‘If you market towards everyone, you’ll reach no one.’
To avoid this marketing mistake, it’s important to dig deep into who your audience is, their likes and dislikes, what they do in their spare time, their pain points and even their personality traits. Researching this information is integral for targeting the right audience and successfully getting your brand out there.
That’s why it’s so important to create a strong buyer persona or customer avatar for your B2B business.
A buyer persona or customer avatar is the profile and characteristics of your business's ideal customer. Whether you’re in the B2B or B2C industry, creating a customer avatar is essential. It allows you to unlock your brand's potential by understanding your audience's wants and needs and how you can cater for them.
In this blog, we will give you a step by step guide on how you can build your very own customer avatar for your B2B business.
To build the foundation of your customer avatar, you must first identify the basic characteristics of your buyer persona. You can do this by conducting research into the market and using data from Google Analytics to help you understand who your existing customers are and their current buying habits.
These four components will help you build your basic avatar:
With these acting as the foundation of your avatar, you can then identify your plan to approach them and cater your marketing towards them.
For example, if we want to create a customer avatar or buyer persona for a content design service, we can jot down the following.
With just this information alone, we can determine a lot. For instance, her age bracket depicts that she is within the realm of advancing technology. She knows the latest trends and has a lot of experience under her belt. The age range shows that she may not want to read something too intricate, but at the same time, she would avoid anything too casual.
As she lives in London, we can imagine her having a very fast-paced and hectic lifestyle. Therefore, we can infer that she doesn’t have time for ‘fluffy’ marketing campaigns or people wasting her time. She wants information that is reliable and straight to the point.
Her job role as Head of Marketing makes us assume that she carries a lot of responsibility and is constantly busy. With this title comes experience. She has worked her way to this position and has done everything in her power to go above and beyond. This means working late and scheduling work around her lifestyle instead of her life around work. For this reason, we know she will have several pain points and needs.
The next stage is to look into what your customer avatar or buyer persona truly believes in and their core values. If we go back to our example, we could say that Sarah’s core values and beliefs are as follows:
With this in mind, we can see that Sarah struggles with giving up control. Therefore, when marketing towards her, a good way to build trust is showing her that we are thought-leaders within the industry. To build this relationship, social selling is a must, and so is creating content such as blog articles, videos and podcasts.
Another way to build trust is through proven examples of our work. Here case studies would be a great way to show Sarah that we can provide her with an excellent service that she can trust.
Building this relationship may take time but will be worth it as Sarah needs to work with people she can count on and trust.
The third step is identifying your ideal customers’ key needs. Here you must look at what keeps them up at night and their real pain points.
If we look at the example with Sarah, we can see that the following factors are her key needs and pain points.
With this in mind, we now know the type of service we must advertise to Sarah. Again we must prove that we are reliable, our services are of high quality and we are the perfect addition to her marketing team. We must also make it simple for other decision-makers. Being a thought leader within the industry will help support that.
This step looks at your customer avatar's worst possible case scenario. If we look into Sarah, we can imagine her worst nightmares are as follows:
By discovering what your ideal customer avatar’s worst nightmares are, you’re able to reassure them long beforehand. The best thing to do in this scenario is show Sarah the capabilities of the content design service by sharing case studies or building up trust through social selling.
Conducting this research can allow you to understand how to deliver content to your ideal customer.
Again if we look at Sarah, we can assume the following:
As Sarah always wants to know what's trending, her form of entertainment is listening to podcasts and watching the news. She also loves to read and spend time with her friends and family.
Her free time is spent binge-watching TV shows, hanging out with her loved ones and travelling or exploring the outdoors.
Binge-watching reality TV shows and documentaries.
As mentioned, this can determine the tone of voice you use and the type of content you send out. As we know, Sarah loves to know what the latest trends are. So, thought leadership articles can help educate her and keep her up-to-date. She may also listen to podcasts as she’s always on the go. Therefore, this can be incorporated into the business's marketing plan.
If everything goes well, what would your customer avatar’s ideal end goal or scenario look like?
If we relate this to Sarah, we can imagine that her end goal would be to:
As we know this is our ideal customer's vision, we must show them that we are willing to make it happen.
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