Decoding Customers: B2B Buyer Personas Advanced Insight Strategies
Studies prove that B2B prospects now prefer a digital buying journey over sales calls. Understanding your target audience is more important than ever for lead generation and improving the ROI of marketing and sales.
Understanding their journey is where B2B customer insights come in. By leveraging data and customer interactions, you gain invaluable knowledge about your ideal buyers, allowing you to create targeted digital marketing campaigns, fix your inbound funnel, improve customer retention, and more.
In this post, we cover the basics and then move on to the advanced insight strategies for B2B buyer personas that are now possible with AI.
What are B2B Buyer Personas?
Humans have used personified archetypes to describe personality types for thousands of years. Think about the Greek gods, for example. Their flaws, talents, and journeys still resonate with people today.
Believe it or not, a B2B buyer persona serves a similar function for businesses – it is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, encompassing their demographics, behaviors, needs, and goals to paint a vivid picture of the individuals you’re trying to reach.
Are Buyer Personas Still Important?
Creating buyer personas can feel like a big challenge. Rather than a one-off project, consider it an investment – once you have them, the benefits of working with them increase over time. By understanding your buyer personas, you can:
1. Craft Targeted Messaging
Imagine sending generic email marketing blasts that land flat with your audience. With buyer personas, you can personalize your communication, speaking directly to their needs, challenges, and preferences.
For example, if your buyer persona is a “Cost-Conscious CFO,” your email content could highlight features that demonstrate cost savings and ROI, like reduced subscription costs or improved lead generation efficiency. This targeted approach resonates more deeply with the recipient, increasing engagement and conversion rates.
2. Personalize the Buyer’s Journey
Think of your buyer’s journey as a guided tour. Buyer personas help you map out their needs and preferences at each stage. Then, you can personalize the experience by providing relevant content and resources at every touchpoint.
For example, a “Tech-Savvy Marketing Manager” might prefer informative white papers or video-driven in-depth webinars. At the same time, a “Risk-Averse CEO” might prioritize case studies and testimonials showcasing successful implementations. By tailoring the journey to each persona, you guide potential customers smoothly towards conversion.
Later in this post, we look at how AI can enhance your results based on each customer journey phase.
3. Allocate Resources Effectively
Rather than marketing dollars at a “spray and pray” approach, buyer personas allow you to identify the channels and tactics most likely to resonate with your ideal buyers.
Imagine targeting an influencer with in-depth industry reports while neglecting their preferred platform. You might assume they are only active on LinkedIn, but they’re actually building a large audience on TikTok.
In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic acted as a significant catalyst for adopting remote and automated sales processes. With strict restrictions on in-person interactions, businesses had to adapt their strategies.
This shift towards remote and automated sales is becoming increasingly common. Gartner and McKinsey both report that, in general, B2B buyers prefer a DIY sales journey over sales calls and conversations.
Knowing when and where your prospect wants to interact can be critical to keeping leads from a competitor. By understanding your buyers’ preferred communication channels, you can focus efforts on optimizing their preferred experience in those channels.
4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment
Miscommunication between sales and marketing teams can undermine everyone’s efforts. Buyer personas bridge this gap by creating a shared understanding of the target audience.
Buyer personas can be like an olive branch between the perennial tension between marketing and sales. The sales team is a critical source of high-quality information about your ideal client profile.
Both teams can utilize the same buyer personas, ensuring everyone is on the same page about who you’re trying to reach, their needs, and what messaging will resonate best. This collaboration leads to a more unified and practical approach to attracting and converting leads.
Creating B2B Buyer Personas: The Basics
Build effective buyer personas as a project management exercise involving market research and direct customer interaction.
Market research involves gathering data from various sources, such as industry reports, competitor analysis, and website analytics. This research provides a foundational understanding of your target market and makes you more effective in creating a buyer persona.
Speaking to customers through interviews, focus groups, and surveys allows you to delve deeper into their motivations, challenges, and decision-making processes.
Here are some tips for conducting compelling customer interviews:
Select the Right Customers
Not all customers are equally valuable. Some have a customer acquisition cost (CAC), and others are harder to upsell.
Avoid attracting problematic clients. For example, check with sales to see which current customers were the easiest to close during the sales process. Choose individuals who represent your ideal buyer persona.
Prepare Insightful Questions
Focus on uncovering needs, challenges, and buying behaviors. Don’t be afraid to adjust your questions based on issues or topics that keep coming up during interviews.
Listen and quantify critical points to look for patterns across all conversations afterward.
Organizing Your Findings: The Buyer Persona Canvas
The buyer persona canvas is a popular tool that helps you organize and visualize the information gathered. Hootsuite offers a popular buyer persona template.
Persona templates create a standardized resource across the organization, from sales teams to content creators. From content marketing to product development, they offer a consistent answer to the question, “Who are we talking to?”
AI Innovation: Empowering B2B Buyer Personas Advanced Insight Strategies
By now, all digital marketers know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how marketers create and utilize buyer personas. Beyond traditional methods, AI-powered tools offer new avenues for gathering customer insights, from awareness to buying.
Here are a few ways you can capitalize on AI to improve your personas:
- AI-powered market segmentation: AI algorithms can analyze vast customer data to identify distinct customer segments with unique characteristics and behaviors.
- Predictive analytics: AI can predict future customer needs and preferences, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve and tailor your marketing accordingly.
- Advanced surveys and feedback: AI can personalize surveys and analyze responses for deeper understanding.
- Social listening for insights: AI can monitor social media conversations to identify trends and pain points and gain insights into customer sentiment.
Using AI to Activate Your Buyer Personas’ Journey
Just like real people, your personas take action. Marketers can increase conversions by optimizing the buyer’s journey, or stages, that personas go through to reach a buying decision.
Here’s how you can use AI during each step to help you guide your customers through the journey.
- Awareness: During this initial phase, potential customers become aware of their needs or problems and research possible solutions. They may be checking out blog posts, white papers, and webinars.
- AI boost for Awareness phase: AI can assist here by offering targeted content and ads based on individuals’ online behavior and demographics. Based on data and customer feedback, A/B testing can help refine your messaging and approach. AI is a powerful tool for A/B testing, enabling faster iteration and optimization.
- Consideration: In this phase, buyers have identified a shortlist of potential solutions and are actively evaluating their options.
- AI boost for consideration phase: AI can help personalize the experience by providing relevant product comparisons, case studies, and demos tailored to the specific needs of each buyer persona.
- Decision: This final phase involves selecting and purchasing the best solution.
- AI boost for decision phase: AI can play a crucial role here by offering tools for real-time interaction like chatbots or product configurators and leveraging predictive analytics to recommend the most suitable options for each buyer.
Moving Ahead With B2B Buyer Personas Advanced Insight Strategies
Understanding your audience is an ongoing process. As your business evolves and the market landscape changes, continuously refine your buyer personas to ensure they remain accurate and relevant.
Remember, AI can be a valuable tool in this process, but it’s not a replacement for human expertise and judgment. At Funnel Envy, we know that even though AI promises a lot, the actual implementation raises the bar for complexity in tracking and reporting.
Our FunnelEnvy customer data platform enables you to create a personalized experience that responds to your website visitors within milliseconds. Reach out today to get the conversation started.