The Ultimate Guide to Developing Buyer Personas for B2B

Woman selecting pictures of people — Source: Freepik

Marketing can be hard. Even when you spend ages strategizing or planning a new campaign, there’s no guarantee of success. You know you’re just what people need if only they’d give you a chance, but how do you convince other businesses to do that? Especially when there’s so much choice available and plenty of other options seeking their patronage.

Developing a series of buyer personas might not sound like it can change much, but when the time and research are put in, results start to show. For targeted users, marketing personas can make websites two to five times more effective and easier to use.

That personal touch, used as part of your CI (customer intelligence) strategy, can boost your interactions and sales with other businesses all by targeting a specific type of person.

What is a buyer persona?

Much like creating a sim of your ideal customer, a buyer persona helps you put together characteristics, attributes, and the identity of someone who represents your target clientele. The more detail, the better, from their career goals down to how they spend Saturday nights.

They might seem like examples of customer obsession, but having a couple of these personas for different people your business wants to target gives you a headstart in being able to personalize their customer journey.

It can be fun to speculate about what your ideal customer is like, but if you want your persona to work for you, you have to do some proper research.

This can come in all shapes and sizes, with interviews and surveys a great starting point for gathering metrics and pinpointing demographics.

Ultimately, there’s no limit to the amount of background checking and persona creating you can do. The more detail, the better!

Questions to think about

There are a plethora of templates out there to get you thinking about who your persona is, the spaces they exist in, and what it is they need from you. Each has pros and cons, being suited to different sorts of B2B sales. There isn’t a right or wrong way to go about making your persona, and the questions you feel are important to answer will probably be different from another business.

That being said, some questions act as a great foundation to build your persona on. These capture information you may not consider and challenge you to incorporate these factors into your lead generation campaigns.

To get started, we’ve compiled a list of go-to, persona-creating questions:

What’s their name? Most templates suggest you name your persona as this helps you interact on a human level.

How big is their business? We all know different-sized businesses have different needs, budgets, and resources.
Where do they live? Location influences what we do, who we meet, and how we live day-to-day, as well as where we spend our time online and the kind of domain name that will appeal to us.
What’s their level of education? You don’t want to spend ages spelling out how your product works if your buyer persona is already educated in this.
What’s their job role? How much time do they spend on inbound calls or making workplace decisions? Who do they influence and who influences them?
What goals do they have? Both professionally and in their personal life, knowing what your persona is aiming for can help you assist them in that goal.

What challenges do they face? Everyone faces difficulties at work, and knowing these can help you provide solutions, such as a specially-developed sales tracker or booking app.
What buying preferences do they have? When purchasing a product, what does your persona prioritize in their consumer choices?

Bulking out your persona

Now you have an idea of the information needed to build a persona, it’s time to consider where you’re going to get this. Of course, you could invent answers, but this isn’t going to create an accurate depiction of what your persona looks like in the real world. Tapping into some metrics and research can solidify your persona, making it well-informed and as useful as possible.

Metrics analysis

Before you start anything else, look at what you already have. Businesses collect all sorts of data across their websites and social media channels.

By analzying data tapping into this, you have a wealth of information on the type of people who make up your customers. Base your persona on this to build an accurate picture of who you’re targeting.

Most social media channels offer insights on your posts, social referral links, and messages.

These collect information on the demographics of your following, the times of day they’re most active, and what they respond to. Harness this to fill in your persona profile.

Qualitative interviews

An interview or online meeting is a great way to get information to fill out your buyer persona, as it’s informed by a living, breathing customer or someone who works with them daily. Finding pain points, challenges, and preferences can be handy in working out the sorts of answers your persona would give. It also makes customers feel valued and listened to.

Be sure to prepare the questions you want answers to and note not only verbal responses but physical and emotional ones too. To encourage customers to take part, offer incentives such as a referral program.

However, take customer experiences with a pinch of salt - just because they say they’d talk about your data engineering solution with their boss, doesn’t mean they would in real life. They may be answering in the way they think you want them to.

Market studies

If you want in-depth insights into how different sectors, businesses, and markets function daily, market studies can give you this. Although they often take a lot of investment if you’re looking at specific areas, there are plenty of respected market research companies who compile detailed information and statistics for these studies.

Use the intel from market studies to inform the world of your persona — using accurate and up-to-date research can create a clear image of the roles, responsibilities, and relationships they engage in during the working day.

As you’re selling business to business, the more you know about the environment you’re targeting, the better. If they want advice on CI/CD best practices, you can swoop in and provide it before they even start looking for a provider.

Keyword research

Learn to speak the same language as your customers, making note of what keywords come up again and again, what questions they search online, and how they describe their pain points. If you have great content and products but are not using these keywords, you’re going to substantially increase the time customers spend searching to discover you.

SEO analytics can highlight which words are searched and where this leads people. Integrating these into your persona informs your business of the terms and phrases that attract and reach buyers.

Rewording a blog title from ‘AI Development and Implementation’ to ‘Benefits of AI in Customer Service?’ can change the web traffic you get and boost your ranking in search engine results. When it’s as simple as adapting your vocabulary, you might as well give it a go.

Buyer surveys

Much like customer interviews, surveys get right to the people you want to model your persona on. Survey questions tend to give more quantitative results, providing numbers and metrics to work with and shedding light on your ideal buyer. For high response rates, these should be shared regularly at B2B customer touchpoints.

However, similarly to interviews, there’s a risk surveys can be skewed and not provide entirely honest or accurate depictions of how customers act.

Design your survey carefully, considering the questions as well as how you want participants to respond. The more freedom you give people to answer as they wish, the more time-consuming the analysis will be, although responses are more likely to be authentic and helpful.

Who you ask to complete the survey is also a point of consideration as this will shape your persona.

Community integration

If you want to know the conversations your persona would be having and the places online and off where they exist, integrate yourself into those communities. There are social media groups for every topic under the sun, and identifying which of these your persona would partake in and how others act in these spaces is only going to improve your research.

You may find people sharing opinions that you’re not hearing through other channels, such as a need for you to support remotely when they have technical issues.

Join several of these groups, as well as offline groups and community spaces, and get involved. This is more reliable than interviews, as people are in a natural environment living their normal lives.

There’s no expectation or incentive to say certain things, and the better your integration, the more quality conversations you can be part of.

Cross-department collaboration

The process of building buyer personas shouldn’t be the job of just one team. To refine your persona, it’s crucial that different departments – sales, marketing, customer success, customer service, leadership, and so on – work together.

Involve different members of your own team and others in the process to ensure diverse input. Make sure you gather a variety of insights from people involved in different stages of the customer journey.

Granted, this can be a time-consuming process, but taking a holistic approach means you’ll be able to build a more rounded view of your ideal customer while also ensuring colleagues feel valued.

Virtual collaboration tools are extremely beneficial here, particularly for hybrid or virtual teams that want to work together in real time. It means you can invite any team member you want to offer their insights virtually and can create a visual representation that brings your ideal customer to life.

Develop your B2B buyer persona

With some proper research and looking in the right places, it’s not hard to create a solid buyer persona based on real life. The more you put in, the better it will serve you and your marketing team, becoming a more accurate portrayal of your real-life target buyers. It’s surprising how much a bit of research helps.

Having a well-thought-out persona means marketing isn’t just sent out into the void while hoping for the best, but has a specific target it’s personalized toward. Not everyone is going to want to buy your product, but you’re not targeting everyone.

By reaching people who have a genuine interest in your products, you save time, money, and effort. It’s all about working smarter, not harder.

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