What is a buyer persona?

The more insights you have into your target audience, the more you can help your buyers. How to get this done? By drawing up buyer personas. A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer, that represents part of your target group.

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What is a buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer, representing a part of your target audience. Having a buyer persona enables you to better engage with your customers. This is crucial in order to help them during their purchasing process or to serve them even better.

The best way to understand your buyer is to get to know them. Based on the insights of your buyer persona and their buyer journey you can develop your content. It will also help you make better decisions on investments, content promotion and the choice of channels.

Read more about the business case of the buyer persona.

Target audience versus buyer persona: What’s the difference?

A target audience is not the same as a buyer persona. A target audience is usually expressed in averages, related to age, demographics, gender, and lifestyle. Generally, target audiences are often used in B2C without connecting this to a buyer persona.

A buyer persona description consists of more layers. The core descriptive profile (age, gender, lifestyle) is part of a persona. But besides the profile description, you want to understand what motivates someone, what makes someone lie awake at night, and above all, how someone buys.

Buyer persona versus user persona

A buyer persona is a profile of your buyer. You can create a profile of your existing customer of course, a customer persona, or a profile of a user of your product, a user persona. Such a user persona is especially useful e.g. when you sell software and your buyer is not 1-on-1 the user or end customer.

User personas are often used in design projects of websites or webshops. It is important to understand the user experience and the user-friendliness of the interface.

Why is a buyer persona important?

In B2B the buying process can be long and complex. Therefore, to pivot a lead to a customer it helps to understand why a buyer buys, and what keeps them up at night. A successful B2B marketing campaign starts with a genuine interest in your buyer, specifically insights and knowledge about your buyer so you can sympathize with your buyer. You then have a better understanding about:

• What information your buyer needs
• What are the relevant contact moments
• The role of the competition
• Which success factors, goals and challenges does the potential buyer have
• What content fits the buyer

Buyer personas help you in developing your content marketing plan. Thus, you can make informed decisions about which content resonates best, how to promote the content, and which channels to use. In short, you now know better how to reach and help your buyer or customer.

What can you do with a buyer persona?

• Align content with the needs of your buyer, so your marketing and communication activities are more focused.
• Align your content per phase in the purchasing process. Therefore allows you to keep buyers engaged in your funnel by nurturing them with the right information, even in longer B2B buying processes.
• Improve the collaboration between the marketing and sales teams by gathering buyer insights together.
• Allocate budget across channels in a better way. You now know where and when to meet your buyer/customer on- or offline.

Buyer persona and content marketing

A buyer persona is crucial in order to roll out a successful content strategy. Only by understanding how you can help your buyer during the purchasing process, you are able to offer the right content. It’s not only about the content for that one buyer but also for other personas involved in a complex purchase.

This way, you can connect content marketing to buyer enablement. Your information should actually help your buyer or customer in the purchasing process.

Buyer persona and buyer journey

With insights into the buyer journey, you’re able to check whether your content has an impact on the decision-making process of your buyer or customer. During the purchase process, a buyer has lots of different questions. This can be right at the start when there is a latent need, but also later in the purchasing process when he or she is making their choice.

By mapping a buyer persona it is equally important to describe the buyer journey as well as the persona profile.

Nowadays, we add another dimension by thinking about the buying jobs of a buyer. Which six ‘tasks’ do buyers have to fulfil together?

Getting started

You want to get started with buyer personas, which is understandable as it will bring you a lot of value. It will help you bring focus to the rollout of your marketing plans, whether this is a campaign for lead generation or for account-based marketing. But where to start?

How do you create a buyer persona?

You create a buyer persona in 4 steps:

1. Listen

It all begins with listening to the buyer. You do this by interviewing your buyers. Look for the ‘5 Rings of Insight: Priorities, success factors, barriers, the buying process and decision criteria. 

2. Analyze and cluster

After you’ve collected the information, you look for patterns and similarities in the behaviour of buyers. Make sure you have clusters on which you can base your profiles.

3. Select and create

Select important criteria and contact moments and create your profile. Make a vivid story of your persona, including photo, name, attributes, challenges and goals.

4. Launch

Introduce your personas in the internal organisation. Everyone must understand who the buyer is and what you focus on in marketing and communication.

Buyer persona and AI

Understanding the buyer is crucial, and it’s equally important to comprehend all the relevant stakeholders in the buying group.

AI can make the process of understanding your buyer significantly faster. It can help you collect data, group buyers, guess future needs, and tailor messages. AI excels at data analysis and pattern recognition, but it still struggles to fully grasp human emotions and context. Therefore, a hybrid approach combining AI’s analytical power with human emotional intelligence is what will make your buyer persona and buyer journey insights robust and actionable.

Read more about how AI can help with buyer persona research:

What does a buyer persona (minimally) need to consist of?

A buyer persona at least has to consist of a profile and the ‘5 rings of insight’, according to the model of Adele Revella of the Buyer Persona Institute. The profile is a short description of someone’s job title, age, demographics, gender and digital behaviour. Besides that, you want to know more about goals, success factors, what keeps someone awake at night, information needs and especially someone’s purchasing process. SPOTONVISION interviewed Adele Revella about the importance of buyer personas in B2B, her answers can be found in this article.

The importance of interviews

Creating a buyer persona without live interviews? That’s not going to fly. You can get a lot out of data analytics, website analytics or online surveys, but you can never get those real in-depth insights from a customer. Read more about interview tips for buyer persona research here.

How many buyer personas do you need?

