A persona is an aid to the buyer journey and helps you to better understand your own target group.
A well-founded target group analysis is the basis for customer-centric marketing and is essential for customer relationship management (CRM).
What Are Buyer Personas?
Personas, or buyer personas, are fictional characters that represent a target group. Buyer personas face the same challenges as your customers and have the same needs and wishes.
A persona should be as realistic as possible but not describe a specific person you know. A persona embodies an entire group and its characteristics.
This illustration can help you to better understand the buyer journey/customer journey and focus your marketing on your target group.
To better understand your target group, you can ask yourself the following questions, for example:
- What challenges does persona A face?
- Does persona A need support with topic X?
- Does product feature Z help persona A achieve their goal?
How to Create a Buyer Persona for B2B Companies
Creating one or more personas creates a common understanding of the target group across different departments and helps to create consistent communication and buyer journeys.
We show you how to create a meaningful persona in five steps:
1. Create Details About the Person
In the first step, the buyer persona or ideal customer profile (ICP) is given a name and personal details such as role, company, age, and private situation. This information helps you to better visualize the persona and address relevant questions regarding the target group more effectively.
You then analyze the persona's environment: who influences the persona and who does the persona influence? The entire buying center plays a central role, especially with regard to B2B companies.
It is therefore worth analyzing exactly what kind of dynamics prevail within the buying center of your target companies and which decision-makers influence each other and how.
This information helps to assess the status of the persona in their professional and private environment. Ideally, you should create a specific persona for each target group category in order to send targeted messages via the appropriate channels.
Tip: Realistic names create closeness. So use names like Nicolas Baumgartner rather than Markus Marketing.
Step 2: Identify Goals and Tasks
In the second step, the goals and tasks of the persona are defined. A distinction is made between two levels: professional and personal.
The professional level includes all topics that are directly related to the persona's professional role. For example, the company and team goals.
The personal goals describe the intentions of the persona, with an indirect impact on the professional role. These include, for example, status within (and outside) the company or new skills for personal development.
Examples:
- Professional: Increase in sales and more converted leads
- Personal: Status as an initiator of change
Step 3: Support Achievement of Goals
Step 3 is about finding out what makes it easier for the persona to achieve their goals. The focus here is on the perspective of the persona itself.
The aim is to find out which "shortcuts" the persona prefers in order to reach their goal more quickly.
In this way, the expectations of the persona can be matched with the functionalities of the product or service.
Examples:
- How can the persona save time or costs?
- Where can synergies be exploited?
- What does the persona enjoy about the implementation?
Step 4: Identify Challenges and Hurdles
Step 4 focuses on the hurdles and stumbling blocks that stand in the way of the persona achieving their goals. This is also about the persona's perspective.
Which aspects give the persona a headache and present them with a challenge? To what extent do hurdles within the buying center become apparent at this point?
As with step 3, these points can then be compared with the product portfolio.
Examples:
- Where do costs & effort arise?
- What skills and resources does the persona lack?
- What causes the persona frustration during implementation?
If you can identify the persona's challenges, this will help you enormously. You can address pain points directly and optimize your lead generation effectively.
Step 5: Understand the Daily Routine
The daily routine helps you to understand the activities and context of the persona during a working day.
Through this analysis, the touchpoints used during the day can be precisely recorded and effectively addressed.
Make a note of the main activities and channels used at different times of the day.
Tip: Describe a typical working day for the persona and not an extraordinary event. Focus on the most important activities and channels.
B2B Persona: Insights
You should now have gained the following insights about the persona:
- Persona details: you have a consistent understanding of who the persona is.
- Goals & tasks: You know where the persona wants to go professionally and personally.
- Support: You know the aspects that make it easier for the persona to achieve their goals.
- Challenges: You know what hurdles the persona is facing.
- Daily routine: You know the persona's routine and can assess the context at different times of the day.
All this information helps you to better understand your target group. This will also make it easier for you to analyze and understand the buyer journey later on.
Conclusion
Defining one or more buyer personas helps your company create a uniform understanding of the target group and their needs.
This is an important step in understanding and analyzing the buyer journey to strive for revenue growth.
A persona also helps to check specific measures and approaches in advance and subject them to a plausibility check.
This allows you to create a perfect sales pitch for your target group in order to generate more leads.
