You might have hundreds of leads or thousands, but who are you marketing to? Have you met them? No, we didn’t think so. That’s why you need a buyer persona to help you out. Figure out who you’re marketing to, and you automatically improve your marketing message. Below are 3 tips to create banging on-point B2B buyer personas. We even used these tips to create our own.

Imagine your ideal customer as an actual person

As a foundation for your personas, imagine what your perfect customer would really be like. What size is their company? What is their annual income? It might even be a good idea to create a simplified persona with just your preferences or killer values included just to compare to the clients you actually get. Use this as a way of seeing who you’re targeting and what it is about them that makes them the ideal customer. Once you’ve got this prepared, it’s time to look at reality…

Reach out to current customers

Look in your CRM for trends and similarities between the customers you already have. You want to figure out what it is that brings the two of you together. Is there a regular stream of certain types of business? That might be important for your personas, especially if you have enough data to create more than one. If you can reach out to your clients, do. See if they would be willing to answer some questions relating to business with you just to help you figure out where to go in the future. Some examples might be:
  • What made you choose us over other companies? What made up your mind?
  • What would you have liked to know in our early stages of communication?
  • Are there any particularly memorable times that we contacted you? What makes them/that memorable? Was it good or bad?
  • What is your favourite aspect of our product/service?
You want to get as much data as possible from these short questionnaires, then analyse the general input from customers.

Get help from contacts that unsubscribe

If your unsubscribers are cooperative, you should be able to get some help from them with your personas to know what to do – or not to do – in the future. On unsubscribing, ask your contacts why they don’t want further communications from you. Try to make at least a few of the questions open-ended so that you can get as individualised an answer as you can. See what data you can find, thinking about what would be beneficial to know. Asking the right people the right questions will tell you exactly what you need to know about your target audience & persona. Download our Persona Builder Template to help you on your way. Once you’ve thought about your personas, why not consider what campaigns you want to start sending out?