To stand out in a crowded market, a company should position its solution in a manner that resonates with prospective customers. Buyer personas can be just the right tool to achieve this — if they’re created and updated wisely.
WHAT IS A B2B BUYER PERSONA?
A B2B buyer persona is a detailed profile of the customers for whom a solution is built.
Marketing leaders understand that as markets shift, so do consumer behaviors. Understanding evolving preferences and purchasing patterns allows companies to tailor their strategies effectively, leveraging advanced analytics to optimize marketing efforts. Research also suggests that regularly updated buyer personas lead to a 73 percent higher conversion rate.
While there isn’t a universal timeframe, some professionals, like ActionIQ Head of Product Marketing Michael Trapani, recommend reviewing personas annually while others opt to review their go-to-market strategies quarterly.
Recently, Built In asked Trapani and Logiwa Chief Operating Officer Greg Halko about their custom research and how they’re refining buyer personas to meet the moment.
ActionIQ is a leader in the massive and fast-growing category of customer data platforms.
How often do you check in on your buyer personas to ensure they’re aligned with current business goals? What are some signs that tell you it’s time to update your buyer personas?
At a minimum, you should look at your personas once a year to make sure they’re up to date. With changes in the marketplace, understanding how roles, titles and responsibilities are evolving will always happen. As your product grows and you enter new markets and geographies, unlocking and understanding new buyer personas will be critical for success.
You could also find that you’re interacting with an influence or ratifier. For example, if IT buyers are showing up more frequently, it’s important to develop a dedicated persona to help augment the sales process.
As new technologies emerge, new roles emerge. When ChatGPT blew up, it became a question of how this impacts our target personas with priorities and challenges. Big market shifts will mean you need to revisit those priorities, pain points and goals.
That said, personas shouldn’t change too much. They’re a foundational reference material and changing it too much might mean changing your downstream marketing too much, which will impact your ability to evaluate performance.
“Changing personas too much might mean changing your downstream marketing too much, which will impact your ability to evaluate performance.”
Are there certain tools or strategies you use to capture trends and patterns in your personas?
A perfect world would include things like automated surveying tools like Survey Monkey. B2B survey tools help you go out and find the audience you’re looking for, ask them questions that you want to ask, collect the answers and give you results.
There’s a human-driven version of this like market research companies that can contribute to analyzing audiences. They are less expensive and, in some ways, a good option, providing a dedicated account team to walk you through the details. There are big and small vendors that help with market research surveys depending on your budget.
The bare-bones version of this is just talking to your sales and customer success teams. That starts with a set of questions you create, like your buyers’ primary pain points, what their role is and what success looks like for them. After you have those meetings, you have a good starter for personas and differentiators that don’t cost you anything. This creates a side benefit of helping build rapport with your sales teams for more feedback.
Once you’re aware of your current audience, what steps do you take to refine your buyer personas to meet the moment? How do you evaluate the success of your targeted marketing campaigns?
It’s good to check in with your sales team regarding your expectations of audiences to get real human feedback. It’s also good to have direct conversations with real customers. You can ask them the same questions you would ask your sales team to ensure that your messaging still resonates with these personas.
ActionIQ is a customer data platform traditionally sold to marketing teams, but we saw the market shift to more IT and data role buyers and found that we needed a data engineering persona. This was a departure from what we expected and entirely new for us, but when we ungated our content, we saw more engagement from IT and data leaders over the last fiscal year than our traditional marketing buyer.
Logiwa is an integrated WMS and fulfillment system that makes it easy to run a digital warehouse.
How often do you check in on your buyer personas to ensure they’re aligned with current business goals? What are some signs that tell you it’s time to update your buyer personas?
We are very aware of the evolving demands of our customers and, by extension, their customers. They expect their products in stock and their orders delivered quickly, as well as up-to-date information along the way and easy returns, and we must stay agile and responsive to these shifting needs. Our approach involves a strategic quarterly review of our go-to-market strategy. This regular assessment allows us to refine our understanding of our buyer personas, addressing their pain points and aligning with their business objectives more effectively.
At Logiwa we use a combination of metrics, feedback, product usage information and market trends as indicators to inform our decisions. If we see that a buyer persona has different top-of-mind challenges than our messaging, or we notice less productive results in our sales and marketing funnel, we will make the adjustments needed to illustrate the value they can achieve with us.
Are there certain tools or strategies you use to capture trends and patterns in your personas?
You must first know who you are targeting, why you are targeting them and the size of the market. If our unique value is aligned with demand and unmet buyer needs, we can see the performance within the sales and marketing funnel across three dimensions: volume, value and velocity. If not, we know we have some work to do, and we ask ourselves what needs to change.
In terms of tools and trends, we leverage the data from our fulfillment platform along with the tangible benefits experienced by our customers to refine our buyer personas and enhance our messaging. We also use our customer relationship management, web analytics and social media tools to monitor other critical metrics and trends.
Once you’re aware of your current audience, what steps do you take to refine your buyer personas to meet the moment? How do you evaluate the success of your targeted marketing campaigns?
Crafting the right message begins with clarity and directly addressing the needs of our audience. By refining our messaging, we aim to raise awareness and educate potential buyers throughout their decision-making journey.
Crafting the right message begins with clarity and directly addressing the needs of our audience.”
We know that our target market faces challenges with labor management, and since it’s one of their largest costs, we leverage insights from our platform’s AI to improve their labor efficiency by up to 40 percent. And since every warehouse is unique, we offer buyers the opportunity for a free AI labor productivity analysis using their data. This proof of concept goes beyond just a marketing statement and exemplifies the personalized value that can be achieved within their operations.
To measure marketing campaigns’ success, we treat everything as a funnel across the entire buyer and customer journey, from the initial impression to generating interest, conducting demos, closing deals and continuing to deliver impactful benefits post-onboarding. This comprehensive approach helps ensure that we not only reach our target audience effectively but also deliver real value that supports our customers’ success.
