Insights From Our Experts

B2B marketing is often stranger than fiction. You have a real target audience to think about as well as real strategies, real business goals, and real metrics you’re going to measure and present, and yet there are still useful fictions that can help you do better business in the real world. Our favorite useful fiction? Customer personas. 

Also known as marketing or buyer personas, these semi-fabricated representations of your customers are designed by conducting B2B market research and can then be used to develop more targeted marketing plans and gather usable data on customer behaviors, demographics, pain points, etc. 

Creating the right customer persona for your brand won’t be as easy as drafting up a fictional character, and yet it can be an exciting part of the story you’re looking to tell with your B2B content marketing efforts. Consider this the first chapter in your customer persona journey. We’ll highlight all the benefits and offer practical instructions for your marketing team. 

The Benefits

Forget sifting through heaps of data and scratching your head over how, exactly, your next marketing campaign will effectively reach your target audience. A solid customer persona will do all the leg work for you: 

Staying in the Know 

If you had a pair of goggles that allowed you to see the world through your customers’ eyes, wouldn’t you want a pair? Personas provide rich, research-based understandings of your customers that function much like a pair of these magical goggles. You’ll know their behaviors, their motivations, and, most importantly, how to reach them on a truly human level. 

Custom B2B Content Marketing

Knowledge is power! Use all the valuable customer information we discussed above to craft tailored content and marketing messages that address their unique needs and concerns. Personalization holds its own kind of power, prompting more earnest interactions from the various segments of your audience. 

Better Products and Services

It may not be possible to give your customers exactly what they want, but you can still get pretty close. Personas just simplify the process by bringing pain points and preferences to the surface and allowing you to make real-world adjustments to the products and services you offer. As a result, you prioritize customer satisfaction and inspire loyalty to a brand that takes customer concerns seriously. 

More Conversions

Conversions: the metric all marketing teams would love to see more of. Personas can increase conversions by helping you weave a narrative in which your brand is now part of your customer’s lifestyle. You don’t just have something they want, you have something they truly need. 

Using Resources Wisely

When your audience is unfamiliar to you, even the most stunning ads and B2B content marketing won’t see their full potential. The insights a customer persona provides can help you avoid throwing money into campaigns and strategies that are falling on deaf ears or simply not reaching the right channels. All your resources should reach all the right audience members, funneling new customers towards your website.  

The Customer Persona Creation Process

How do you create an effective customer persona and, more importantly, how can it make targeted marketing more effective? Let’s explore: 

Personalities and Values

From focus groups and surveys to market research and customer feedback, there are a variety of ways to gather the information you need to make your persona feel more like a full-fledged person who reflects your ideal customer. But don’t forget to go deeper than the demographic basics: 

• What matters to them?
• What motivates them?
• What are their priorities?
• How does that impact their decision making? 

Ask questions that establish the personality of your audience members in order to truly understand their perspective and what kind of marketing message is more likely to reach them. 

Demographic and Lifestyle Information

Okay, we just said don’t get bogged down in the demographics, but age, location, income, gender, and education level are still important, and so are lifestyle factors such as hobbies and social concerns. This information can give you a glimpse into your customers’ everyday lives and snapshot how and when your content may be reaching them.  

Real-World Results

Look beyond your marketing bubble for examples of companies who have successfully created and executed customer personas. Why? It’s inspirational, for one thing, but it’s also a great way to identify points where your own persona can become stronger and more impactful. 

Coca-Cola, for instance, has developed multiple customer personas ranging from “family-oriented adults” to “brand advocates.” As a result, they can create campaigns and advertisements that speak to the values of each persona and create an emotional connection with different demographics within their wider audience. Their holiday campaigns are perhaps the most obvious example as they convey a message of joy, nostalgia, and the importance of family gatherings for those family-oriented adults. 

Keep Current

Regularly update your persona and maintain a consistent presence across marketing channels like social media, email, and your website. You want a cohesive customer experience that supports the ongoing growth and evolution of your brand, not a stagnant source of clicks that reflects last year’s business goals and priorities. Tracking conversions, click-through rates, and customer satisfaction metrics can help you achieve consistency, too, as you assess your performance and optimize your persona to match. 

Need Help Stepping into Your Customers’ Shoes?

Liger can help. We believe that knowing your customer is the first step in executing a marketing plan that really performs. Our data-driven approach to customer research, UX insights, and audience analysis puts us in a prime position to help you understand how your customers think and behave. We can put you one step ahead, securing leads and conversions as you align more and more with your target audience via customer personas and other proven marketing techniques. 

In fact, forget stepping into your customers’ shoes. Liger offers the opportunity to step into their hearts and minds with our approach to marketing strategy and content development. 
Want to work with our team? Contact us today to learn more.