How to properly build buyers personas for B2B content marketing with audience research

8 min readFeb 18, 2021

“Catching someone’s attention and being heard amid this streaming torrent of information is the greatest challenge of contemporary marketing.”
— Adele Revella

Buyer personas form the foundation of any effective inbound content marketing campaign. They can make or break your company’s content strategy, either empowering your teams with useful lead-generating insights, or leaving you mired in missed opportunities.

So what are buyer personas, and why do you need them for your next B2B content marketing campaign?

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on extensive data and research.

These aren’t just simple lists of attributes or two-dimensional caricatures. They should capture what your target audiences are watching, reading, wearing, buying and feeling — conveying as much personality and nuance as possible.

Buyer personas arm your business with a holistic psychological profile of your ideal customers, revealing the specific rational and emotional concerns informing their purchasing decisions. The more detailed this profile, the more laser focused your messaging can be.

The goal is to be able to pinpoint your target audiences’ pain points. These are the challenges and obstacles preventing your customers from achieving their goals.

This might seem like a no brainer — “of course I want to address my customers’ needs, that’s just how business works, right?”

Well yes, but in practice, things are rarely so simple.

“In most cases, what you intuitively want to say about your services or products isn’t what your customers are actually interested in hearing.”

You may be thrilled by a new partnership or certification, or keen to announce your latest technical development or systems update. Maybe you’ve changed your logo, moved into a swanky new office, or recently returned from a team retreat.

All of these might well be worth blogging about, but they’re unlikely to mean much to someone just stumbling onto your brand for the first time — let alone someone grappling with a serious purchasing decision.

What’s more, your ideal customers may not even be aware of their own pain points yet, especially if your solution is particularly innovative or technical.

For example, if your ideal clients have been building central heating systems with galvanized steel ducts for decades, they may not realize that cheaper, more eco-friendly textile ducts even exist. If your clients are multinationals interfacing with complicated tax schemes, they may not know that your local transfer pricing laws have changed, let alone that they need to run an immediate audit with your firm.

Either way, your mission is to put yourself in your customers’ shoes, to understand the challenges they face, make them aware of their pain points if they’re not already, and to show them precisely how your products or services will help.

This will ensure that you’re delivering genuinely useful content while improving your SEO. After all, most people turn to search engines when they need to solve specific challenges. Speak to these challenges directly and your content is far more likely to turn up in search results.

Prioritizing target personas

It’s tempting to think of B2B marketing in over simplified terms, as “company x” engaging with “company y,” interacting impersonally, brand to brand.

“But remember, there’s always a living, breathing individual on the other side of the screen. That’s your real customer, and that’s who you’re aiming to capture with your buyer personas. ”

This is what makes producing targeted marketing content for B2B particularly complicated.

There are typically multiple levels of senior decision makers involved in any significant purchase, and an even greater number of subordinate employees responsible for recognizing opportunities or instigating changes on an operational level.

Before you begin building out your buyer personas, you need to think very carefully about which target audiences are actually worth catering your content to. Are they operations officers, people who will directly benefit from or deploy your solution, or are they top-level executives, people invested with final purchasing authority?

Narrowing this broad set of potential targets down to just a few strategic personas can be a real challenge, and it’s one that even the most experienced B2B enterprises tend to struggle with.

Unfortunately, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. You’ll need to strategically align your chosen target audience with your underlying business objectives. Ask yourself:

Which target audience will best help you reach your stated business goals?
Which target audience stands to benefit most, or most directly, from your products or services?
Which target audience will be easiest, or cheapest to serve your content to?
Which target audience is most likely to be searching for your solution?
Which target audience will be most likely to convert?
Which target audience do you already know the most about?

We would advise carefully and creatively considering your options. Larger, more conservative organisations tend to overlook potentially receptive target audiences all the time.

