B2B Buyer Personas: Everything You Need to Know About Your Customers

Your customers are all individuals. They have their own lives, interests, fears, and dreams–no two are the same. While this is a lovely way to look at things, it can make it really hard to target the right people because everyone’s so different. This is particularly true for B2B brands that are targeting job roles and companies rather than everyday consumers.  

In fact, many brands fire out generic messages and try to capture everyone with their marketing. But this can be counterproductive; you often end up pleasing no one when you try to please everyone. 

Enter B2B buyer personas.

While it’s impossible to create unique and personalized campaigns for every single prospect, you can group people into similar persona types and create content for those instead. 

Reveal is a powerful tool that can scan your existing lead base and identify similarities between your leads and your most successful clients. This is the perfect springboard for creating highly accurate and targeted buyer personas. 

What is a B2B buyer persona?

B2B buyer personas are profiles of customer segments. They highlight key characteristics and information about each segment that will help you create messages that truly resonate. 

If you aren’t convinced, here are some stats to put it into perspective: 

Understanding who your customers are, what they’re interested in, and what they need from you can help level up your content, increase sales and revenue, and improve the performance of your marketing campaigns–what’s not to like? 

What should a B2B buyer persona include? 

B2B buyer personas are slightly different from B2C buyer personas because you’re targeting a person as part of a company rather than as an individual. While B2C brands might be interested in the magazines their customers read, what they do in their spare time, and what their family role is, B2B brands should be more interested in workplace challenges and goals. 

As a general rule, B2B buyer personas should include: 

  • Demographic information: basic information about a prospect’s age, location, and sex 
  • Job profile: key facts about a prospect’s job role, including their salary, seniority, and main tasks 
  • Buying behavior: What products they have bought in the past, when they are most likely to buy, how they prefer to buy 
  • Psychographic information: deep-level information about a prospect’s biggest fears, challenges, dreams, and goals 
  • Pain points and challenges: information about what a prospect struggles with the most at work or in their business 

You can dive into as much detail as you like for each one of these areas. 

Psychographic questions to ask when creating your personas include:

  • What is my prospect’s main business goal? 
  • What are their values in business?
  • What issues are they most concerned with at work? 
  • What challenges do they face on a daily basis? 
  • What are their career or business dreams? 
  • What does an average week look like at work? 
  • What platforms do they use to carry out research? 
  • What motivates them to do well at work? 

These questions will help differentiate a mid-level manager who wants to impress their boss by presenting a useful new time-saving tool from a CEO who struggles with an inconvenient micromanaging habit. 

B2B Buyer Personas: Facebook Ads Example
Wrike’s Facebook ads are targeting users with a specific pain point–not getting the details they need from work requests. 

Why B2B buyer personas are important

The problem with personas is most companies create them without actually speaking to their audience or digging into available data. As a result, they have an assumptive version of their audience that doesn’t always match reality.

When you create solid B2B buyer personas, you’ll notice the difference. 

Why? Because you’ll be able to: 

  • Personalize the customer experience
  • Better understand your customers
  • Create more successful marketing campaigns
  • Guide decisions in making new products and services 
  • Interact with your customers better
B2B Buyer Personas: Salesforce Example
Salesforce’s product range suits a variety of different needs and customer pain points. 

What do you do with B2B buyer personas?

Later in the piece, there’s a step-by-step guide to creating a B2B buyer persona, but first of all, let’s look at what you can do with them. It’s no good putting together a comprehensive overview of your customer segments and then filing them away, never to be seen again.

Instead, your buyer personas should fuel everything you do, from sales calls and prospecting to creating content and managing your social channels. 

1. Map out the sales funnel

Knowing what your prospects want and need from you will help you create a sales funnel that tackles their questions and objections every step of the way. For example, if you find out that one segment of your audience is regularly on LinkedIn rather than Facebook, you can focus on creating LinkedIn ads to catch top-of-the-funnel prospects. 

B2B Buyer Personas: Map Out The Sales Funnel, Lighter Capital Example
Lighter Capital knows their audience is mostly hanging out on LinkedIn, so they serve lots of ads there. 

How to map out the sales funnel: Understanding the journey your customers take is crucial information. It tells you what the next possible steps are, allowing you to deliver the right content at the right time. 

