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Buyer personas are a valuable marketing tool that you should use to identify your target audience. However, an effective buyer persona goes way beyond mere demographics like gender, age, where they live, marital status, income level, and education.

The problem is that data like this is too vague. Any number of people can match up in these areas. For example, there might be many 45-year-old married males who live in a specific city and fall into the same salary range. Are all of them in your target audience? Absolutely not. There are likely only a few or maybe none from this group.

Instead, buyer personas should be based on the pain points and challenges of your target audience. What problems do they need to solve for their employer? What kind of results do they need to get? These are the types of questions to ask when creating buyer personas, especially for business-to-business (B2B) efforts.

THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF PAIN POINTS

Pain points refer to the problems that customers face in the industry or market you serve. Business-to-business (B2B) pain points arise in their working life, not their personal life. Typically, these prospects must find a solution to the pressing problems to benefit their organization in some way.

B2B customers often have a budget to which they must adhere. They are also responsible for persuading decision-makers at their company to approve the solutions they present. Therefore, your salespeople must not only understand what keeps your target audience up at night but also be able to make connections to your products or services to solve this problem.  But before this can be done, you need to know what the pain point is to achieve this goal.

Pain points fall into different categories which include:

  • Productivity – A lack of efficiency arises when time and resources are not properly utilized.
  • Financial – Confusion around spending, as well as products or services that are overpriced, or exceed the budget.
  • Support – The prospect and their team do not have the tools they need to do their job well. (This may be a capacity or capability issue or both.)
  • Process – Time-consuming, repetitive tasks take time away from high-level, complex projects that yield more significant outcomes.

Chances are good that your target audience’s pain points fall into more than one of the categories above. They might even deal with all four types.

The key to success – and this is critical – is to accurately pinpoint the pain points for each one of your buyer personas.

STRATEGIES FOR IDENTIFYING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE’S PAIN POINTS

Aside from hiring a marketing research firm, how do you identify each of your buyer persona’s pain points? Following these strategies is a great place to start.

Survey Existing Customers and Your Target Audience

Start with the customers you already have via your customer email lists. Offer them an incentive to complete a brief survey with questions about the pressing problems they face at work. The incentive is an important piece because you do not want to irritate or alienate your customer base. By offering them a gift of some kind in return for their participation, you add a positive connotation to the request.

Next, post the same survey on your social media profiles. Stress that your company wants to ensure you continue to provide effective solutions that fully address your customers’ needs. Do not mention anything about gathering information for buyer personas. You want to convey the message that you are soliciting this information because you care that much about making customers happy.

Leverage Chat to Get Feedback from Website Visitors

Whether it is automated or live, the chat feature on your company website is an excellent tool for learning more about your target audience’s pain points. There are two ways to go about it when you automate the process:

  • Leave the chat open-ended so the visitor can direct the “conversation” with the chatbot.
  • Engineer prompts that help narrow down pain points from a list of pre-programmed options.

Live chat is fairly straightforward. Whoever is responding to the visitor should go with the conversation and respond according to what the visitor asks or says. Let the visitor lead unless they seem uncertain. In this case, it is acceptable to provide a little direction.

Track What Your Target Audience Says Online

You can use social listening tools to track what your target audience says online, including on your own social media profiles as well as your competitors’ profiles. It is human nature to vent when a person is feeling frustrated. You will also come across questions people ask of other users in the community and those questions can be equally enlightening. As you spend more time tracking comments and questions, you will start to recognize trends among your target audience. These trends are a solid indicator of the pain points they need to solve.

BECOME THEIR PAIN-POINT-SOLVING SUPERHERO

When it comes to creating personas, knowledge is literally power. The more knowledge you gain about your target audience’s pain points, the better equipped you are to build buyer personas that are reflective of your best prospects.

Using this data, you can craft marketing messaging that communicates how perfectly your products or services can help prospects overcome their challenges – and in doing so, become their pain-point-solving superhero.    

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Jim Bozzelli
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