The Importance of 'persona' in relationship building and branding.
All successful campaign has accurate buyer persona.
If you are missing your revenue goal - there are high chances that you don't have the right buyer persona.
A B2B Buyer persona is must have to go to task for successful marketers. The reason is - 'the time and resources invested on persona research paid off well.' Let us represent some B2B Buyer persona statistic:
- 71% of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas.
- 90% of companies using personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of their buyers.
- 93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals report segmenting their database by persona.
The figure gives us confidence in persona designing. We need to know 'who we are building a relationship with' to deliver the right value. In this blog post - we will learn the strategic way of knowing 'who' (The persona or target audience) and 'why' it is a top marketing priority.
'Who' are you excited to listen from?
"Buyer personas are examples of real buyers who influence decisions about the products, services or solutions you market. They are a tool that builds confidence to persuade buyers to choose you rather than a competitor." - Adele Revella.
When you have a tentative idea about 'who' the next questions pop up in your mind is 'how', 'how to build a persona?'
Let's learn it step by step:
1. Who are buyers?
To know the persona, first, we need to know the accounts.
Businesses can fetch Target Account list by using intent data services and pre-maintained big database. In this data-driven world, it is easy to build TAL that is enough to see the big picture. However, reaching the right accounts is a difficult task and required strategic research and curation.
Resources:
Who are intent data providers?
Food for growth:
B2B Intent data: for business demand growth.
After we know the accounts we can proceed to find the buyers within the account using various research tools. Most of the marketers use LinkedIn research and connection to fetch the buyer list to their database.
Apart from recognising buyer, we should also recognise the position of buyer in DMU structure.
2. How does their internal decision-making structure look like?
Successful marketers and sales persona know How buyers make the decision? This is the next step in building a persona to know how the hierarchy works.
To know this - we should break down the operation of DMU. In DMU, on average 7 people take part. We need to note that, not all people make the decision, most of them are influencers who guilds the major decision-makers.
While building a persona, we need to understand the role of each prospect and change the persona for each of them. Often, we deliver the same content to influencers as the decision-maker, that helps nobody to reach the common ground on a purchase decision.
For instance:
Considering a company which sales Edge computing solution to another company which has active use of multiple devices over the internet and cloud. In this scenario, if a company is small in operation and the CEO is a sole decision-maker then it is ideal to deliver end to end content - from educating blog post to demo to the CEO.
But when the same company tries to sale a comparatively big company which involve multiple stakeholders and decision-makers - it is an important job to identify the whole DMU structure and deliver content according to it. Let's suppose - CEO will call for action of purchasing the solution where CTO have to make sure that they bring the right solution, considering all aspect, to the CEO. Here CTO needs special educational content where they can learn, analyse and compare the solutions than CEO who will be more concerned with budget and ROI.
3. What motivates them?
We all have some motivation behind a purchase. Some are needs, some are the sense of power, some are related to looking good. But in the case of business, the motivation can be more impact making. Businesses want to grow, to automate operation, to cut the cost, to boost revenue, to impact the world for good and you name it.
Whatever the motivation is it is not good to keep assuming. We need to find the exact motivation behind the accounts.
Motivation can be found learning the goals, growth strategy, growth projection, market condition, values and mission of the company.
Marketers need to study accounts deeply. It starts with their website. A website gives you a subtle hint of a business and why do they exist.
Where you can learn the motivation behind an account?
- Social Media.
- Interview of leaders.
- Company Annual report.
- Business Intelligence services.
- Intent data providers.
- Market research service providers.
- Employee reviews.
- Annual summit.
- Event representation.
4. Understand the individual goal of a decision-maker:
It is also equally important that we understand the individual goal of decision-maker. Each decision-maker is influenced by different factors.
To learn more about individual decision-maker, we need to learn about their online behaviour. It can be learned through their regular social media activities and engagement with the various marketing campaign.
Why do we need to create a persona?
It is not good to ask a bald person to buy a comb. We need to sale strategically.
Persona enables us to know the exact buyer for the products and services. It saves unnecessary efforts and resources on marketing and sales. There are benefits of building a persona, from creating content to boosting ROI.
Here are some High-Level Benefits of Persona Creation:
When we can construct bottom line buyer persona we could significantly improve sales and ROI.
Personas help to:
- Straighten the value proposition of a business.
- Accelerate revenue and profit.
- Enable to learn buyers.
- Create higher lead conversions.
Along with above-listed benefits, there are some branding and positioning benefits include:
1. Media Planning:
Persona helps brands to run various advertisement campaigns. Managing content and delivery is one of the top concern for brands. It is important to distribute the content to the right audience in a given timeframe, in this way we could have the maximum return from the content investment.
Brands invest significant budget in media planning which includes a complete ecosystem from media planning agencies to publishers.
Food for growth:
How B2B Publisher can build data infrastructure to drive demand growth?
Persona helps all partners to integrate well with the given campaign and ensure the maximum operating efficiency.
2. Establish a relationship with buyers:
Well-constructed persona helps marketers to communicate to the audience on a personal level. An emphatic communication and nurturing help a brand to establish a relationship with buyers. Relationship-driven branding is a proven growth strategy for brands of any size.
Food for growth:
How to achieve demand growth by building a relationship?
3. To broad the reach of the brand:
Top of funnel activities is one of the first steps towards demand growth. To collect the ToFu leads it is important to reach the maximum audience with branding. Accurate persona helps marketers to reach the audience and have required engagement.
4. To listen to the right audience:
The successful branding starts with listening to the audience. But to listen to whom? Brands need not listen everyone expects our niche. Persona helps brands to listen to the most prospective customer and help to create content for them.
Conclusion
B2B Buyer persona needs to be built strategically. Marketing tech should be smartly integrated with the rest marketing infrastructure to create and curate the right B2B buyer persona. The accurate B2B Buyer persona enables marketers to plan the media, position right, reach prospects, create the right content, deliver effectively and achieve the revenue goal with controlled investment - ensuring higher ROI and steady demand growth.