If you’re not seeing success with your company’s marketing efforts, your buyer personas – or lack thereof – could be to blame. While inbound marketing is a tried and true approach for technology companies, trying to sell your solutions without defining your B2B buyer persona is like taking a shot in the dark and hoping you hit the right mark – hardly a winning strategy.
Building your buyer personas is an important first step to understanding exactly who you’re selling to and what their technology challenges are. But how do you craft the perfect B2B buyer persona for your tech company? And once you’ve pinpointed your ideal customer, how do you market to them effectively? We're sharing a few actionable tips to help you get it right.
Make Your Customer the Protagonist
Many companies, regardless of industry, center their marketing content on themselves and their services when they should focus on the customer instead. If you aren’t relating your solutions to the real technology problems your customers are trying to solve, they aren’t going to care.
That’s where your buyer personas come in. You can create your B2B buyer persona based on client interviews, surveys, sales, social media – wherever your customers are, you have to go deep to understand their pain.
For example, let’s say our B2B buyer persona is Steve, the CEO. Use your customer research to determine Steve’s:
- Basic demographics. How old is Steve? Where does he live? These are surface-level questions, but they’re critical for finding the common threads among your target customers.
- Challenges. What technology challenges does Steve struggle with in his business? You’ll want to hone in on Steve’s specific technology pain points to better understand how your services can solve them.
- Buying behavior patterns. How does Steve typically try to deal with his struggles? Gaining insight into the solutions that haven’t met the mark for Steve can help you differentiate your services from your competitors.
- Goals & motivations. Why does Steve need to overcome these tech challenges? Learning Steve’s personal motivations allows you to better communicate how your services help him meet his goals.
Once you’ve gotten into your target customers’ heads, you can start developing messaging that makes your prospect the protagonist of your marketing efforts, with your company’s services as the trusty sidekick.
Keep Your Personas up to Date
If your team relies on outdated B2B buyer personas, it’s time to conduct some fresh research. Businesses and their technology needs are constantly evolving, so marketing strategies based on buyer data you pulled from before the rise of social media – or before the pandemic – aren’t going to cut it.
Understanding your customers’ needs will never be a one-time project, especially in the technology industry. Review older buyer personas to see if there are any new opportunities you can take on. Even if you only need to make a few changes to bring your personas up to speed, those changes could significantly impact your messaging.
Don’t Make Assumptions
Knowing your customers – really knowing them – is key to getting better results from your email marketing, content marketing, and other marketing campaigns. If you’re approaching your B2B buyer personas with an “I already know” mentality, you’re likely hurting your marketing efforts by recycling stagnant strategies that don’t work.
Creating data-informed buyer personas is an opportunity to gain insights that lead to shiny, new marketing ideas. So say goodbye to any long-standing assumptions about your buyer personas, and put the work into meeting your customers where they’re at today. We're sure you'll learn a few things about your customers that you didn’t know before (or you’ll find out what you knew before still holds true).
Focus on the People, Not the Process
This likely goes without saying, but it's an important one, so we'll say it anyway: your sales and marketing teams should be aligned. Companies that excel in sales and marketing alignment generate 208% more revenue from their marketing efforts,1 so it’s worth your time to make sure these departments play nice with each other.
There are a few steps to take if you want to accomplish this, but the first is to switch your focus from your marketing process to your people. Your buyer personas should be the basis for your sales and marketing goals. Once your teams are clear on your buyer personas, it will be easier for them to identify leads and nurture them along the buyer’s journey.
Lead With Empathy
Does your marketing content read like a robot wrote it? Did a robot write it? If so, your customers are probably passing right over it.
A 2018 study found that 64% of U.S. consumers believe companies have lost touch with the “human element” of the customer experience.2 As humans, we’re hard-wired to crave connections with other humans (as pandemic-related restrictions made very clear), so forming a relationship with your buyers is essential in B2B marketing.
A great way to make sure your marketing strategy doesn’t lose that human element is to create content with your customers’ pain points in mind. Yes, we’re talking about using those handy buyer personas again. Your marketing should focus on solving your buyer persona’s technology challenges in an insightful and empathetic way, rather than pushing impersonal content that treats your customers like a piggy bank.
Build Better B2B Buyer Personas With Expert Help
Understanding your buyer personas is an iterative process. As our second tip suggests, your customers’ technology needs are constantly evolving, so it can take some time to nail them down. Turning to a partner with deep experience in telecom and IT marketing is a great way to keep your marketing efforts on track.
Mojenta has powered the growth of nearly 300 B2B technology companies since 2010. We’ll work side by side with you to make sure you’re not only developing well-researched, data-informed B2B buyer personas but effective marketing strategies as well.
Are you ready to learn how to market to your buyer personas – and start getting real results? Schedule a call with Mojenta’s marketing experts today.
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