How to Build Buyer Personas That Work: A B2B Marketer’s Guide B2B Marketing
Posted: Wed Sep 24, 2025 1:14 pm
Content marketing is rightly undergoing a renaissance. It’s seen as the key to engaging with your target audience when your buyers are (almost) all going online to commence their buying journey (over 80% of B2B buyers according to Forrester.)
How to Build Buyer Personas That Work
A B2B Marketers Guide image buyer personaBut here’s the bad news. Most B2B Marketers just don’t understand their target buyer’s world and particularly their purchasing journey.How can B2B belize cell phone database marketers generate effective content if they don’t undertand the world of their reader, listener or viewer? How do you build messaging for your website, for your emails and newsletter?
The key word here is “effective
” Too much content is written with the seller in mind or pays lip service to the buyer’s problems and is a thinly disguised plug for the products of the content creator.
The effect of a poor understanding of what motivates your buyer is ineffective content. Ineffective content means lower conversion rates and poorer quality leads. Without these strong foundations your cost per lead goes up, and marketing ROI comes down.Real understanding requires real effort and real research. No shortcuts.The 6 steps to building powerful buyer personas.
Secondary research – Listen carefully
Taking time with your internal customer experts such as sales, customer service or channel partners is an excellent starting point to build a broad general picture of your buyer. Create some initial assumptions about job titles, areas of interest and challenges. Try and understand if there is more than one person influential in the purchasing process.
In B2B markets the sale is often long
complex and it’s very likely a number of people will influence the decision. At g2m solutions we always run a series of buyer workshops with our clients internal customer experts. We focus on undertsanding and agreeing core problems our clients buyers are facing and those problems they are best at solving. It’s a powerful exercise in creating clarity.
However just as importantly marketers must
generate some genuine, unbiased external input. Many B2B marketers are unsure of how to do this. Social media provides excellent opportunities to listen to your target buyers discuss their issues and concerns on LinkedIn groups, for example.
Set up Google Alerts for key phrases, attend events and conferences, listen to Q&A sessions on webinars, read articles in trade magazines whose readers are your target buyer. With a little careful thought and applied effort it’s quite possible to get a good read on your buyer’s world.
Tip: Think carefully about who and how you are going to collect AND COLLATE this information. Without some careful planning you will have lots of information but no way to process the data and “see the wood for the trees.”
How to Build Buyer Personas That Work
A B2B Marketers Guide image buyer personaBut here’s the bad news. Most B2B Marketers just don’t understand their target buyer’s world and particularly their purchasing journey.How can B2B belize cell phone database marketers generate effective content if they don’t undertand the world of their reader, listener or viewer? How do you build messaging for your website, for your emails and newsletter?
The key word here is “effective
” Too much content is written with the seller in mind or pays lip service to the buyer’s problems and is a thinly disguised plug for the products of the content creator.
The effect of a poor understanding of what motivates your buyer is ineffective content. Ineffective content means lower conversion rates and poorer quality leads. Without these strong foundations your cost per lead goes up, and marketing ROI comes down.Real understanding requires real effort and real research. No shortcuts.The 6 steps to building powerful buyer personas.
Secondary research – Listen carefully
Taking time with your internal customer experts such as sales, customer service or channel partners is an excellent starting point to build a broad general picture of your buyer. Create some initial assumptions about job titles, areas of interest and challenges. Try and understand if there is more than one person influential in the purchasing process.
In B2B markets the sale is often long
complex and it’s very likely a number of people will influence the decision. At g2m solutions we always run a series of buyer workshops with our clients internal customer experts. We focus on undertsanding and agreeing core problems our clients buyers are facing and those problems they are best at solving. It’s a powerful exercise in creating clarity.
However just as importantly marketers must
generate some genuine, unbiased external input. Many B2B marketers are unsure of how to do this. Social media provides excellent opportunities to listen to your target buyers discuss their issues and concerns on LinkedIn groups, for example.
Set up Google Alerts for key phrases, attend events and conferences, listen to Q&A sessions on webinars, read articles in trade magazines whose readers are your target buyer. With a little careful thought and applied effort it’s quite possible to get a good read on your buyer’s world.
Tip: Think carefully about who and how you are going to collect AND COLLATE this information. Without some careful planning you will have lots of information but no way to process the data and “see the wood for the trees.”