that in itself is worth the time and effort developing the buyer personas in the first place.