There are two successful ways you can map out your sales funnel: 

  1. Website analytics: Use the data you have available to determine the route customers take on your site. Google Analytics shows which pages visitors land on and where they go next, but you can also drill down into the most popular landing pages, which sign-up forms convert the most, and which pages are most likely to encourage a purchase. 
  2. Journey mapping tools: Reveal is a powerful tool that analyzes your existing marketing campaigns, sales efforts, and product data to identify which actions are most likely to lead to a sale. It pulls this information from various channels for accurate attribution and compiles it to provide a comprehensive view of what your best customers and most qualified leads have in common. 

2. Create content geared towards real-life needs

Don’t make the mistake of assuming you know what your prospects want. Instead, use information collected from your buyer personas to create content they actually want and need. 

For example, if you discover that one of the biggest struggles your prospects face is managing their time, you can create content around helping them do that. 

B2B Buyer Personas: Create Content Geared Towards Real-Life Needs, Podia Example
Podia’s content is geared towards an audience interested in email marketing and empowering course students. 

How to create content geared towards real-life needs: When you have a deep understanding of who your most qualified leads are, you can cut through the noise and deliver content that continuously resonates with them. 

This goes beyond rudimentary keyword research and competitor analysis (just because you have a similar product to another brand, it doesn’t mean your customers require the same information!). 

Here’s a brief step-by-step guide to creating content based on what your personas actually want and need from you: 

  1. Discover common questions, queries, and pain points: Use customer support tickets, social media interactions, customer feedback, and reviews to identify common questions your customers have. 
  2. Run keyword research: Track the real-life queries you discover with keyword research to make sure you’re creating content that has the potential to become visible.

Create content for customers at every stage of the funnel: Your personas will reflect the pain points of leads at various stages of the funnel—from those who are just learning about your brand to those ready and raring to buy. Make sure you’re creating content that tackles their questions at each stage.

3. Improve marketing campaigns

Marketing campaigns rely on targeting the right people in the right place at the right time. Understanding who your prospects are and where they’re hanging out will improve the visibility of your ads and marketing messages.

On top of this, you’ll be better fixed for writing copy and creating visuals that really resonate with their wants and needs.

B2B Buyer Personas: Facebook Audience Creation Example
Facebook’s ad targeting capabilities let you really hone in on your buyer personas. 

How to improve marketing campaigns with buyer personas: Your marketing campaigns rely on laser-focused targeting. The more refined your target audience is, the easier it is to send out a message that resonates with them.

You can use demographic information to narrow down your targeting options, but you can also use information gleaned from your research to drive the messaging in your marketing campaigns. For example, if you learn that one of your personas uses a specific phrase relating to their job role, you can use that in your marketing to resonate with them. 

4. Enhance lead scoring and sales calls 

Your sales calls will run far smoother if you know what questions to ask and what matters the most to your prospects. 

In addition, buyer personas can help elevate your lead scoring efforts and vice versa. Scoring can provide validation of your personas, highlighting whether personas are showing up in your funnel, where they’re showing up, and whether they’re turning into qualified leads (and customers!). 

Scoring can also help you improve your top-of-the-funnel results. Use FIT scoring to build target segments for paid campaigns where you can run high-performing retargeting ads to lookalike audiences. The more you can match your ad audience to your buyer personas, the more click-throughs you’ll get and the more qualified leads you’ll attract. 

How to enhance lead scoring with B2B buyer personas: Lead scoring is a great way to identify your best customers, which goes hand-in-hand with generating accurate and lucrative buyer personas. 

Breadcrumbs brings together your best leads from multiple different sources so you can unify your existing marketing strategies. When you know who your buyer personas are, you can assign scores based on their specific attributes to determine how qualified they are. 

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Your B2B buyer persona template

Now, it’s time for you to create your B2B buyer personas. Here’s a template of information you can include, but feel free to tweak it to fit your own needs. 

Demographic information:

  • Name
  • Age
  • Job role 
  • Location 
  • Sex

Job profile: 

  • Position
  • Company size 
  • Main tasks 
  • Reports to
  • Manages 

Psychographic information: 

  • Biggest challenges
  • Fears
  • Main goal 
  • Daily struggles 
  • Preferred platforms 
  • Tools used 
  • Business values 
  • Achievements 
  • Frustrations
  • Motivations
Illustration Of Breadcrumbs Icp Worksheet

Ebook

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Worksheet

Learn how to create an Ideal Customer Profile and build a successful sales strategy with this Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Worksheet.

