How can B2B buyer personas improve your marketing strategy?

no, they are *not* fictional, as in made-up or imaginary. to be effective they have be a distillation of real-life examples. Marketing can't create these, because Marketind is seldom in contact with the Prospect or Customer ... you get the information by close collabotaion with, Sales, Customer Service, pre-sales consulting, et al.

Identifying a customer is not the goal here - selling to them is. Simply relying on data and feedback from existing customers will only help you refine an assumed persona without regard to how you craft a message to sell to new ones. They key is combining that data with the objections and push back from potential clients leading up to a deal. That takes the persona of a prospect and elevates it to the persona of a customer. It is also crucial to fine tuning a message that increases funnel velocity towards new deals. There’s no better persona than the one that you spoke with and got feedback from today.

Developing personas ensures that you are meeting your potential or existing customer where they're at. There are a lot of downstream benefits listed here. Start with understanding 'what keeps them up at night' - and ensure that you've asked them vs. assuming based on your industry experience. Then ideate how you can provide a solution for each of the challenges they want to resolve.

If you are a beginner (or not) and want to save some time, you can leverage ChatGPT to help you with creating buyer personas. It’s important to feed it with info related to your campaign goals, sales offer, benefits and similar and ask, for example, which kind of person would benefit from my campaign. You can refine your prompts and ask for a results in a markdown table, so you have nice information overview. Also its good to have multiple B2B personas so you can segment your messaging accordingly.

It’s important also to separate buyer personas from user personas. In B2B SaaS the decision-making cycle includes avg 6,7 persons (according to LinkedIn data) and starts with users. Imagine: you acquire a potential user and guide him through your product (e.g. marketing tool). Then they gets in touch with their teamlead or c-level and claims “we need it”. Maybe their manager won’t even create an account in your product, just approves the bill – but for this success you need your offer to resonate on both user and buyer personas

You don't need to know what your ideal customer has for breakfast - but what their pain points are and how you can help them. To find these pain points: 1. Use multiple data streams: Never rely on easily accessed information. 2. Most times the devil in in the detail and THAT detail can be found in the most uncommon places; 3. Find commonalities in pains. You can't be there for all people. Find your immediate most important target persona who share the same set of characteristics.

Using personas forces you to take a step back from focusing specifically on the product. its features and capabilities, and instead, lets you take a look at what the product does for your targeted customer. This customer-centric focus provides you with a much better understanding of what you're selling, which helps you not only clarify your messaging and positioning, it also helps you understand what the proper channels are you should be using to reach your target customer.