Buyer persona marketing is primarily about offering approaches through which your (potential) customers can achieve or implement goals and challenges. In principle, this also applies if you base corresponding actions on a target group. However, with the help of a buyer persona you proceed in a much more differentiated way. You get much more accurate data that allows you to meet the needs of your customer base more effectively and more economically. Of course, the resulting advantages are not only highly relevant in B2C marketing. B2B companies also get the chance to work very efficiently and close to their (potential) customers. The marketing message and the so-called elevator pitch are of central importance here. In simple terms, this is a description of the maximum benefit of your solution for the (potential) customer and the argumentation of its advantages. You should cover both as comprehensively as possible in your content marketing. After all, today's prospective customers generally become aware of your company via digital media. If they find all the information they expect right away and it even becomes clear that they can achieve/solve corresponding goals, challenges and/or problems with your product or service, the user experience is already very good before contact is made. This usually results in advantages for the further course of the business relationship.
What all this means exactly as well as basic questions about buyer personas, target groups, persona marketing, their connection with content marketing and more, we will clarify in this post. You will also get an overview of how you can develop a persona yourself.
What are buyer personas and target groups?
The term or the analysis of "personas" originates from the requirements management of computer applications. Here, clearly defined user profiles are used to determine which requirements, for example, CRM software must meet in order to satisfy the users as much as possible. Marketing managers increasingly transferred this principle to their efforts to win customers and retain existing ones. The approach here is basically the same. Based on personal experience as well as the observation of prospective customers, persona marketing collects data and facts with the help of which one or more customer profiles can be created. This information then describes not only a persona, but a concrete buyer persona, i.e. - to put it simply - an exemplary buyer or customer. One of the central questions here is always: What moves the buyer personas who could use the services of a company - what goals and challenges do they have?
You should put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas in order to deal with these needs in the most beneficial way possible and take up corresponding processes in your B2B content marketing. There is always a trigger or a problem that occupies the (potential) customers. They will then most likely search the web for suitable information as well as ultimate solutions and compare them. The options that most comprehensively fit the searcher's profile and generated the most trust during the research are usually shortlisted. This chain is generally referred to as the customer journey.
"Comprehensive" here refers not only to the actual product, but also to its presentation on the web. Which solution is ultimately really taken up therefore depends on the persuasiveness of the respective content marketing and the resulting user experience. The buyer persona, buyer persona marketing and content marketing are therefore very closely linked.
Most of the previously mentioned aspects basically also apply to target group marketing. The difference to persona marketing lies in the detail of data elicitation and processing. The target group is a subset of the entire market. For example, you can create your target group according to socio-demographic information, actions, psychological characteristics and/or media affinity. These factors are certainly also taken into account in B2B Persona Marketing or in the elicitation of one or more Buyer Personas. However, the result is different. When using a target group as a basis, your (potential) customers always remain faceless due to the comparatively static data collection.
Buyer persona or buyer persona marketing, on the other hand, aims to put a face to the customer base - to consider them as a fictional person whom you help solve specific problems. The actual consideration of the latter as well as the integration of solution approaches in corresponding considerations on the part of the marketing-operating enterprise, are, what the Buyer Persona marketing and the target group marketing essentially differentiates. Of course, there can be several Buyer Personas with different prerequisites and requirements. These always represent your typical customers.
What are the benefits of buyer personas?
Desired customers will only become customers if you completely convince them with your services or products and their presentation. Likewise, with an optimal implementation of these requirements, you strengthen the bond with your existing partners. Since today a significant part of the purchase decision is made via the web, content marketing, or more precisely the provision of correspondingly useful content, should always be the starting point in persona marketing in order to achieve the ultimate goals, i.e. customer acquisition and retention, as effectively as possible.
The elicitation of concrete buyer personas helps to find out which content actually appears on a website and how it should be implemented. This gives you the chance to align your content marketing very specifically to your buyer personas and more precisely to their potential needs, user behavior, media affinity, etc. This results in the best possible outcome. At best, this will result in an optimal user experience in the end, which will entice your customers to choose the ideal solutions provided by your company not only once, but also in the future. By working more closely with the ideal customer, you can often also gain new impulses and ideas to improve your marketing in general. The Buyer Persona offers much more differentiated possibilities than the target group survey, resulting from a more detailed data collection that relates to a concrete (fictitious) person with goals and challenges, rather than a more statically considered group. With regard to this, you can determine very precisely whether your product or service brings a benefit to your typical (potential) customer and also estimate how you need to pitch it in order to convince them.
Your content marketing becomes much more personal through persona marketing, which in turn makes your business efforts seem more natural and less profit-centric. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why user experience goes up significantly when implemented optimally. When you have a persona in mind with goals and challenges to overcome, you don't just statically provide content. You produce and arrange it very specifically to take the different prerequisites and needs of the buyer personas into account as comprehensively as possible.
Your (potential) customers feel understood by you and picked up exactly at the point where they need your solutions. In this way, the (potential) customer comes to the conclusion, at best, that the chemistry between your company and himself is right. Of course, this is not only useful for the one deal, but also for the likelihood of subsequent business.
It also benefits your internal operations in virtually every area. After all, if you and your employees know exactly which personas they're dealing with on a day-to-day basis, this means that other processes in the company aside from content marketing can be aligned with them as well. For example, you can provide additional support staff for personas who are particularly active on weekends.
How is a buyer persona developed?
Of course, to get the opportunity to take advantage of the aforementioned benefits, you first need to highlight one or more buyer personas. Depending on the company, industry, service or product, one, two or many more profiles can be useful. How many there are in your case will certainly quickly become apparent in the course of developing the first persona. If, for example, you have goals and challenges that you cannot reconcile with other important data - such as profession or marital status - of an already completed persona, this is a clear indication that further profiles are required.
In principle, you should always take into account any data that can add value to the paragraph. However, the relevant information is of course not the same in all contexts. Aspects summarized below are kept generally valid and move primarily against the background of content marketing as the main beneficiary of persona marketing. Thus, a large area can be covered.
Do a keyword check: It is particularly important to know which terms your personas could probably use to search for your company's services on the web. Because if you can only be found with difficulty via the major search engines, or in the worst case not at all, even the best content won't help you.
Our support around the topic Customer Journey:
- Together with you, we create relevant customer profiles and derive a professional customer journey.
- We determine relevant channels and design an individual customer journey map specifically for your company.
- Based on this, we outline a positiveuser experience along all relevant touchpoints and implement it programmatically.
- In addition, we are happy to support you in the strategic alignment of lead nurturing with the defined customer journey and develop concrete content modules for the respective phases of the buying process.
For holistic and successful online marketing, we are also happy to take care of the following topics:
Oliver Parrizas will be happy to answer any questions you may have on the subject. 
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