Buyer personas and how to create them

You might be wondering why buyer personas matter. If you have a detailed buyer persona, you can truly understand your customers. When you put yourself in the audience's perspective, you can understand their goals, challenges, and even what they're doing during the day.

Detailed buyer personas are essential for a successful marketing strategy. Because you can understand why buyers make purchasing decisions. You'll also get convenient and comprehensive target customers. Buyer personas help determine what content to produce, where to publish, etc. This is an essential element in understanding how to get more customers.

Don't you think you should spend precious time mapping these personas? Let's say 71% of companies that have achieved revenue and lead goals have documented personas.

But back to that, let's solidify our base of potential customers. The buyer persona definition is simply as follows:

Buyer personas are semi-fictional expressions of ideal customers based on market research and actual data on existing customers.” — HubSpot

Can I just create HubSpot buyer personas?

HubSpot is a software platform designed to store and manage inbound marketing tools, contacts, and more. If you're a HubSpot user, you know that you can create buyer personas with CRM property settings. This HubSpot feature allows teams to work together to define basic buyer personas. If you've already created buyer personas, HubSpot lets you import them from a file.

Also, simply documenting a few personas isn't enough. HubSpot's most important benefit is the ability to track and segment buyer personas within its database. HubSpot lets you target these different groups and categorize contacts in your database. Therefore, before creating buyer personas for tracking and segmentation purposes, it's important to have the right framework for creating and defining buyer personas. If you write down names and details without doing any supporting research, that persona won't help your core marketing strategy.

How is the B2B buying process different from B2C?

B2B often has many decision makers, while B2C usually only has one or at most a few household members. Each key decision maker must have a different B2B buyer persona. You might want to do your research first by focusing on who influences purchases and then build people who play a role in that process.

For example, when selling HR software, the first persona that comes up might be an HR manager or director. Eventually, though, you might be able to build an IT director's competent B2B buyer persona. This person doesn't go out looking for HR software, but they're often capable of saying “no” and closing deals.

The B2B buying process is often much longer than B2C. Often there are multiple decision makers, but companies are more complex, which can hinder a sale. Many levels of internal approval are required, and corporate decision-making is slow.

For example, in the case of manufactured B2B products, engineering personnel may need to check specifications. Costs may need to be approved by the purchasing manager, or the senior management team may need to confirm the purchase details.

B2B purchases often require more research, and this should be reflected in the buyer persona development process. Solutions tend to be more complex, and businesses tend to require more due diligence before purchasing. This is why inbound and content marketing have such a huge impact on educating and persuading target audiences.

What is a B2B buyer persona?

In the case of B2B personas, you need to gather a variety of information about the persona. For example, let's say you collect the following information:

• Everyday online behavior. Where do they hang out online during their lunch break? Use tools like Google Analytics to provide answers.

• Demographic statistics such as age and region. Don't forget about company statistics and technical data.

• Psychographics are essential for market research because they categorize people based on psychological data, mood, and aspirations. An example of this is a person's personality and values.
  

• Goals, that is, what you need to achieve at work. You can also break this down into immediate goals and long-term goals.

• Challenges you might face, such as workflows and business strategies.

If you need help creating buyer personas and strategizing, consider reaching out to a marketing agency for assistance.

3 steps to create a buyer persona

Buyer personas vary greatly from company to company and industry, but overall, development isn't that complicated. Here are the first 3 basic steps to making sure your marketing strategy targets the people you want to trade with.

1. Get inside the buyer's persona. What challenges do you need help with, and what kind of content will attract customers?

2. Collaborate with sales departments and other departments. You can get valuable information such as who regularly buys products and services. How will your persona experience the sales funnel?

3. Think about their personal and professional information. As mentioned above, we may brainstorm about the other person's internet behavior, personal characteristics, or search intentions. If you're already using CRM, some of this data is likely already available in the database.

We often start with internal assumptions and client knowledge, and we encourage everyone to do the same, but it's important to treat personas as “living” documents that are updated as new knowledge is gained. Since our own inner feelings are often biased, it's also important to seek out persona validation from the outside, usually through interviews, surveys, and other outreach.

With these 3 steps, you can start using your B2B buyer persona right away.

B2B buyer persona examples

What does a buyer persona actually look like? Make sure your concept is conveyed by creating a sample B2B buyer persona. Keep in mind that your buyer persona should describe a real person, not just a set of characteristics you've collected.

For example, let's say you're on a product-focused sales team and want to know who is most interested in your products.

First, let's start with the name. You can also use a nickname like Mike, the maintenance manager. He might be an older maintenance technician. You may be frustrated by not being able to get parts fast enough or efficiently. After discussing the potential buyer's persona with other departments, here's how to write out his details. We've prepared a sample of the first page of a persona from our unique buyer persona template.

That's it! Now you have a very basic B2B buyer persona that you can use as the backbone of your inbound marketing strategy. The example above didn't delve into all his characteristics, but in your case, you should. If you want to sell him B2B products, how can you write content that appeals to his user base and what he values?

Now we've removed the core part of our marketing strategy from our huge task list. However, don't forget to update buyer persona information every 6 to 12 months as needed, regardless of HubSpot or other platforms. By doing this, you can ensure that the content you're creating is relevant, knowledgeable, and gets the most attention.

Need more help with buyer personas? Download our free buyer persona template!