How Buyer Persona Searches You Before Buying (B2B)

Almost every software company knows nowadays terms like “buyer persona”, “ICP”, or “customer profile”. Those are usually defined by demographics, interests, goals, and relevant contextual data. But we go a step further to close targeted deals.

Understanding B2B Buyer Personas

This article proposes the idea of analyzing and understanding what are Google searches this semi-fictional representation of a company's ideal customer. We mean the exact phrases and intent behind queries. We categorize all those terms into higher hierarchies called “topics” which encompass your software category. 

As an example, we’ll take ProductBoard, the project management solution, popular among PMs. We’ve identified 10 topics applicable to their customer profile, and 5 more for their enterprise segment.

Why is this more important than ever?

90% of your targeted accounts do research before buying. If you are able to understand their main topics, in real-time, then you are sitting in front of multi-million dollar untapped opportunities. In other words, if we get into our buyer’s minds, we can get useful data, that will serve to sell more. Much more.

From a marketing point of view, B2B content needs to be highly personalized and actionable to our target audience. 

Whether you plan to get new leads with inbound or outbound you NEED to understand your potential customers. And build accordingly.

The premise of this content is that you can capitalize on your buyer’s research. You can understand how and what questions they are doing before buying. It can become a secret sales weapon.

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What can you solve with this?

• Active accounts: You can make sure you are reaching accounts most likely to convert and not those who aren’t actively in-market.
• Ads optimization: Stop the endless battle of creating noise and find the perfect messaging for timely conversion on interesting topics.
• Enable sales: Identify unengaged accounts based on their interests in your topics.

How ideal customer persona research for solutions?

First, let’s realize our main goal. For example, someone looking to generate thousands of MQLs with an already built list of 10,000 targeted accounts. How do you prioritize content and narrow down those that have the most probability of conversion? The first task, is to define what is the current search state of your category.

After doing so, define trends and what is rising interests out of your accounts. To get a more detailed overview of what topics a company could analyze that could be of interest to a certain group, you can take a look at this article.

How to get buyer persona data

In order to understand their search psychology we need to understand all of their touchpoints, and what they are saying. Plus, use some third-party sources of information. Here is a list:

CRM

When asking yourself which of your prospects should you target next? You can use your CRM data like Hubspot or Salesforce to properly link the topics you found the most relevant to those that have indicated interest or recent activity.

Sales Intelligence

Usually, when starting a new list of targeted accounts, you have no idea who to target. Now that has changed. You know exactly what are your highest priority prospects, and what they search for. For example using tools like Outreach, SalesLoft o Chorus, you can now link prospects with the most relevant topics coming from your buyer persona.

Third-party source

You can use Semrush or Ahrefs as a third-party source traffic provider. They’ll let you build a working template of your search ecosystem- Meaning you can scrape phrases and main terms that people are doing around your solution. The result is both qualitative and quantitative. The number of searches someone does, and what is the search. Another data point you can extract here is intent.

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Review sites

We’ve done an article on how to extract sentiment data from review hubs. The main examples are G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, IT Central Station, and Trustpilot. Most B2B purchases include a high level of complexity. By analyzing and leveraging reviews of competitors, one can explore the problem and solutions of potential buyers.

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The ready availability of quality information through digital channels has made it far easier for buyers to gather information independently, meaning sellers have less access and fewer opportunities to influence customer decisions. - Gartner Report

Ads platform & first-party data

Once you captured someone from your webpage, within your content strategy, you can create retargeting based on the most relevant topics. Creating targeting based on behavior or interest. With the ads platform, you can uncover the current interests and desires of your target audience- Linkedin, and Google Ads.

• By testing engagement, you can see which segments are having more responses than others

Predictive analysis

CAC rises, and companies need to predict future customer decisions like churn or upsell. Although this topic itself should be explained separately, here are some insights you can get with it:

• Capture real-time needs out of CRM deals and notes like Hubspot
• Calculate the best content to show out of your B2B blog data, and analytics
• How past decision-makers that visited your site are going to future-buy and what are they going to visit
• Capture all of your ICP searches to predict the most profitable topics

Email nurturing

To maximize engagement with your email nurturing sequences, it's crucial to focus on the recipient's interests and create a personalized experience. By targeting proven topics that they find engaging, you can increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

However, a challenge in nurturing at a higher level is that it only reaches the engaged accounts, while potentially missing out on a significant portion of your audience who may be exploring other websites. To address this issue, you could explore additional marketing channels to expand your reach and capture the attention of a wider audience.