Very Important Personas: Why Great B2B Experience Starts With Listening

An excellent customer experience is what takes a person right through from the start of the customer journey to being a brand advocate who can’t stop talking about you.

According to author Blake Morgan, while writing for Forbes, “CX is no longer just something that’s nice to have—it’s a competitive advantage that brings in customers and increases loyalty. Product and price are less important to many customers than experience.”

That’s backed up by Forrester’s US 2020 Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) rankings, where they found that 27% of brands improved their CX Index scores in 2020. One of the main contributing factors that Forrester cited for this was that companies were “designing experiences that emotionally resonate with customers.”

That’s a powerful experience to have if you’re a customer. But if you’re a senior manager in B2B, how do you begin to do that? How do you meet your customer expectations and provide a great customer experience that emotionally resonates, if you don’t know what your customers expect? How do you give your target audience what they want, if you’re not even sure what that is?

Understanding your customers is vital to delivering an excellent customer experience. This really is the first step before you can begin to improve CX in your company.

Good experiences start with listening. To truly understand your customer, you need to research and collect proof about actual customers, not make unverified assumptions about imagined ones.

The importance of knowing who your customers are

It’s nearly impossible to hit a target that you can’t see. That’s what you’re attempting if you try to market to your customers when you haven’t done the research to know who they are and what they want.

Not only can that make it impossible to create the right sort of content to suit your audience, but you may also be marketing in the wrong places.

Given that there is both a monetary cost and a time cost to every marketing task or strategy, you could be throwing your budget away on things that simply don’t work and content that will never bring in the people you want to reach.

The other problem is that not every customer has the same value to your business.

Some customers come back again and again. They buy high-value products or services and tell everyone they know about you. Yet others spend only once, or very occasionally, and buy lower ticket items. The cost of marketing to the second group could be more than you will make from them.

If you don’t know enough about your target market, you can’t differentiate between the two groups and target your marketing effectively to the right people. You probably also have a third group of customers who might well spend more and buy more often if they were reached by the right marketing.

No business can afford to be throwing good money after bad on any aspect of marketing, but even more so, they can’t afford to waste it on providing a less than stellar customer experience.

Before you look at improving customers satisfaction and providing a good customer experience, know thy customer!

Create your buyer personas the right way

B2B buyer personas are helpful abstractions of customers and a great first step to take.

However, they have their limitations. You may find there’s still a little work to do to make your buyer personas more effective and reach your ideal customers.

You probably know that a buyer persona is a sketch of your ideal customer. It’s a representation more than a fully-fledged 3D model. It’s there to give you an idea of who might usually buy from you so that you can plan what kind of marketing is needed to persuade them and encourage customer interactions. The hope is that your buyer persona can help you find where your target customers are as well as what to say.

Here's where your buying personas might fall down:

1) Do you have the complete picture?

One of the biggest problems with a buyer persona is that, quite often, at least part of it is guesswork. No doubt you’ve talked to your sales department and your marketing department and asked them to contribute what they know to your customer personas. You may even have asked customer service and your product or service development department, too.

All of these are great things to do, and they do provide you with some helpful insights into your target audience, but you’re still not getting the complete picture. Why?

Because each of these departments is only involved with part of the customer journey. Sales, for example, have no idea what product development’s experience of customers is in many companies. This siloed approach is doing you no favours.

Everyone needs to work together to create a more rounded picture of your customers. Bring everyone together in one meeting to swap ideas and insights and you’ll get far more information—and some surprises!—than you will from talking to departments separately.

The other problem stopping you from really knowing your customers is that you may have extrapolated and assumed from the information you’ve already got, rather than going out there and asking your customers.

Get a fully rounded picture of your target audience with B2B market research and you will reap the benefits in your marketing and customer experience management.

2) Are you depending on stereotypes?

Do you have buyer persona titles that sound like this?:

• Brian the Banker

• Emma the Entrepreneur

• Millie the Marketing Manager

We know you’ve got to call them something, but how much are you relying on stereotypes when creating your personas? Would you feel about a company that categorised you this way?

Your personas shouldn’t necessarily be based on their job title. There are many reasons why people might want to buy from you and their job title might not have much to do with it. If you’re selling wholesale coffee, then you might indeed sell to coffee buyers. However, you might equally sell to business owners who provide a staff canteen, or restaurants that want to sell coffee on to their customers.

Again, we’re back to research. Who are your customers, and why are they going to buy from you?

Take a good hard look at your personas and delete anything that isn’t based on experience, accurate information and data, and cold, hard facts.

3) Are you actually using your buyer personas?

You may be someone that’s done everything right. You’ve created a set of buyer personas that would get an A* grade in any marketing class.

But are you using them day-to-day? Do your staff know what your personas are and are they working with them? Or are they sitting unloved on your central hard-drive?

Take them out and dust them off. Make sure that they aren’t the marketing equivalent of Lord of the Rings in length. Yes, you want accurate information, but you also want people to be able to implement what they’ve learned. Slim down and simplify your tomes of information into one A4 sheet for each persona and put them where everyone will find them and use them.