Building your buyer personas

There are two surefire ways to develop accurate buyer personas, interviews and questionnaires:

Interviews: The most effective way to flesh out a buyer persona is to conduct a series of in-depth interviews. By engaging your customers in real conversations you’ll be able to suss out their nuanced hang-ups and desires. What’s more, you’ll be able to identify patterns of behaviour that inform or influence your target audiences’ purchasing decisions. Talk to your own salespeople to get a better idea of who you should be approaching for interviews and how to reach them. For best results, interview at least 3–5 individuals.
Questionnaires: Interviews take time, and people are busy. So the next best thing is to compile a questionnaire that you can simply drop into a contact’s inbox. To develop a solid questionnaire we recommend referring back to HubSpot’s lists of 20 questions. Note that every business and every client is unique, so you’ll absolutely need to customize your questionnaires on a case by case basis. Remember to construct your questionnaires as if you were trying to get to know a person, anticipate their likely responses and pose some follow up questions accordingly.

Let’s have a closer look at the kinds of information you’ll want to learn about your target audiences:

Personal & Demographic Information

Demographic information concerns your target audience’s age, gender, location, income and family status. On the most basic level, this information will help you accurately target your preferred audience(s) when distributing your content online. Demographic information should also inform your tone of voice and style guidelines.

Media Behaviours

Learn as much as possible about your target audience’s media habits. This information will directly inform your content mix, your distribution strategy, and even your writing style. After all, content made for Instagram or Twitter will have a significantly different feel from articles produced for trade magazines or professional organizations.

What are your target audiences reading? Where do they get their news? What social media channels do they prefer in their personal and professional lives?

Above all else, pay very close attention to any media channels, community resources or professional forums they consult for advice and insights. Pinpoint and analyse these channels for tips, tricks and trends to adopt in your own content.

Ultimately you’ll want to turn to precisely these channels when it comes time to distribute your content online.

Industry & Professional Information

Professional information concerns anything and everything about your target audience’s working lives. Beyond gleaning information on job titles, department structures and purchasing processes, you’ll want to dig into your audience’s personal and emotional concerns.

How do they define success in their role? What obstacles do they face at work? How do they overcome these challenges?

You should also be asking questions about the broader industries or sectors your target audiences operate in. The more you know about their industry, the better you’ll understand the professional opportunities, challenges and standards impacting their work and informing their purchasing decisions.

On a more basic level, you’ll need to be fully conversant in your target audience’s industry specific jargon to demonstrate your expertise and resonate with readers.

After conducting interviews or receiving a sufficient number of completed questionnaires, you’ll be ready to begin building out your buyer personas. Save yourself the extra time and trouble with this helpful Buyer Persona Template.

Factoring in Buyer Journeys

A buyer journey is the process a customer goes through from first identifying a product or service right down to making a purchase. Buyers’ needs, wants and hang-ups will change as they progress through the various stages of this journey. You’ll want to fine tune your messaging to continuously meet these changing needs.

Buyer journeys are usually broken down into three distinct stages: awareness, consideration and decision:

Awareness Stage

At this stage, a buyer is encountering some kind of challenge and is searching for a solution online. In some cases, they may lack the precise vocabulary to describe their problem, or they may not yet realize where they’ve gone wrong.

Consideration Stage

At this point a customer has identified their problem(s) and learned a bit more about potential solutions. Their main concern will now be researching and comparing between those solutions in greater detail.

Decision stage

This is when a potential customer has identified their preferred solution and is actively deciding between vendors. They will compare your offer to those of your competitors and will ultimately make or decline a purchase.

Your buyer personas’ specific pain points will change as they progress through the stages of their respective buyer journeys. We recommend producing variations of each of your buyer personas to represent the specific concerns they’ll harbor at each stage.

Your ultimate goal is to be able to approach the right people with the right message at the right time, and factoring buyer journeys into your persona research will help you nail your messaging and timing.

Conclusion

Building robust buyer personas can be a real challenge, even for the most experienced content marketers. The process requires careful thought and loads of preparation, but the level of deep understanding it’ll generate about your target audiences is always worth the effort.

Bulletproof buyer personas will not only help you pin down your messaging, but directly inform each and every stage of your B2B content strategy, from keyword research and content mixes right through to distribution plans. Ultimately, they’re an instrumental part of making your brand’s content marketing efforts generate real results for your business.

Clearly, getting your buyer personas right is crucial. Unfortunately, that’s easier said than done.

If your B2B enterprise is struggling with buyer persona research, or simply lacks the bandwidth to tackle the A-Zs of a solid inbound content strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’re always happy to help, whether with a quick chat or a detailed consultation, no strings attached. Contact our team and schedule a chat today.

Originally published at https://wecreatecontent.asia on February 18, 2021.