The decision maker and influencers’ need to more effectively navigate that context.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nFor B2B companies, the buyer’s context is the company. By looking at your most profitable and engaged customers, you’ll quickly see patterns that will help you understand the context. It’s also worth expanding your universe to look at customers that surprised you (i.e., responded well to your product or got a lot of value from it) and your aspirational customers (i.e., your dream client<\/em>) when developing data files. What you want to understand about them is:<\/p>\n\n- Basic demographics: industry, size, who do they serve, number of employees, revenues, footprint, etc.<\/li>\n
- Biggest objectives as a firm for the year ahead<\/li>\n
- Biggest obstacles for them as a firm for the year ahead<\/li>\n
- Industry dynamics, i.e., what’s their bigger context?<\/li>\n
- What’s changing where they’re feeling the pain that you’re alleviating?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Change & The B2B Buyer<\/h2>\n
I want to focus on the idea of change for a minute, because it’s central to understanding the B2B buyer. Businesses rarely innovate for innovation’s sake. The decision to buy a new accounting system is driven by something such as: growth in revenues that an old system can’t keep up with, a lack of features that are adequate to the demands of public reporting prior to an IPO, or changes in technology that allow more flexible mobile reporting.<\/p>\n
Whatever the situation is, something has happened that makes this urgent or important enough to focus resources on now.<\/p>\n
In an interesting post on the Content Marketing Institute, Ardath Albee suggests asking the following questions to help understand what’s changing:<\/p>\n
\n- What’s important to them and what’s driving the change?<\/em><\/li>\n
- What’s impeding or speeding their need to change?<\/em><\/li>\n
- How do they go about change?<\/em><\/li>\n
- What do they need to know to embrace change?<\/em><\/li>\n
- Who do they turn to for advice or information?<\/em><\/li>\n
- What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?<\/em><\/li>\n
- Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?<\/em><\/li>\n
- What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The second area that you need to profile encompasses your decision maker and influencers. In effect, this change in the bigger corporate context has created a change for your buyer’s job. You have to understand that ripple effect and capture that critical data in your profile. Answering the question, “How does this corporate change affect your buyer<\/em>?” will get you sales.<\/p>\nAt the decision maker and influencer level, you need to understand who is involved and be able to answer the following:<\/p>\n
\n- What is their job title and core responsibilities?<\/li>\n
- Who evaluates their performance?<\/li>\n
- What aspect of their performance evaluation can your product assist, such as increasing efficiencies or cutting costs?<\/li>\n
- What’s at risk if they make a bad decision with regard to this purchase?<\/li>\n
- Who else in the organization will they impact with their decision?<\/li>\n
- How has the bigger company change or pressure impacted them personally?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
It’s less important that your B2B buyer is Jenny, a 35-year-old office manager that manages two administrative assistants. It’s more important to know that Jenny needs to find a way to report her team’s productivity to her boss, who sees administrative support as a cost center and is under increasing pressure to manage his P&L.<\/p>\n
If you can demonstrate a tool with the analytics to turn administrative capability into a revenue generation center (for example, by tracking their contributions to lead generation), you’re going to have a sale on your hands.<\/p>\n
How To Put Avatars To Work Across Your Organization<\/h2>\n
In content marketing, we often talk about creating a culture that embraces this type of marketing in order for it to be successful. A related idea to this is that you need to create a culture that understands, values and can implement customer avatars. Below are some ideas and strategies you can use and how specific groups within your company can benefit from putting marketing personas into action:<\/p>\n
\n- Include your customer avatars as part of your standard internal marketing documents. <\/b>Your internal marketing kit probably includes a brand guide, templates and other materials to assist your staff with external communications. Including your avatars, with an explanation of why they matter will help demonstrate that you take them seriously and empower individuals throughout the organization to apply this knowledge to their jobs.<\/li>\n
- Include them as part of your new hire training.<\/b> More organizations are including marketing and content marketing training as part of new hire orientations. It’s important at every level. Executives are expected to contribute thought leadership pieces. Administrators may be managing social media accounts. By introducing your customer avatars as part of your overall introduction to new hires throughout your company, you’re putting your team on the same page.<\/li>\n
- Share them with sales. <\/b>Customer avatars can help your sales team quickly identify and sell more effectively to leads and prospects. In fact, using customer avatars that align with where your online marketing is derived from can help your sales team better manage leads from inbound marketing. Historically, leads from cold calling and from inbound marketing may require different handling. This approach can help overcome that barrier.<\/li>\n
- Arm executives with avatars. <\/b>Anyone speaking on behalf of your business will benefit from understanding your customer avatars more deeply. From press interviews with the CEO to your director of HR pitching potential recruits, solid B2B avatars can help focus themes, language and approach.<\/b><\/li>\n
- All creatives should work from customer profiles. <\/b>Depending on your business, you are likely to have a range of creative staff working for you. This includes writers, designers, and positions you may not think of as creative types such as programmers. If they’re involved in creation, think of them as creative. How could a deeper understanding of your ideal customer help them write better copy, build a better product or craft a more engaging customer experience? <\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Conclusion<\/h2>\n
If you take a close look at most inbound marketing process documents, you’ll see that marketing persona generation is one of the most important steps. But, asking the right questions and creating a culture that enables those personas to go to work for your business is critical, and many organizations don’t understand how to tackle this aspect of the process. Has your business found an effective way to use your B2B customer avatars to inform your marketing and other endeavors? Let us know in the comments below.<\/p>\n
\nContributing authors are invited to create content for Search Engine Land and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff<\/a> and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.<\/em><\/p>\n
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