Creating buyer personas is a critical component of any successful B2B marketing strategy.
By taking the time to understand your customers' needs and wants, you can create content and messaging that resonates with them, leading to more leads and sales.

In this blog, we'll walk you through what buyer personas are, what negative personas are and why these are essential to your marketing strategy.

What are Buyer Personas?

Buyer personas are semi-fictional, generalised representations of your ideal customers.

They help you to understand your customers (and prospective customers) better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of different groups. 

The strongest buyer personas are based on market research as well as insights on gathered data - be that through your surveys, interviews or other. Depending on your business, you could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as 10-20. 

What are Negative Personas?

A buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer - a negative (or 'Exclusionary") persona is a representation of who you don't want as a customer. 

This could include, for example, professionals who are too advanced for your product/services, students who are only engaging with your content for knowledge and research, or potential customers who are just too expensive to acquire.

How you Can Use Personas?

At the most basic level, personas allow you to personalise or target your marketing for different segments of your audience. For example, instead of sending the same lead nurturing emails to everyone in your database, you can segment by buyer personas and tailor your messaging according to what you know about these different personas.

If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer (and see higher sales productivity).

When combined with life-cycle stage - i.e how far along someone is in your sales funnel cycle - buyer personas also allow you to map out and create highly targeted content.

How to Create Personas

Buyer personas are created through research, surveys, and interviews of your target audience. That includes a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside of your contact database who might align with your target audience.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

• Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service
• Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content
• When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information. (For example, if all your personas vary based on company size, ask each lead for information about company size on your forms.)
• Take into consideration your sales team's feedback on the leads they are interacting with most. (What types of sales cycles does your sales team work with?)
• What generalisations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?

 

In order to create an effective digital marketing strategy, it’s important to know your audience. Buyer personas are a great way to get to know your customers and understand their needs. By creating buyers personas and negative personas you can identify exactly who you want to invest your time into. 

 

Free Template to Create your Own!

We've created a template for you to use to create your own buyers personas! We've also created an example for you to reference if you're unsure.

Download our Free Template                                        Our Example