Editorial
The Gist
- Multiple-persona complexity. B2B involves multiple personas, causing complexity.
- Data quality. Personas often lack resemblance to real-life customers.
- Buyer independence. Buyers are using self-serve information, reducing sales contact.
How well do you know your customer? I mean, really know your customer.
If you’ve invested some of your marketing budget in personas, you might have been told that they’re 45-year-old male middle-managers who like football or that they’re 30-something females with senior content strategy roles who enjoy music festivals.
Three Big Problems With Using Personas in B2B Marketing
But there are three big problems with using personas in B2B marketing:
- You’re selling to more than one person. B2B sales might involve 10 decision makers from different teams with varying levels of seniority, expertise and skepticism, and all kinds of different priorities. And working with multiple personas makes things very complex, very quickly.
- Personas tell us nothing about why those people need our product or service. This is despite the fact the best way to sell is to make customers aware you can solve a pressing problem they have.
- Personas are usually based on poor quality data. This means they bear little resemblance to real-life customers. All too often, their "insights" come from what a tiny minority said on social media, or what one existing client divulged to an account manager once. These are not things to bet your business’s future success upon.
Related Article: How Customer Personas Fuel Good Content
Understanding Your Existing Customers
The good news is that you have something far better and more reliable than persona-creating martech at your fingertips: You have your existing customers. The most successful companies strive to understand their clients in a profound way.
They seek to find out what keeps them up at night. They uncover what customers love and hate about their jobs. They deep dive into previous experiences of working with suppliers and vendors. And they find out how individuals work with their colleagues who are also making buying decisions. In short, they look to understand what it's like to be them.
Of course, you can also talk to non-customers. In fact, a series of one-to-one interviews can deliver deep, actionable insights. Using an external consultant and remaining anonymous until the end of the interview helps ensure responses tell you what you need to hear — not just what you want to hear. It avoids respondents bringing their existing knowledge of your brand, product or service to the party.
Related Article: 3 Ways to Drive a Unified Understanding of Your Customer Personas
Do You Think You Know Your Customer?
Of course, a bigger problem is that many companies aren’t aware that they don’t know their customers as well as they should.
Many moons ago, I took part in a pitch for a major printer company. The company was having trouble selling its own brand printer cartridges to customers. Many preferred to buy cheaper knockoffs online.
We asked people at the company if anyone had ever thought to ask those customers who do buy their cartridges why they choose to buy them despite the higher cost. No one had. To put it in another way, the company didn’t know its customer, but people who worked there weren’t aware of it.
As it turned out, the customers mostly bought their own-brand cartridges because the quality was noticeably better. And when you’re printing your precious memories, quality matters. This simple piece of customer insight helped the company build a marketing campaign focused on the impact of high-quality printing, which directly increased its sales.
This hammers home the importance of talking to your customers and getting under their skin. You might well be surprised about their motivations and bugbears.
How Customers Buy Is Changing
How customers buy is also an important part of the puzzle. And this is something that’s shifting all the time. Understanding how buyers buy today can transform the way you market your products.
Research by Considered Content shows customers have become increasingly independent and aloof. Two-thirds (66%) of B2B buyers are now self-serving more information before contacting vendors for information. And more than half (53%) of buyers would prefer to buy without contacting sales at all.
In real terms, this means freely available content — and not your sales team — needs to answer all their questions. In other words, content needs to be a self-service experience.
For example, the aforementioned survey also found that a quarter of buyers want to be able to get all the information they need online before contacting a salesperson. Yet this is offered by just 9% of marketers.
And 28% of buyers want to be able to view testimonials, case studies and reviews from named businesses. Again, only 9% of B2B marketers offer this on their sites.
So, investing in creating quality content for every decision maker, at every stage of the buyer journey, that is easy to find and ungated, is critical.
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And the better you know your customer, the easier it is to produce content that’ll move them to the next stage of the buyer journey and further toward a sale.
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