How To Create B2B Buyer Personas (with Template)

Most marketers would agree it’s imperative to understand their target audience, but compiling, analyzing, and distilling customer data to create buyer personas can be a huge undertaking. If you work for a B2B organization, we get it — building B2B client profiles comes with challenges you don’t experience when working directly with consumers. But B2B buyer personas are incredibly helpful, and today, we’d like to share some of our top tips for how to craft research-backed, data-driven buyer personas that can improve your messaging and overall digital presence.

If you don’t have clearly defined buyer personas, you may miss out on knowledge of critical buying impulses that shape your target audience’s decision-making. To learn more about how to create B2B buyer personas (and access our FREE template) keep reading.

Why Buyer Personas Are Useful for B2B Organizations

You will create more impact with your marketing campaigns and communication efforts. By creating detailed buyer personas, B2B companies can understand their target audience better and tailor their marketing efforts to reach and engage them more effectively. Understanding what your customer base wants to hear and how they want to hear it is critical. Buyer personas can help you pinpoint what kinds of marketing strategies may be most effective and what key messages you should include in each of your initiatives. For content marketing agencies like us, buyer personas ensure we include the right blend of topics and content types on behalf of our clients.

You will deploy more effective sales strategies. Buyer personas aren’t just helpful for marketers — they can drastically improve the way sales teams interface with leads. Buyer personas help sales teams understand their prospects’ pain points and motivations, allowing them to create more effective sales strategies and materials that speak directly to their needs. This is particularly important for lengthy, complex sales cycles that are all too common among B2B organizations.

You will pinpoint product development opportunities and enhance the customer experience. The most successful organizations are always looking for ways to adapt emerging needs, whether these changes are unique to their audience or part of a broader industry shift. Since buyer personas are rooted in real customers’ specific needs, challenges, and preferences, product marketing and client success teams can better anticipate ways to innovate, problem-solve, and ultimately surprise and delight their current customers.

How to Create Buyer Personas with Data

When creating a buyer persona, you should never make assumptions about your target audience. Your B2B buyer personas will be stronger if you conduct thorough market research to understand your ideal client’s buying process. If you have access to customers that are willing to give you fifteen minutes of their time, Google Analytics, and a survey tool, you have what you need to put together a data-backed buyer persona.

What to Include in a B2B Buyer Persona

When creating a B2B buyer persona, you’ll want to go beyond just demographics. The best buyer personas include a balanced mixture of numerical data points and in-depth qualitative information. Ideally, you would create a buyer persona for each key decision-maker — because not every decision-maker has the same goals, requirements, and preferences.

• Name and Photo. Client profiles typically start with the persona’s name and a stock image to represent them — but why? Because naming and affiliating a persona with a photo humanizes the people you’re trying to connect with. At the end of the day, each individual buyer is a living, breathing person with unique needs and problems to solve. Remembering that can help you keep your perspective where it matters — on the people you can help.
• Job Title and Responsibilities. What your buyer does for work can significantly influence their purchasing decisions. For B2B organizations, pinpointing exactly who you’re targeting and what they do on a day-to-day basis can help you identify better ways to connect with them and serve up your solution on a silver platter.
• Industry and Company Size. Understanding which industries your ideal buyer works in is crucial to ensure you’re targeting the right verticals. Most buyer personas categorize company size by small business, mid-market, or enterprise.
• Pain Points and Challenges. When identifying your ideal buyers’ pain points, consider how your solution can resolve the tension your audience experiences. Your prospects have a need, and zeroing in on what friction they experience is key to ensuring your messaging resonates.
• Buying Habits and Decision-Making Criteria. Even if a lead recognizes your product or service can improve their quality of life, identifying a potential solution is only a small portion of the buying process. Your ideal customers may need to receive a certain number of bids, adhere to stringent budgets, or get buy-in from higher-ups. All aspects of decision-making matter, and you must understand buying impulses that extend beyond your customers’ basic wants to meet all of their requirements.
• Communication Preferences. Does your target customer spend a lot of time on social media? Do they regularly open and engage with email content? Are they signing up for webinars and ongoing education? By understanding your buyers’ communication preferences, you can focus on strategies that will work, and less time on those with little value.
• Buyers’ Journey – When you build your B2B buyer persona, one of the most important components to include is your ideal buyer’s journey to becoming a customer. To create a buyer journey flow, reflect on and document the most common significant moments and pivotal points your customer experiences throughout the buying process. Start with their first interaction with your brand, and get as granular as you can, ending with when they convert.