There’s an art to creating the perfect buyer persona in MSP marketing. You have a number of prospects, from a variety of industries and sizes of business, researching all sorts of details about your offering. How do you find the common thread between them? Where is the pattern that helps you target your marketing to your target audience?
In short, it takes research, creativity, and asking those tough questions that owners like to avoid, but which B2B marketing agencies will always push you to answer.
In the end though, working through these tough questions and crafting a targeted set of technology buyer personas is extremely beneficial to growth. Being able to target your inbound marketing efforts to your ideal customer needs and concerns will increase your lead conversions and as a direct result, your top line revenue.
If you’ve been struggling with your marketing strategy or even just your content, we’re here to help you craft the perfect tech persona to complement your brand marketing initiatives, in turn helping you focus on what matters — your business.
What is a Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona is a fictional representation of your ideal or average client. It acts as a complete profile explaining who they are, what they like, and what their job responsibilities and struggles are.
It should include a great amount of detail. At the very least, however, buyer personas should include the basic details of demographics, job role, pain points, objections, and examples of sources that influence them. It should be based on who is consuming the information you are presenting and also be tailored to who will make the buying decision in the end.
The buyer persona acts as a quick reference for everything you need to know to write website copy, blogs, and email content, but it goes deeper than that. The buyer personas can help guide your IT marketing strategies overall. It can help you decide which collateral to put more focus on, which industries you are weak in and how to bolster your presence. It can even help your sales team sort out their scripting.
Why do we Need Them?
Since an overwhelming 59% of content marketing’s goals are to increase lead conversion, creating personalized and targeted content is increasingly important. Digital marketing is filled with clutter and content written to suit the writer’s needs instead of the audiences. This will reflect in your marketing analytics especially when you look at how much time people spend on your blog pages.
Research has proven that buyers are increasingly relying on internet searches and content from authority sources to make buying decisions, with up to 67% of B2B buyers are using this content solely to decide on a purchase.
This means that marketing agencies need to focus on B2B content marketing that will give buyers all the information necessary in order to come to a buying decision. Remembering that buyers more often than not do not close the first time they visit your website, you need a reason to bring them back. Relevant content accomplishes that by providing value continuously.
The kinds of content can vary from white papers, case studies, webinars, eBooks, videos, blog posts, to infographics. However, according to a report by the Linkedin Technology Marketing Community, the majority (40%) of that content is segmented by buyer persona, making it even easier for your target client to find the content they need to be informed.
In short, targeting to your buyer allows you to help new clients make buying decisions. You’re already addressing their concerns and pain points, before directing them towards your your product or services.
How do we Gather This Information?
You likely already know a fair bit about your clients, but digging deeper to fully understand their objections and concerns is integral to being able to target more people like them.
Research. Research. Research.
Ask your sales team what the hesitations of some of your potential clients have been, and more importantly what are some of the reasons qualified prospects didn’t turn into business? Aside from the obvious answer of budget, did the product suit their need? Did the information provided to them answer their concerns?
Ask your project or account managers for more information about who your current clients are. What are some of the complaints they have had in the past? What are some of the positive things they have communicated? Lastly, what commonalities can be drawn between them?
An inbound marketing agency like Jumpfactor can help you by making this research phase a team effort to ensure that you’re capturing the right persona.
What are the Important B2B Buyer Persona Questions?
By researching answers to the following questions, you will begin to see the commonalities in your customer base and more importantly how you can change your approach to suit them.
Things you need to ask in order to craft the perfect buyer persona are:
1) Who are they? Remember that these are not the case for every persona but rather where do the demographics skew to?
- demographics (age, sex, marital status, urban/suburban/rural)
- role, industry
- work history
- How do they like to communicate
Understanding whether most of their buyers are suburban or urban dwellers, married with children, or millennials gives us a better idea of their goals and what interests them. This is important for their ad copy as different generations approach reading differently and so do those in different job functions and industries. Are your customer’s blue collar or university educated? Elevating your language or providing more succinct copy allows you to speak their language.
2) Buying decisions
- Who makes decisions?
- What are their goals?
- What are their challenges?
- What are their objections?
- How do we provide solutions to their challenges?
This is where we start to learn about their pain points. What are their company goals? What are their personal goals?
Understanding their daily challenges helps us provide them with solutions. This helps you figure out how best to highlight your products in order to directly address their concerns. If their challenges are mostly compliance related, it should be a primary focus in your IT marketing strategy.
3) Where do they get their news?
- What kind of publications
- What/who influences them?
Ask those important questions like “what do they read every day?”
Then read the same thing your customers are reading.
Keeping a pulse on what they’re in tune with ensures that you’re one step ahead with your marketing efforts being aligned to IT industry trends. It also allows you to speak more intelligently in your marketing and sales. Use their jargon and not just your own.
So We Created Them, Now What?
Implement them in everything you do.
Talk to your customers on their level, acknowledge their pain points, understand how they navigate your website, and watch the leads roll in.
1) On your website:
Creating engaging website copy that’s targeted to your buyers is extremely important in making your website relevant. What kinds of information are they looking for? What are they trying to understand? Providing them with the answers to their questions is just one way that your website can convert more effectively. You should also implement it into your page flow, create a journey through your links to lead them to a conversion. Also blogs can help you address concerns directly, if you found there’s a common complaint, write about it and steer your clients and prospects to that blog to help close.
- According to Hubspot, targeting your website to personas made it 2-5 times more effective and easier to use for those individuals.
- A MarketingSherpa case study reported that the length of visit increased 900% when it was designed with buyer personas in mind.
2) In your emails:
No one likes receiving generic spam emails. If the information inside isn’t compelling and targeted to their wants and needs, it’s going to get deleted.
- According to MLT Creative, open rate increased two times, while click-through rate increased five times when adapting email campaigns to buyer personas.
- Hubspot reports that personalized emails drive 18 times more revenue than generic broadcast emails.
Crafting the perfect persona can take some trial and error, but once it’s ironed out you have a basis for every future marketing campaign.
If you’re struggling with learning about your B2B customers and crafting a buyer persona, an inbound marketing agency can help you iron out those details. With a focus on software and technology marketing, Jumpfactor has perfected the art of creating personas that attract and engage your ideal customers, ensuring higher website conversion rates and more qualified leads.
Book your 30-minute consultation today, and we’ll go through an analysis of your website to determine what can be improved.
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About the Author: Zamir Javer
