What is a Buyer Persona?

When you have a deep understanding of your audience, it’s easier to meet their needs in your marketing and, ultimately, sell to them. A good marketing strategy targets different personas with content tailored to their interests and needs. 

We’ve previously discussed the importance of buyer personas, but in short, they help you to market more effectively, better anticipate your audience’s needs and create more impactful content.

This article will explore everything your B2B SaaS company needs to know about developing buyer personas.

What’s a buyer persona?

As defined by HubSpot, “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” These can be as fancy as a designed .pdf with detailed information on each of your personas or as simple as a document with several bulleted notes.

How should I choose my buyer personas?

Most businesses have more than 1 persona — Accelity actually has five that we’re marketing to at any given time. Personas can be decision-makers or influencers. B2B SaaS companies typically have a few of each. Most frequently, the individual with budget authority (decision-maker) is not the same as the end-user (influencer).

You need to develop a marketing strategy that targets different personas at different periods throughout the buyers’ journey. The influencer persona will need more educational, awareness stage content, while the decision-maker will primarily need sales-oriented decision stage content.

The best way to decide what personas you need to develop is to consider who you talk to during the sales cycle. Most businesses separate their personas by job title, industry or both. If you’re not sure how to divide your personas, think about the way you’d talk to each of them. For every individual that you would communicate with differently, such as the CEO of a large firm or an independent agent, create a  unique persona. 

How should I gather information on my buyer personas?

Once you’ve narrowed your personas down to a job title, industry and company size, you can utilize LinkedIn to do some initial research. Use LinkedIn search to find individuals that align with your defined personas. After establishing the buyer persona core, dig into their profiles to understand their interests, behavior on LinkedIn, job tenure and more.

If you have loyal customers you think would be comfortable, reach out and interview them. Put together questions that will help you understand their demographic and psychographic profile. If you’re able to interview your customers when creating buyer personas, take advantage of the opportunity to more deeply understand the benefits of your service that most resonated with them. 

Ready to get started?

A great marketing strategy involves deeply understanding the profile of your ideal buyer. When you understand your buyers, you can create content that matters most to your audience, piquing their interest in the awareness stage. Don’t forget to also consider when different personas are involved in the buyers’ journey. 

If you’re ready to develop buyer personas for your B2B SaaS company, download this template to get started.