63% of marketers create content by buyer persona, according to the 2016 Content Marketing Staffing & Tactics Study conducted by Curata. But if you’re not targeting your core audience, your consumer profiles will be ineffective at converting visitors to leads and ultimately, to buyers. When constructing buyer personas, you first need to uncover your ideal customer.
If you’re a business-to-business (B2B) company, you’re likely selling to chief financial officers, employee managers, executive committees, human resources specialists and so on. However, if you’re a business-to-consumer (B2C) company, you sell your products and services directly to customers. Just like there’s a difference between B2B and B2C buyers, there are major variations in B2B and B2C consumer profiles. Keep reading to learn the differences between B2B and B2C buyer personas.
The B2B Buyer Persona
When marketing to businesses, keep the following question in mind: how can your product or service save them time, money and resources? As you begin to answer these questions, you’ll start to see your B2B buyer personas take form, giving you a greater understanding of the type of content to create, as well as where each consumer profile fits into the buyer’s journey.
First, visualize your target audience, their buyer’s journey and how it varies from the B2C buyer’s journey. B2B buyers weigh the pros and cons of products and services, and by nature, they rarely make impulse purchases. That’s one reason why the B2B buyer’s journey is longer than a consumer’s and why you need to keep each stage in mind when devising consumer profiles. If you need to brush up on the differences between B2B and B2C buyer’s journeys, check out this post.
With a thirst for knowledge, B2B buyers are often detail-oriented, meaning they want cold, hard facts and fast. To deliver the information they need when they need it, you must discover each buyer’s needs, desires and motivations – both as an individual playing a specific role in a company and as a collective entity. What’s important to them? What are their greatest challenges, fears and pet peeves? How about what drives them?
In order to gather the information needed to develop B2B buyer personas, consider the following methods:
- Conduct interviews and surveys with former and current customers and prospects.
- Sit down with your sales team, and discuss what works for them and what doesn’t.
- Review internal data to see who’s making purchases and why.
Once you’ve outlined your buyer’s most pressing needs and garnered helpful information, you can start to create value-driven, educational content backed with logic, financial benefits and strong data based on each B2B buyer persona.
The B2C Buyer Persona
While placing emphasis on demographics for B2B buyer personas is not the most effective strategy, demographic statistics are what drive most B2C buyer personas. In order to create valuable consumer profiles for B2C buyers, you’ll need to tailor personas to individual decisions, perceptions, wants and needs.
Once again, think about the B2C buyer’s journey. When compared to B2B buyers, B2C customers are generally more emotive, more impulsive and less logical in their decision-making process. As such, you’ll need to generate consumer profiles that take the B2C buyer’s journey into account in order to create targeted content at each stage.
The first step in developing B2C buyer personas is to consider the personal background of your target audience. Demographics, such as marital status, age, gender, geographical location, spending habits and level of education, will help you create content that empathizes with your target audience. This information can be pulled from your own marketing database or services, like Google Analytics.
Next, identify their day-to-day life through surveys, focus groups, sales records, third-party data, internet forums and social media analytics. Are your buyers busy parents who own their own home? Perhaps they’re college students with limited finances. Once you get a snapshot of how each persona spends their day, you can begin to understand the daily challenges they face, their hopes and dreams, their worries and fears and other pertinent information, and then use this info to devise B2C buyer personas that boost the effectiveness of your marketing content.
Why Create Buyer Personas
Based on the 2016 benchmark report led by the Marketing Advisory Network in collaboration with Cintell, companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are over twice as likely to create personas than companies who miss these goals. By understanding your target audience and tailoring content based on their motivations, you can attract prospects, drive conversion and build your brand – no matter if you’re a B2B or B2C business.
Once you’ve done all the research and developed a handful of buyer personas, you may still be wondering how to create content tailored to each consumer profile or if the content you’re producing meets the demands of your target audience. That’s where we can help. With Tweak My Post, we invite you to send us a piece of your digital marketing content – be it a blog post or landing page – and we’ll optimize it according to your intended buyer persona.
Not sure you have the staff or time to create enough website content or blog posts? If you're considering outsourcing content writing, download our free ebook, Outsourcing Content Creation: 6 Essential Questions for Choosing the Right Partner, before you make the decision to buy blog content.
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