Before you do anything within your inbound marketing journey, you need to focus on one important thing: Buyer Personas.
These are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. They help you understand both your current consumers and prospects more effectively. This allows you to create and target content for the specific needs, behaviours and concerns of different consumer groups.
By creating buyer personas, specifically from the technology sector that requires specialised technical knowhow, you have all the information and knowledge needed to focus your inbound marketing campaign. If you know who you’re talking to and what they desire, you can effectively and efficiently achieve your sales goals.
Here are 4 tips to developing your B2B Technology Buyer Personas:
What is Important to Include?
Depending on how big your business is, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10 or 20. The strongest buyer personas are based on a collaboration of market research and insights from your actual customer base. To research these, you can use: client interviews, surveys, social media investigation, sales and marketing team brainstorms.
No matter which avenues you choose, the fundamental information you will need can fit into 5 categories:
Know your Target Audience
I know this sounds simple but don’t brush this step aside. Approaching personas with an “I already know” mind-set will only lead to you recycling stagnant marketing strategies that don’t work. Consider which technology sector, business model, or product/ service dictate who you are trying to appeal to. Buyers personas should narrow your focus; therefore, it is important to clearly address each possible avenue your consumers might follow.
For example, in the technology industry, you have two main buyer types; user buyers and technical buyers (those responsible for matching a solution to their company). Your aim is then to develop and research these buyer traits, objectives and obstacles that they face to purchase. Consider questions such as: What have they brought before? What priorities do their organisations have? What issues are they trying to solve? Pinpoint the decision makers and target them within buyer persona creation.
Align with your Marketing Funnel
Once you have investigated and researched your personas, you will need to align them to your marketing funnel. Consider how they may interact with your brand and content dependent on where they are in the buyers journey. To learn more about the buyers journey, click here.
This may take several different points of view to understand so interview both your customers and your own team to see how both sides interact with one another. Existing customers will help you learn their pain points, whilst your internal team will have specialised knowledge of how your consumers acted or responded throughout their journey.
This way you can better target your workflows, communications and distribution of content, to perfectly target your consumers and recognise their needs.
Give your Personas an authentic Story
Once you have your basic information, create a back story that exemplifies your persona. Giving your persona a individual history brings it to life and enables your marketing team to make stronger and more personal connections in your campaigns.
In the say way, name your personas to make them more familiar to you. A name helps them become a living representation and more importantly, more real!
Forgetting to name your personas can lead to confusion and generalisation. Imagine when you’re at a marketing meeting and a colleague exclaiming ‘We need more offers for technology people’. Who might that be? Support staff or the CTO?
Discussing personas can become a more targeted and precise exercise with a name. Your colleague can then instead state, ‘This offer targets Chief Technology Officer Jane – She is weighing up different intranet options’. This has a lot more authority than ‘technology people’.
Growth and results driven marketing all start with buyer personas
Buyer personas are the essential tool to any B2B company’s marketing success. If you avoid the task, you may run the risk of developing blog posts, social media, and other content that just doesn’t reach the people you consider as prospects. Time and resources are wasted as you’re left wondering what you could have done better!
Understanding your audiences’ desires, goals and even lifestyle, can optimize your marketing strategy and deliver vibrant results.