Developing B2B Buyer Personas to Amplify your Digital Strategy

Buyer personas are a fundamental cornerstone of any B2B marketing strategy.

Developing in-depth profiles of target customers can unlock valuable insights into their role success factors, specific needs and pain points, enabling you to understand what their sticking points are when it comes to investing in a new product or service.

Once you have a clear picture of exactly who your target personas are, you can produce highly targeted content that speaks directly to their pain points across every stage of the funnel, and create highly personalised messaging to attract and delight them at every touchpoint.

How to build your buyer personas

You cannot build well-informed and hyper-relevant buyer personas without the right data at your disposal. We utilise a range of different data sources, blending CRM customer segmentation data and social listening with demographic data from Google Analytics and search patterns to build a holistic view of your target audience.

By analysing this data, you can begin to build out the following characteristics per persona:

• Demographics (including age range and gender)
• Job role and function
• Pain/resistance points
• Information sources
• Relevant influencers
• User journey flows
• Targeting criteria

From this, you can begin to define core messaging, messaging to avoid and priority topics of interest to inform your wider strategy. This can also inform your website content hierarchy and help you to plan optimised user journeys across all your digital touchpoints.

We recommend building out individual characters, complete with names, images and demographic information to help construct your buyer personas. This way, you can begin to build deeper narratives around them when considering buying habits and relevant content topics.

It’s key to note that your buyer personas should not be fixed; they should evolve organically as you pivot your marketing strategy. Below is an example of our own Semetrical Buyer Personas that we are developing on an ongoing basis.

Applying your buyer personas to your inbound marketing strategy

So, you’ve built out your buyer personas – now what? Developing in-depth buyer personas should be the first step in any inbound strategy. Now, it’s time to leverage these insights across your content, social, digital PR and CRM strategies.

Building content arcs

Armed with information on pain points and role success factors, you can begin to build out a list of relevant content titles and map them across different stages of the funnel.

With specific pain points and reservations for each buyer persona you can craft personalised content that directly addresses their challenges.

To give an example, let’s say you identify ‘Operations Manager’ as one of your key target personas and discover that their key reservation about your product is ease of implementation.

Using this insight, you can plan content specific to implementation, such as an in-depth guide with practical steps for boosting user adoption rates, to satisfy this pain point.

This is also applicable for creating personalised email campaigns. Mapping relevant content assets and tailoring your messaging enables you to build bespoke workflows to guide MQLs through the sales funnel towards conversion.

Personalising social messaging & targeting

Defining B2B buyer personas can help you when refining the targeting and messaging of paid social ads. Having in-depth knowledge on your target job titles and pain points allows you to craft compelling ad copy that really resonates with your target audience.

Not only can buyer personas define your messaging, but it can also help you to tailor your targeting options for LinkedIn, ensuring that your highly-targeted content gets in front of the right people.

LinkedIn targeting enables you to target by job function, seniority and specific job titles, so you can be extremely precise. However, to avoid limiting your reach, ensure to explore other relevant job title variations.

LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager tool will automatically suggest related to help you build a robust campaign.

Tailoring Digital PR campaigns

By broadening your knowledge of your buyer personas’ job roles and responsibilities, you can begin to build out a list of relevant content topics and articles. Using a content explorer tool, such as Buzzsumo, you can orchestrate searches to find the most-shared content titles using keywords and phrases from your personas’ pain points.

From this, you can identify influential publications within this space, which you can use to form an initial prospect list for outreach, or as inspiration for what performs well thematically and in terms of messaging. This way, you can guarantee that you are targeting publications that your personas are likely to read or engage with regularly.

Analysing what content currently performs well is also a great way to spot potential gaps and understand which buyer persona pain points are being left unanswered. Identifying gaps and new angles is a fantastic way to inform unique and ‘newsworthy’ stories that are likely to generate coverage and valuable backlinks.

Undertaking regular content checks and setting up automated alerts for keywords relevant to your buyer personas can also ensure that you are always abreast of new developments, so you can be reactive with your digital PR campaigns.

Targeting hyper-relevant influencers

Using buyer persona pain points and core messaging, you can undertake social listening to identify key influencers and journalists that are prevalent in the industry.

Constructing an Industry Track using keywords will enable you to uncover influential bloggers and journalists for this topic, who you can potentially leverage to amplify your content or social strategy.

The example below highlights the results from an Industry Track from Pulsar based on niche data recruitment, showing ‘influencers’ and their ‘webs of influence’.

Next Steps:

If you are interested in building out your very own buyer personas, keep your eyes peeled for future posts on how to leverage multiple data sources to build profitable buyer personas.

Alternatively, to learn more about how to amplify your digital strategy with buyer persona development, get in touch!