Chief Marketer, an online publication dedicated to providing marketing professionals with information on marketing strategies, tactics, and techniques for consumer and business-to-business brands, published the following article written by BPI President, Jim Kraus.
How to Elevate B2B Buyer Personas Through Strategic Survey Insights
Demystifying Buyer Personas
Before we discuss how surveys can enhance buyer personas, it’s critical to debunk common misconceptions about what they are and what they are not:
Buyer Persona: A detailed blueprint providing deep insights into specific buying decisions, including purchase triggers, desired outcomes, concerns, key decision criteria and the buyer’s journey.
Buyer Profile: Often mistaken for a persona, a buyer profile merely describes characteristics of individuals or roles involved in the buying decision with little to no insight into what actually influences it.
Buyer personas that include insights about the buying decision provide precise guidelines for crafting transformative marketing strategies. In contrast, buyer profiles, which lack this depth, often require you to rely on conjecture to fill significant informational gaps.
From One-On-One Interviews to Strategic Surveys
Marketers who use one-on-one interviews with prospective buyers to develop buyer personas gain deep insights into their potential customers’ needs and preferences. These qualitative discussions reveal critical decision-making factors and the entire buying decision journey from the buyer’s perspective, uncovering detailed motivations that drive purchases.
Incorporating survey research adds breadth and further validation. Surveys engage a broader segment of the target market, enhancing the statistical reliability of the insights and providing a more comprehensive view that supports strategic marketing decisions. This approach ensures a robust understanding of buyer behavior, crucial for crafting effective marketing and sales strategies.
Now let’s dive into the key ways that surveys can enhance your buyer personas:
Confirming and Validating Insights:
Broadening the research through surveys helps confirm the initial insights are accurate and representative of a larger market. This step increases confidence in the buyer persona’s validity, which is crucial for creating organizational buy-in and developing effective marketing strategies.
Determining the Relative Importance of Buyer Expectations:
Surveys are particularly effective in recognizing which buyer expectations are most and least crucial. Doing so helps marketers prioritize features or messages that will influence the buying decision the most.
Testing Marketing Messages and Value Propositions:
Surveys provide an excellent platform to test and refine marketing messages before they are rolled out. By presenting various messaging concepts to the target audience, companies can determine which messages resonate best. This testing can be structured to assess messages based on clarity, relevance, uniqueness and persuasiveness.
Understanding Buyer Segments:
Surveys can help uncover significant differences in preferences and priorities across different market segments, such as variances by company size, industry or geographical location. These insights are critical for customizing marketing strategies that are more precisely aligned with the needs of specific buyer groups.
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