How to create a B2B buyer persona

Creating your B2B buyer personas means learning more about your prospects. There are plenty of ways to do this, but it’s crucial that you actually do some research rather than taking a stab in the dark. 

Here’s how to get started.

1. Identify your best customers

Use CRM data to identify who your most loyal customers are or who your biggest spenders are. These are most likely the kinds of customers you want to replicate, so understanding what they look like in real life is the first step in the process.

Our Reveal feature does this automatically in three simple steps: 

  1. Connect your data: Seamlessly connect your existing lead data to other lead gen tools you use to identify your customers
  2. Define your objective: Indicate the type of customer you’d like to use to define “success”—this might be all paying customers or customers that have signed up for a specific resource.  
  3. Get your results: The tool identifies commonalities between the customers you define as “successful” to generate a list of attributes you can use in your buyer personas.
Alt=&Quot;B2B Buyer-Personas-Icp-Validate-Breadcrumbs-Reveal&Quot;

Alternatively, if there’s a segment you haven’t reached yet but want to reach (for example, enterprise companies), research the key characteristics of some of your dream customers. 

2. Pinpoint what information you need

Deciding what to include in your buyer personas will inform your sales funnel and content creation efforts, so it’s important you get it right. 

Think about what information would be good to know. For example, it might be crucial that you know a prospect’s job title, but not so crucial to know what their fears or values are. 

The results from Reveal can help guide this information. If it’s clear that your most successful leads have a specific job title, earn a certain income, or manage a team, you can use these parameters in your buyer personas. 

Boost your writing habits by jotting down a list of beneficial attributes you’d like to know about your customers. The best part is that Reveal uses machine learning to generate more accurate predictions with every fresh piece of data. So, the more leads you generate over time, the more data you will have about what makes them similar to your best customers.

3. Real-life research 

Remember, we’re not in the business of making assumptions. Instead, go out and find prospects in the wild to discover the real answers to your questions. 

Reveal can provide a comprehensive view of what commonalities your best leads might share, but it’s always good to pare this with information that comes straight from the horse’s mouth—a.k.a. your customers themselves. 

There are a few ways you can do this—some easier than others. 

  • Customer surveys: ask your best customers to answer a series of questions about their challenges, goals, and purchase barriers. Collect and store this information in one place, and identify any patterns that emerge
B2B Buyer Personas: Real-Life Research, Mastercam Example
Mastercam Offers Customers The Chance To Win Something If They Respond To Their Survey.&Nbsp;
  • Customer interviews: dig deeper by interviewing two or three of your best customers to really understand what makes them tick and what they need help with the most 
  • Social listening: scour social channels with social listening tools such as Meltwater to discover what your target customers are talking about, what content they read and share, and what issues are on their minds right now 
  • Tap into data: analyze data from your analytics or CRM to get demographic data and behavioral information about prospects 
B2B Buyer Personas: Google Analytics Example
Discover basic demographic data in Google Analytics. 

4. Bring your personas to life

At the moment, you just have a list of attributes and characteristics. It’s time to bring those to life by giving your B2B buyer personas a name and a photo. 

You can then picture them in your head (or above your desk) when creating content, writing ad campaigns, and planning sales calls. 

5. Repeat two or three times

It’s highly likely that your customer base is made up of lots of different kinds of people. For example, your product might be a good fit for mid-level managers at large enterprise companies as well as CEOs of small businesses. 

If this is the case, you’ll need to create more than one B2B buyer persona because it’s highly likely that these two different segments will have differing wants and needs. 

Repeat steps 1-4 for each customer segment you want to create until you’ve covered all bases and have a persona for each type of customer you want to target.

Leverage Reveal to create your most accurate buyer personas yet

B2B buyer personas might feel like just another thing you have to do, but they fuel every single part of your strategy. From identifying and qualifying leads to running successful marketing campaigns and creating happy customers, everything relies on you understanding your audience, their wants, and their needs. 

The AI technology behind Breadcrumbs Reveal will make sure you generate increasingly accurate buyer personas that truly reflect your most successful customers. By pulling in data from multiple sources and analyzing the attributes of your best customers and the actions they take, it will provide a clear insight into the kinds of leads you should be targeting. 

Create your free Reveal account today