Create buyer personas

Whether you have experience in your target audience’s industry or not, we all have knowledge gaps when it comes to understanding our buyers’ needs. So, rather than using instinct alone, it can be helpful to build profiles or personas based on actual insights from your existing customers. A persona is a representation of a buyer based on a number of key traits, such as job role, buying power or seniority. For example, you might have a persona called ‘Super-user Sally’ who is the key account holder and user of your product/service and therefore needs a high level of technical information before choosing to buy, unlike her colleague ‘Budget-holding Bob’ whose main concern is price.

To create your buyer personas, you can interview current clients with whom you have a relationship to define these key traits, as well as asking your sales team for their understanding of prospective clients’ needs. Using your CRM and analytics data, you can look for patterns in behaviour to establish common needs. Of course, you can also use your own understanding of B2B businesses to paint a fairly clear picture of the decision making roles in a typical business. If you’re struggling to get a clear picture of company hierarchies and decision-lines from the outside, you can also ask your extended network via LinkedIn or conduct a short survey with your target prospects.

Map the buyer journey

With your buyer personas created, you will have a better understanding of the information and messaging needs of your target audience. Armed with this, you can start to map the buyer journey through the marketing funnel, knowing that at each stage, your buyers will be in need of different types of information, from thought leadership and case studies to testimonials and demos. Offering the right information at the right time, for each persona, will help move the buyer through the funnel. For example, ‘Super-user Sally’ might be in the consideration stage, comparing your solution with that of a competitor. ‘Sally’ will likely want to see a spec sheet so that she can directly compare the key features and benefits you offer alongside your rival, but if ‘Budget-holding Bob’ was in the same phase, he would prefer a breakdown of the subscription tiers you offer in relation to the service specification. Knowing this, you could offer a features list organised price bracket, or you could have a bespoke offer where buyers choose their features and the price is calculated accordingly.

To gain the knowledge you need to map the buyer journey, you can observe how your prospective buyers interact with each touchpoint, such as your website, to understand what information they are looking for, what nudges them further along in the journey, and at what point they drop out in favour of a competitor’s offer. Once you understand and map the journey, you can optimise your messaging at each stage to ensure conversion.

Personalise buyer messaging

Now that you’ve mapped your buyer journey and optimised the information at each stage to suit your personas, you can tailor and personalise your marketing channels and messages to meet buyers’ needs at every step. This might include using sector-specific language and statistics, offering solutions to industry-specific problems, and sharing relevant client success stories that are relatable to your buyers.

A test and learn approach can be adopted both in-house and with agency partners. You can use A-B testing on your email campaigns to see which subject line attracts a higher open rate, as well as creating multiple landing pages to test the conversion of your copy and call to action. If you invest in advertising, this can also be tested using specialist agency partners. If your buyers can make a purchase through your website, it might be worth investing in user testing to optimise your messages here as well.

Market research is often overlooked as unnecessary or expensive, but the insights gleaned from different methodologies can be invaluable to marketers. Armed with a greater understanding of your buyers’ pain points and information needs, you can create buyer personas, map the buying journey, and personalise your marketing messages to ensure a smooth sales process and high conversion rate.