It’s time to rethink B2B tech marketing and PR objectives. Here’s how. By Janice Hughes, B2B Tech Marketing and Technology PR Leader
Rethink Buyer Personas for Better Results for Tech Companies
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By Alex McLellan, Copywriter
Successful marketers recognize they are communicating with real people. That is why all B2B technology marketers worth their salt use buyer personas. But not all buyer personas are helpful. Read on and rethink your approach to buyer personas.
Better buyer personas for B2B tech
“We already use buyer personas,” you say confidently. But not all buyer personas provide real insights into buyers. It’s all in the approach. At HCI Marketing and Communications, we produce more valuable results through an approach laid out by the Buyer Persona Institute. The authentic voices of real buyers are at the heart of these personas. By talking to both the buyers and rejectors of your solution, we gather their perspective on how effective your marketing materials are, what made them hesitate, what assured them, and what helped them decide to buy—your product or your competitor’s product. You learn the truth about why some of them said, “No.”
What is a buyer persona?
Often, marketers envision a buyer persona as an avatar of a fictional individual with a specific role in an organization, such as the CIO or a technology buyer. For each, marketers assign descriptive characteristics, such as education level, work challenges, business priorities, and information channels. But this high-level information is helpful only to a point.
You still don’t know your buyers and what has motivated them. To influence buying decisions through marketing and sales outreach, you must thoroughly reflect their pain points and decision criteria at each step of the buyer’s journey from awareness to consideration to decision. Take note of this crucial component of buyer personas.
How to research buyer personas for B2B tech
Traditional approaches to buyer personas use market research data, identify stakeholders in the buying process, and assign names to each persona. But here’s the simple truth: the way to gather objective facts about your prospect’s buying decisions is through an unbiased, third-party interview with recent evaluators. And we say evaluators rather than customers because uncovering the reasons why your company fell short of a sale is just as important as the reasons why a prospect purchased. Interviews with the people who walk away help you identify the Achilles heel in your buyer’s journey.
We ask respectful, probing questions and dig beneath the surface to achieve understanding. We uncover the interviewee’s true experiences and viewpoints to produce profound insights into how you can improve your buyers’ journey.
In this way, a buyer persona study identifies perceptions that influence decisions to purchase or walk away, considers the influence of industry competitors, the roles of various stakeholders in a purchase, the buy cycle, and the pivot points that lead to a go-no-go decision.
Timing matters. Once they’ve been your customer for two or three years, it’s too late to capture the details—they’ve forgotten or moved on. Recent buyers and non-buyers contribute the most useful information.
Rethink your buyer personas with HCI by your side
Together we can transform buyer persona interviews from an awkward chore into a goldmine of marketing and sales insights. Then you have a solid foundation for strategic marketing campaigns and messaging that resonate with your ideal customers and create meaningful results. Contact us to get started.
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HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.
HCI has marketing professionals in North America and Europe.