You may wonder how many buyer personas you need, three or ten? It is important to first look at your resources to engage with the market for multiple content strategies to multiple personas. If you create ten personas, will you be able to roll out ten content plans? Often this is not the case.

In practice, it is more convenient to align your persona development with the speed of execution you can handle. Maybe first start with one or two? Or create a profile each quarter? At Ultimo, we developed two personas and it helped the marketing team to build excellent and effective campaigns.

Do I have to update my buyer persona regularly?

The shelf-life of a buyer persona is limited. The ecosystem changes continuously, technology changes, and a strategy is often revised. Needs and requirements in the market can change. It is vital to regularly ask yourself whether your buyer persona is still up-to-date and whether it needs maintenance.

How do you successfully use a buyer persona in your organization?

In order to use buyer personas successfully in your organization, you’ll have to actively work on a content strategy based on your personas. You don’t create a persona for the sake of a profile, you create a persona mostly because you want insights into a purchasing process and the information needs of a buyer. And even that is not enough: you create a profile to actively use the insights in your marketing and sales approach. Eventually, it is all about the deals you’re closing.

Therefore, keep the personas alive: create a nice poster with the profile and purchasing process and put it on the wall. Give your persona a name, a birthday and share the insights with as many internal stakeholders as possible.

Inhouse or outsourcing?

Marketers often ask themselves whether to develop activities in-house or whether to outsource. The same counts for the development of buyer personas. What do you have to take into account when creating buyer personas? How much time does a buyer persona project need? and what it would cost to outsource? Have a look at these 7 considerations whether to outsource your buyer persona project or not.

The most frequently made mistakes in buyer persona development

When creating a buyer persona, you have to take a lot of things into account. The most frequently made mistake is to create a buyer persona profile without interviewing a customer. The strength of a persona is all about looking at the market through the eyes of the customer.

Another frequently made mistake is only mapping the basic profile of a target audience. It is all about the deeper insights into the purchasing process and the information needs of the buyer.

We have created a list of the 7 most frequently made mistakes during the development of a buyer persona.

Examples

You may ask yourself what a buyer persona profile looks like. You can imagine that organizations don’t just share their profile, of course, there is a lot of confidential information in it. What may help is a buyer persona template, so you can at least see which topics should be in a profile.

Are you interested in reading how other organizations use buyer personas, read the story of Verint. At Verint, we created 3 buyer personas for the European market. You can also read the story of Ultimo about how buyer personas are an essential step to successful B2B marketing campaigns.

International buyer personas: how does that work?

International organizations sometimes think that they can conquer the world with one persona. Sadly it doesn’t work that way. Buyers and buying behaviour can vary a lot between countries. The differences will impact your go-to-market approach greatly. Especially in Europe, the differences between countries can be huge. Find here some tips on how to set up an international buyer persona project.

Buyer persona and ABM

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused strategy where specific businesses are targeted. It requires a synchronized effort between the sales and marketing departments. Both teams identify companies to target, understand potential buyers within these companies, and determine what might influence their buying decisions.

Buyer personas are instrumental in understanding the individuals within these targeted companies. Buyer personas serve as your B2B marketing compass, enabling you to gain a deep understanding of you potential customers. B2B buying decisions often involve several individuals with unique roles and perspectives. By creating detailed buyer personas, you gain a clearer image of these players, learning about their specific needs, challenges, and decision triggers. This allows you to create ABM campaigns that convert more effectively and generate higher revenue.

ABM and Buyer Personas used together, enable you to better attract potential customers with content and messages that match their interests and go through the channels they are on.

Read more about the future of ABM here.

FAQ

I have 10 different types of buyers, do I need to create 10 buyer personas?

No. You should start with a pilot: choose one or two buyer(s) and focus on the most influential decision-makers. Which buyers are most profitable? Which market will have your priority this year? When you have identified one or two buyers, you can start by creating relevant content and start a marketing campaign. Once this campaign is on track, you could then focus on the next buyer.

What number of in-depth interviews is representative of the target audience?

Our experience has taught us that 12 to 15 qualitative person-to-person in-depth interviews are needed to create a representative buyer persona. Of course, you would like to interview many more people, but after several interviews, you will discover that you can find commonalities.

The list of respondents is crucial. If you interview both an IT manager and a purchasing manager and then try to create a profile, it will fail. Segmentation in advance, based on the role of the buyer, is therefore very important.

Is it also possible to only do quantitative research?

It isn’t recommended to rely solely on quantitative research. When your buyer persona research consists only of quantitative research, you miss out on vital insights. How can you really know your customer’s goals, success factors, challenges and information needs, if you submit a standard questionnaire with pre-filled response options?

The best results are gained with qualitative interviews utilising active listening, in which you respond by asking another question based on the previous answer of the respondent. This is the strength of in-depth interviews. It is also very important to gain the confidence of your respondent. If they trust you, they will give you a lot more information. Besides, people like it to be interviewed. They have the opportunity to talk about their profession and this will give you more insights than you would ever have with quantitative research.

Who do I need to interview?

The best people to interview are buyers who have just gone through the buying process. They have chosen either your or – even more interesting – your competitor. These people can best recall the details of their buying process; think of the people involved, triggers, decision criteria and information sources they used in making their decision. When compiling your list of respondents it is important that the respondents have the same role within a company. Sometimes you can deduce a role from the job title (eg IT manager and IT director), but sometimes you need to do a little research to find the right buyer. Only then can you easily find commonalities to create a good buyer persona.