Freya Oxton-Grant
To identify and define your ideal buyer personas is an integral task to complete before you start any marketing activities for your building product business. The information you gather will enable you to understand thoroughly who your business should be targeting and what messaging will be most effective.
At Insynth, carrying out buyer persona research and defining them is one of the first things we do with any new client. It’s a crucial part of the process.
In this blog, we will give you 5 important steps to help you with the process of building out your buyer persona.
Step #1 Hold a Sales and Marketing Meeting
Get your sales and marketing teams together and start discussing what they both would consider the business’ buyer persona(s) to be. Sales teams are so important to be part of this discussion because who else talks to prospects more? And who else understands who does and doesn’t convert more than them?
Work together to identify which types of companies your construction business best serves, thinking about their size, employees, customers, location. Once you have the ideal company profile you can drill down to define your ideal buyer persona.
When both sales and marketing collaborate on this important task, you have the ability to dig deep and flesh out your persona. Moreover, if your marketing team defines the buyer personas without input from the sales team, salespeople will always be able to blame poor close rates on marketing attracting the wrong types of leads.
Step #2 Consider Your Current Customers
To start getting a better idea of your ideal buyer persona, gather some customer and prospect feedback. This can help you make sure that you can support your ideas with the data- are the people you are targeting the ones who will convert?
You also get to understand the sales cycle through seeing which types of people were lost during the sales process, who the key players are in a sale, and whether you need to make sure you always target a specific job title, if they are the gate keeper or final decision maker.
Step #3 Characterise Your Persona
For B2B buyer personas, there may be more than one, which covers different types of people at your ideal company. You should consider things like their background, age, job role, experience, goals, challenges, and their frequently asked questions.
You can start to personify these personas through naming them things like Mechanical Engineer Mike, Quantity Surveyor Sam, Site Manager Molly, or Specifier Sarah.
Step #4 Get in Your Ideal Buyer Persona’s Head
Once you have the foundations, it’s now time to start thinking about more than just demographics, but psychographics. What needs, behaviours, attitudes, trigger points, influencers/drivers, beliefs and attitudes do your buyer personas possess.
You want to start asking things like:
- What are this person’s goals at work?
- How are they measured for their performance?
- In relation to work, what keeps them up at night?
- What are the top three items on their to-do list?
- How does your company help them solve these problems and achieve their goals?
This sort of thinking will allow your marketing team to understand what sort of marketing messages will resonate with your ideal buyer persona and what channels are best to reach them.
Step #5 Keep Reflecting
Developing your ideal buyer persona is not a set and forget task. Although you should start with it, it doesn’t mean you can’t come back and reflect on it every year. This will make sure you are keeping your marketing strategy on track and measuring performance. You never know, you may discover there’s a whole ideal persona you have missed off, or one you are focussing on is just not converting.
Holding interviews with customers and prospects who didn’t convert is a great idea, as you can continually add to your understanding, and use it to improve your marketing and sales process.
Something as simple as adding ‘job title’ or ‘company size’ fields in your contact forms will also allow you to build up the data you have on your contacts to better inform your understanding.
Conclusion
Identifying and creating your buyer personas will allow you to fully understand your target customers and ensure everyone in your construction company’s marketing and sales knows how to best target, support, and work with your customers.
This will help your business improve reach, boost conversions, and increase loyalty, all while improving the effectiveness of your marketing tactics.
Read our Complete Guide to Sales and Marketing Alignment here.
About Insynth
Insynth Marketing is a leading UK construction marketing agency based in Shifnal in the West Midlands.
They use the latest inbound marketing techniques such as construction inbound marketing, to support building product companies to grow their business by proactively driving sales lead generation activity.
As the only HubSpot certified agency to major on construction marketing, we bring together construction marketing strategy, digital strategy, website design, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, sales automation, marketing automation and HubSpot CRM implementation to produce successful campaigns and great results for our clients.