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Siegfried SchneiderCMO, Red Dot Design
customer experience
15 min
Written by Daniel Luecke
In this article, you will learn how to create a buyer persona in 5 simple steps – and at the end, you can expect a surprising insight that will revolutionize your marketing strategies!
A buyer persona is a fictional person who represents your target group and helps you to better understand the decision-making process of your potential customers and improve their customer experience. It combines demographic characteristics such as age or industry with psychographic aspects such as goals and desires, hobbies and interests as well as pain points.
This detailed, fictitious persona gives you a clear insight into the customer journey and allows you to develop targeted communication and marketing measures. The creation of a buyer persona creates a tangible basis for designing your communication and range of products and services in concrete terms and thus effectively accompanying the path to the purchase decision.
Creating such templates is part of Customer Experience Management and essential to improving the customer experience.
In the B2B sector, the sales cycle is often long and complex. A B2B buyer persona helps you to recognize the needs of customers in different phases of the customer journey and to develop appropriate marketing strategies.
Buyer personas help you to tailor your content marketing and inbound marketing measures to the individual decision-makers. In addition, by using many buyer personas, you optimize your sales and increase the efficiency of lead generation.
Having your own buyer persona enables your sales team to formulate tailored offers and thus increase conversion rates.
The target group describes a general framework of potential customers, defined by demographic and industry-specific criteria.
A buyer persona goes far beyond this: It is a fictitious person who becomes tangible through socio-demographic, psychographic and behavioral characteristics. While the target group outlines a contingent of potential leads, a buyer persona provides an emotional and rational insight into the world of your ideal buyer.
This allows you to develop a specific approach that goes far beyond general target group communication and builds a more personal relationship with your audience.
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) describes your ideal customer at company level based on criteria such as company size, industry and turnover. A buyer persona, on the other hand, is a fictitious person with a name, a photo and specific goals and wishes.
The ICP helps you with strategic account planning, while the buyer persona supports your marketing and sales in the individual approach and design of marketing measures.
Both concepts complement each other: the ICP defines the framework in which your persona development projects take place, and the buyer persona ensures a precise customer approach.
A buyer persona allows you to understand your target group and precisely map your customers’ needs. It optimizes your content marketing strategy because you can tailor content to the right topics and formats.
In sales, you ensure higher closing rates with a buyer persona-based approach, as you can support the purchase decision of each representative along the customer journey in a more targeted manner.
In product development or when designing services, the persona also helps you to prioritize specific requirements and develop new features or services tailored to your needs.
The creation of buyer personas begins in the workshop with your sales and marketing team. First, you conduct market research and surveys among existing potential customers to gather customer insights.
You then use a buyer persona template (e.g. this free one from Canva) to document all important characteristics such as age, professional background, goals and wishes as well as problems and challenges. You validate the results in focus groups and with feedback from customer success teams.
This iterative process ensures that your creation is always based on up-to-date data and that you regularly maintain and adapt your personas.
In practice, three personas have proven to be the optimal number to cover typical roles in B2B and to map different phases of the decision-making process.
Too few personas narrow your view and prevent a differentiated approach, while too many personas can unnecessarily increase the effort and confuse the sales team.
Focus on your most important desired customers and create a maximum of five different personas to keep the project efficient. Make sure that your personas are clearly prioritized and that you continuously review the benefits of each persona.
A common mistake is to create a buyer persona without real customer data, resulting in profiles that are not persona accurate. A definition that is too broad or too narrow prevents effective targeting and leads to unclear marketing measures.
Avoid creating your personas only once; if you create buyer personas once, you will miss important updates later when customer requirements change.
Another mistake is to develop personas in isolation in the marketing department without comparing them with sales and service. This means you miss out on valuable feedback from the field.
When analyzing your target group, start with the socio-demographic characteristics of your target group: Age, industry, company size and job title. Supplement this data with psychographic information such as hobbies and interests or personal goals and wishes.
This allows you to recognize early on which topics and formats appeal to your user persona. This detailed analysis lays the foundation for your buyer persona creation projects and ensures that all subsequent steps are based on valid data.
Identify relevant internal and external sources: Your CRM and sales logs provide hard facts, while external market research reports and social listening provide insights into sentiment. Supplement with results from online surveys to obtain quantitative data.
The more diverse the sources, the more specific your buyer persona template will be. Make sure you comply with the data protection guidelines for each source of information and always keep your data up to date.
Qualitative interviews are essential to gain in-depth customer insights. Talk to decision-makers in your B2B company, ask about pain points and the most important criteria for their purchasing decision.
Supplement this with focus groups in which you have several participants discuss to identify hidden problems and challenges. These methods provide you with narrative data that you can later triangulate with quantitative results.
Online surveys are ideal for making statistically relevant statements about the customer journey and the decision-making process.
Request specific data on budget, purchase frequency and preferred channels. Use web analytics to analyze user behavior on your website and draw conclusions about the decision-makers and their journey.
Note the differences between B2C and B2B data so as not to gain distorted insights.
Open your buyer persona template and systematically enter all the data you have collected:
Name, job title, demographic characteristics and professional background.
Define goals and wishes as well as central pain points to record motivation. Add a description of the decision-making process phases and give your persona a picture so that it becomes tangible for everyone in the team. This step gives your target group a face and brings the persona to life.
Validate your personas through feedback loops with customer success and sales teams. Present the drafts in workshops and ask for specific adjustments. Test the persona as an example in marketing measures to check its practicability.
This is the only way to ensure that your buyer images remain realistic and that you are not creating buyer personas in a make-believe world.
Define several user personas for your B2B company that cover typical roles such as buyers, technical decision-makers and management. Use socio-demographic and behavioral criteria to develop different personas that represent different needs and budgets. This allows you to target all phases of the customer journey.
Not every persona is equally important. Identify the persona that has the greatest influence on the purchase decision and prioritize it in your sales and marketing. Avoid unnecessarily many personas to keep your workflow efficient and clear.
Implement inbound marketing measures by creating content along the customer journey. Develop whitepapers or blog posts that are tailored to the pain points of your buyer persona. This allows you to reach potential leads effectively and guide them through the decision-making process phases.
Use the user persona to create conversation guidelines for your sales team. Align email sequences to different personas and continuously update your profiles to react quickly to new insights. This will help you to increase closing rates and improve collaboration between marketing and sales.
The creation of buyer personas is not a one-off project, but an ongoing process that helps you in the B2B sector to better understand your target group and optimally align marketing measures and sales. With a clear buyer persona template and valid data from market research and surveys, you can guide the decision-making process of your potential customers and convert more leads into paying customers. Just as Alan Cooper once coined the user persona, you can now lead your B2B company to success with precise buyer personas.
Daniel Luecke
Director Software Solutions
I work together with my colleagues to make our product a little better every day – and to be a partner who helps our customers work successfully with their media and product data.