Do you use B2B buyer personas in the marketing strategy for your B2B business? Why are buyer personas so important to B2B businesses? While many B2B companies do, there are some that haven’t caught on yet. There can be a misconception that buyer personas are tools that work well in the marketing strategies of B2C businesses, but not with B2B companies- this could not be more false.
A buyer persona is a representation of a business’ ideal customer– whether a business deals with customers that are part of another company or not, these individuals are still seen as customers. If you run a b2b business, you are still supplying another business with products or services that they need. Therefore, while B2B companies deal with interactions between firms, these companies still act as customers. In this article, we will focus on why B2B marketers should use buyer personas to help them drive demand and grow their business.
Why B2B Buyer Personas Are Important for your business
Buyer personas are perhaps the most useful tool to help you understand your customers. Using both research and real data, buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your customers, which can help you to understand both who your customers are and what they want. Using buyer personas in your b2b marketing strategy can help businesses generate more leads, adapt to the rapidly changing desires of buyers, increase your conversion rate and much more. And the statistics prove it! If you don’t believe us, take a look at the raw numbers:
- 73% higher conversion rate for companies that use buyer personas compared to that aren’t
- Twice as many recipients will open emails when buyer personas are used
- Websites are 2-5x easier for users to navigate if they incorporate buyer personas
- 40% of b2b marketers that segment their content use buyer personas
- Buyer personas can lead to a 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue
Despite the overwhelming amount of statistics proving the usefulness of buyer personas, only 44% of B2B marketers are using them. Hopefully, this article will help to change their minds and show them not only why B2B buyer personas are crucial for their business, but also how to create them and how they individually can improve their inbound marketing. Now that we’ve seen the statistics let’s talk about how exactly buyer personas help b2b businesses.
Generate more leads
One of the most important goals of any marketing strategy is to generate more leads for business because the more leads, the higher chance that leads will become customers. While several strategies can help to create leads, the only way these plans will be successful is if they show that companies understand their customers. But how do you know your customers? The answer is simple: with buyer personas. The best way to get a comprehensive picture of your buyers is to create one. The below section of this guide will tell you just how to create a buyer persona, but the main components are market research and raw data. By interviewing customers and researching their buying patterns, you can predict what it is they want to see and cater to that, which will, in turn, attract more customers and generate more leads. Remember that there are multiple types of buyer personas, but thorough research will allow you to create more quality leads because you will be basing your marketing strategy on personas created by real data.
Adapt to buyers’ changing desires
Let’s say your data shows that you have been generating more leads than usual and had a higher conversion rate, but you’re not doing the extra work of creating and using buyer personas. While these statistics may exist, they are unlikely to last unless you implement buyer personas into your marketing strategy. Buyers’ behaviour, goals and buying patterns are not static but are instead continually changing. You may have a firm grip on what it is your buyers want now, but what about next month? Will that change? How will it change? How can you accommodate the change? Due to the complex factors involved in creating buyer personas, you can easily re-create them to reflect factors like current market changes that might affect their purchasing decisions. Without the help of buyer personas, B2B business wouldn’t know what to expect from their customers or what to do when the reality and the expectations no longer matched up.
Increase conversion rate with B2B Buyer Personas
Not only do B2B buyer personas help generate more leads for businesses, but they also help to increase their conversion rates. This is mostly common sense because with more leads, you have more traffic to your site and when your site is exposed to more people, the chances that you’ll have more leads drastically increases. However, 59% of marketers say that converting leads is their central struggle. Buyer personas will help you both understand your buyers and attract them, so they will feel prioritised by your company and will become paying customers.
Strategically create new products and services
When a business creates new products or develops new services, they do so to satisfy their customers. If the products and services they offer are not attractive to customers, then how will the business make money? They won’t. So when a company decides to create new products and services, they must be informed by educated guesses about what their customers want. If a business doesn’t have a buyer persona, how will they know if their products and services will be successful? These decisions need to be informed by data and research, which is precisely how buyer personas are created.
Keeps everyone on the same page
When your business has created accurate buyer personas, all departments will be able to work together smoothly because there is a common goal. Without a buyer persona, there tends to be confusion about which marketing strategies will be useful, which products and services will be helpful to customers and much more. Buyer personas offer a comprehensive picture of who buyers are and what they want, which means that departments won’t have to frantically communicate with each other just to find out what they should be doing. Buyer personas help keep everyone on the same page.
Shows customers that you are customer-focused
When businesses use buyer personas, their products, services and customer service are all informed by precisely what their buyers want. This means that their customer services become more informed and efficient and their products and services are more useful to buyers. These changes prove to customers that your business is customer-focused. When customers, and potential customer, feel appreciated, a business’ sales typically increase. Buyer personas can help a company succeed, all the way from generating quality leads to increase sales directly.
Summary
These are just some of the reported benefits of how B2B buyer personas can help your business and accelerate your marketing strategy. Buyer personas show you the nature of your buyers, helps you to predict their purchasing decisions and shows you how to create products that they will love. B2b businesses reportedly have more quality leads, the ability to adapt to buyers’ changing desires, a higher conversion rate, creates useful products, keeps everyone on the same page and shows customers that the business is customer-focused.
This is a summary of why B2B businesses should focus time and energy on developing their buyer personas. We’ll come back over the next few weeks and focus on how you develop personas and what questions to answer during the persona definition process. If you’ve enjoyed this article please share it and feel free to leave a comment below.