Developing Buyer Personas for Effective B2B Marketing for Manufacturers

Buyer personas are an essential component of any effective marketing strategy since they serve as a roadmap foundation for your efforts. According to sources, buyer personas have helped 82% of businesses in creating an improved value proposition.

Several manufacturing companies struggle to comprehend the modern buying habits of today and how to keep up with these fast-changing habits. When properly researched, developing buyer personas act as an ultimate tool for B2B marketing for manufacturers, providing insights into who your consumers are, the challenges they encounter, and, most pressingly, the goals they are striving to achieve.

What are Buyer Personas?

A persona is a semi-fictional depiction of your ideal customer derived from market research and legitimate data about your existing customer base. Customer demographics, behaviour patterns, objectives, and goals are examples of target personas. Buyer personas offer exceptional structure and insight into your business.

What Makes Buyer Personas Important?

Customers are 48% more inclined to choose companies that personalise their marketing to tackle their specific concerns. By developing buyer personas for your manufacturing business, you can enhance your knowledge of customer needs and wants and establish a framework for crafting a strategic marketing and sales plan.

How to Develop Buyer Personas for Your Manufacturing Business?

1 . Research Data Trends and Discuss Them With Your Sales Team

Hopefully, the majority of you already have a general understanding of who is purchasing from your business and their reasons for doing so. Nevertheless, for them to be beneficial, your buyer personas must be specific; therefore, carrying out a little extra research into the factors that influence your customers will pay off big time.

Browse through your customer database to recognize patterns in how people are consuming your content. This will furnish you with a clear picture of the forms of content that work best for your business and the social media sites where you can drive the most engagement from your audience. 

The online behaviors of your buyer personas can be easily ascertained using tools such as HubSpot Analytics and Google Analytics. The types of leads your sales team deals with on a daily basis might also be discussed with them. Oftentimes, your sales team will be able to provide specific details on how these leads discovered your company and the problems that initially led them to do their research.

2 . Examine Industry Concerns

Maintaining awareness of current concerns affecting your sector will assist your marketing team in resolving industry-specific challenges for your customer base. This includes being aware of the laws, regulations, and deadlines that your customers must adhere to. For a manufacturing company, this could be as easy as deciding whether the sourcing manager or the design engineer is more concerned about the material utilized in a given product. 

The more carefully you are analyzing your environment, the more enhanced your ability to position your goods or services as a solution to the problems that your personas frequently encounter will be.

3 . Interact with Prospects and Clients

Talking with them is the best approach to identifying your buyer personas. They will be able to pinpoint precisely what issues and demands brought them to your offering.

For B2B manufacturing companies, interviewing customers from each industry you service is a wise choice; businesses with roots in numerous industries simply cannot use a single buyer persona.

Here are some excellent interview questions to ask (be careful to consider how comfortable people are answering more personal questions):

• What position does the buyer hold within the company? 
• What type of organization does the buyer work for? 
• How much education does the buyer have?
• Which gender belongs to the buyer? 
• How old is the buyer? 
• Does the buyer reside in a city, a suburb, or a rural area? 
• How big is their business in terms of revenue and personnel? 
• Which communication method do they prefer to interact with vendors? (e.g. email, phone, in person)
• What worries the buyer the most? 
• What are the most common objections from buyers? 
• What problems can you help the buyer with? 

Don't forget to talk to your "bad" clients as well. Customers who asked for refunds or ended their professional relationships with you can offer valuable insight into the issues they had with your business or the reasons why your product wasn't an ideal solution for their requirements. This inside info can help you identify the personas you serve successfully and others who might not be worth engaging with. Additionally, you can use their feedback to attempt and address the issues that previous customers had to enhance your offerings.

4 . Develop Your Buyer Personas

Start creating your personas using all the information you have obtained from the aforementioned steps. They ought to be comprehensive and contain both psychographic and demographic details. Identify the kinds of businesses each persona works for and their position within the company. The difficulties and long-term objectives of each persona must also be considered. Find out your prospects' level of education as well as their preferred research and purchasing methods. With the aid of this broad description of your ideal customer, you can explain to your personas in an impactful way how your business can resolve their problems and assist them in achieving their objectives.

Last but not the least, it's imperative to keep in mind that buyer personas are dynamic. The challenges and needs of your customers will change as your business does. To adapt to changes that take place gradually over time, continuously update and revise your personas.

Driving Business Success with B2B Marketing for Manufacturers

For manufacturers, developing buyer personas might seem like a tedious task, but with a good digital marketing agency for manufacturers such as StratMg available to assist you through it, the entry process can be made a lot simpler and more efficient.

It can help you in conducting thorough research and create definitive buyer personas that will enable you to draw in much more qualified leads for your company.