How to research your customers and improve their customer experience

When looking at your customers, it's not enough just to create a buyer persona that really works for you. You need to move beyond your buyer personas into basing your marketing decisions on customer intelligence.

So what can you do?

Understanding your customer means listening to them. You need to research and collect proof about actual customers, not make unverified assumptions about imagined ones. Customer intelligence + great listening skills = compelling, personalised customer experiences.

1) Use your data

Use the data that you’ve gathered from the customer journey and across departmental barriers.

Many businesses have more customer data than they know what to do with. Instead of leaving it to gather cyber dust, use it, and use it well. Look at every touchpoint your customers have with your company. Follow the customer journey through and see what information you’ve already collected about your customers and what you can do with it.

Aggregate the data from your marketing automation tracking and your CRM. Collate every piece of information you can find to help you understand your customers and find out what would make a truly excellent customer experience for them.

2) Look at your competitors

They’re aiming for the same target market after all. What are they doing? What information can you glean about your potential customers from how your competitors behave on social media?

Look at their social media marketing. What types of content do they write? What language and terms do they use, and which keywords and phrases they use. Examine the way they interact with their customers on social media. What questions are they being asked and are they answering? Look at their case studies and testimonials to find out who they are working with, because they are your target market.

Go through your competitor's reviews too. What do they say? What don’t customers like about them? Where can you beat them? How can you overdeliver where they don’t? This will give you industry benchmarks and insight into what people like about them.

3) Check out your own reviews

Do the same exercise for yourself as you've done for your competitors. Look at your customer feedback to find out what people are saying about you, both good and bad.

From your reviews, you can see what language your customers use and any jargon or slang they use to describe you and your products or services.

Use your reviews to find out what your customers want, what they think you don't have, and what they wish you would fix.

This is also helpful for company improvement and generating new product and content ideas, as well as for finding out about your customers.

4) Do a deep dive into customer service and tech support

Look at your support requests for both departments. What do customers ask for most frequently? Where do they struggle with your product or service? What new products and features do they ask for the most? What good things do they have to say about you that you can do more of?

People rarely call customer service or tech support when things are going well. This is priceless information to tell you what your customers need help with and what they need.

Just like with reviews, this is great research for improving your offers, creating the right content for your audience, and finding new product or service ideas, as well as for learning about your customers.

5) Look at your sales conversations

With good marketing automation software, you should easily be able to pull together notes and questions customers have asked during sales calls.

What are the objections to your product or service? What do people want to know? What information are they still lacking by the time they reach the sales call stage? How can you add to what they know before they talk to a salesperson?

How can you prime your sales team so that they are poised to answer objections and to provide quality information without the customer needing to ask?

Make as much use as you can of the information you find here to get to know your customers.

6) Research your search terms

Dig into Google Analytics and look at what search terms people are using to find your website. Look at what they are searching for and take note of your most popular content so you can write more of it.

You can also take this opportunity, and the information you have gained above, to look at the content you already have and see if there are any gaps in the content you have at each stage of the sales funnel.

This will give you clues about how they frame their own questions and what terms and jargon they use. Answering them on their terms will automatically improve their experience. As will creating customer centric content that speaks directly to them as part of your content marketing strategy.

7) Use social research and social listening tools as part of your marketing strategy

People talk about the brands they use on social media. You can use platforms like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, and SparkToro for social listening, brand monitoring, and sentiment analysis.

These tools can give you deeper insight than just what people are saying about you. You can find out what people like and don't like about your company, your products, and your services. In addition, you can direct your searches to discover what they think about your competitors, different topics and trends, as well as what they wish they could find on the market.

Social research uncovers the websites your customers visit, the accounts they follow on social media, the hashtags they use, and the people who influence their opinions. You'll be able to see which solutions word of mouth marketing is favouring. This is market research available in real-time. You’re able to measure customer pain points and understand what you can do to help, as well as positioning yourself to be the answer to their prayers.

It will give you countless ideas for new content, and maybe for new products too.

8) Make use of qualitative user research

Focus groups and diary studies can be really helpful. You can interview people one on one or send them surveys.

One useful aspect of interviewing groups of people together is that they will bounce off each other. They’ll remind each other of points to make. You’ll see how much they agree with each other, and where they don’t.

You will gain fascinating insights from any conversations you have with your customers, especially in person, where they can ask questions and raise points you might not even have thought of.

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If you were struggling for different types of market research you could do on your customers, we hope we’ve helped give you at least some ideas.

Take the time to truly understand your target audience.

Marketing automation is your friend here. Not only will you find great insights in your automation platform data, but you will be able to create compelling, personalised experiences for your customers and deliver content that they will value at every point along the customer journey.

That’s how you really understand who your customers are and wow them with an incredible customer experience.

If you would like to find out more about what this might look like for your company, get in touch for a conversation about your content strategy and a demo of our automation platform.