There is no doubt that buyer personas are among the most taught and used marketing tools today: they are considered an essential starting point for many analyses.
This widespread diffusion, however, also raises some doubts: is their effectiveness really so high? Is the investment required to outline them repaid by the improvement in results that their use entails?
At least for the B2B market, the answer is definitely yes. When we are faced with complex purchasing dynamics and areas where it is very difficult to ensure customer loyalty, marketing personas become a valuable weapon to use.
Let's try to understand better, therefore, what they are and how they are used.
What are marketing personas?
Think about your best customers, individually: who they are, what they need, why they turn to you, what they consider important and what is secondary (obviously, in relation to your product/service).
In short, we could say that each of these “ideal customer” profiles is, for you, a buyer persona.
The differences compared to traditional target determination systems are, fundamentally, two:
The target usually consists of a group of individuals with certain common characteristics; with buyer personas, one or more individual portraits of the “best customer” are created, which are analyzed in detail and identified with a name.
Buyer personas are investigated from a psychological and habitual point of view, with a decidedly high level of in-depth analysis. We try to answer questions about the needs they must satisfy, what leads them to discover our product, what can make them loyal, and so on.
This type of question will probably make another type of analysis resonate in the minds of many: that of the customer journey.
What is the customer journey?
Here is a key point for the correct use of marketing personas: this tool becomes truly powerful and useful when combined with customer journey analysis.
The customer journey (literally: the “customer journey”) is the symbolic path that each of our customers takes and that leads them to become one: it begins when they realize they have a need (that our product or service can satisfy, obviously), it arrives up to the final feedback they will give on their experience with our company or, possibly, to their loyalty.
This is the complete list of each of the stages of the customer journey, in a nutshell:
1 – Awareness – the potential customer becomes aware of the existence of the company, or product. Or it could be the moment when the customer realizes he has a certain problem and therefore takes action to solve it.
2 – Knowledge – the future customer is essentially gathering information about the different products or services on the market, to understand which one best suits his specific needs.
3 – Consideration – the customer is ready to evaluate the different options available to him.
4 – Decision, or decision – is the actual choice phase, in which it is important to help the customer by convincing him that your product is at least worthy of a try.
5 – Trial, or test – especially in the world of services or B2B, trial periods are now a constant.
6 – Settledown – the customer begins to feel comfortable using the chosen product.
7 – Relationship, or relation – the relationship between the customer and the company is fully stabilized. However, the company's work is not finished: assistance or in any case the maintenance of a contact may be needed. On the other hand, the customer, now loyal, has become an important asset for the company and not a cost to be sustained.
We could say that the customer journey describes the process, while the buyer personas describe the agent. The initial need, the psychological levers, the channels used to get information will be different from person to person even for the same product.
For example, when faced with a simple exercise bike, there will be important differences between the buyer persona “Sara” (a professionally busy woman, with a good income but little time to go to the gym, who spends little time on social media but reads specialized magazines) and the person “Anna” (a young student, with a lot of free time but little financial availability, who spends a lot of time on Instagram).
There are different motivations for purchasing a home fitness machine (saving time for the first, money for the second), the advertising channels to use, the factors that will make you choose a certain model rather than another, the elements of reassurance.
The specificities of B2B markets
Moving to B2B, purchasing decisions are often more rational and less impulsive. One might think then that personas, with their background of motivational and psychological analysis, become excessive.
In reality, it is precisely in B2B that they become fundamental.
In B2C, especially when addressing a very large audience, investing time and money to define different buyer persona profiles and, then, different strategies for each, may not be so convenient.
Generally, the more mass-market the product, the less important it becomes to invest in persona analysis: in fact, we are addressing a very, very wide variety of subjects who will necessarily have extremely different profiles.
B2B markets are the exact opposite of this scenario: potential buyers are limited or, in any case, they are part of a very specific area. The reasons that push them to prefer a certain supplier rather than another can be investigated more easily.
Let's take some examples to make the concept simpler.
A company that ships fresh food products and one that ships building materials will look for very different characteristics from their logistics service provider (reliability in terms of timing and care of the product during transport in the first case, savings even for high weights and volumes in the second case). This diversity of objectives will correspond to two different buyer personas.
Let's take instead the case in which the differences are not between the companies, but between the subjects who will make the purchasing decision: the owner could be reached in different ways, for example, than the person responsible for company training ; and he could be convinced to rely on a certain training agency with different motivations than the other.
This is where analyzing marketing personas becomes essential to truly understand the customer journey and draw up an effective marketing plan.
How to build your buyer personas
Building buyer personas can be more or less complex depending on the knowledge the company has of its customers.
Essentially, you proceed by identifying some “ideal customers,” perhaps taking inspiration from those the company already serves regularly.
For each profile, an identikit will then be drawn up that will include everything that can help to best describe them as a “real person”, helping to understand their motivations and behavior: a name and surname (fictitious, obviously), profession, needs, ways of gathering information, difficulties they face… obviously in relation to our product or service.
Some companies already have a very in-depth knowledge of their customers or at least have no difficulty finding this information; often it is enough to talk to the sales staff and customer care to reconstruct these aspects quite precisely. The data collected in the various company databases can then integrate this information with valuable indications.
In other cases, we recommend proceeding by scheduling interviews with the best customers, so that you can directly find the information you need.
Once the personas have been described and the related customer journeys analyzed, it will be much easier to develop targeted, effective and original marketing strategies compared to the competition.
Fabio Piccigallo
Data Driven Marketing Strategist. I manage the strategic development of clients' business through quantitative analysis and modeling of marketing processes.
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