How to Create B2B Buyer Personas Questions? {Insider’s Guide}

There’s a saying, “A Satisfied Customer is the Best Business Strategy of All”. It’s a strategy that can make your product outshine the competition and drive higher revenue. But, ever wondered how to make a customer satisfied?  

One way that is widely considered in this context is to explore how to create B2B Buyer Persona questions – something about which we will discuss in this article in detail.

But before that, assuming that some of you are newbies in the market, let’s hunt the answers of what is buyer personas and what are they important to consider.

Buyer Persona – What It Is and Why It Matters

A Buyer Persona is basically a representation of how an ideal customer would be. It is based on market research, information obtained from existing customers and calculative assumptions and is popularly considered to find the type of customers who will be eager to receive your services/products, and add profits to your business.

Now, while it seems that visualizing an ideal customer is the only advantage of creating personas, there are various other benefits of the practice, such as:-

1. Gives Clear Understanding of Buyers – The process of developing user personas help the businesspeople, marketers and developers to know more about their customers and thus, design a solution that could become a part of their lives.
2. Saves Time and Money – By delivering the right amount of information to the team, the process gives them an escape from investing their efforts into features and functionalities that the target audience do not want. And in this way, saves time and money related to the process of developing a mobile application.
3. Boosts More Leads – Since the application designed by considering the process resembles what the customers’ are looking for, it attracts more customers. And ultimately, bring more leads to the business.
4. Make Sales Cycles Shorter – Again, the detailed understanding of what the customers want reduces the chances of confusions and make the salespersons come directly to the end factor the sales – implying shorter sales cycles.
5. Encourages Higher Conversions – The process of building a buyer persona, as you can guess from the above, results into higher conversions and make the business go popular.

With this attended to, it is a good time to look into how to build customer personas. So, let’s get familiar with the ABC of buyer persona development process.

The ABC of Creating Buyer Personas

A – Accumulating Data

Despite the fact that data is the new fuel to every industry and must be gathered in heaps to get better outcomes, many marketers and business developers confine their efforts to information gained from a B2B customer persona template or survey form. This prevents them from unleashing maximum opportunities and driving higher results.

So, look forward to brainstorming more set of questions and ensuring a bigger slice of the market profits by getting their relevant answers. A perfect strategy of which is to focus upon the following prime categories:-

1. Customer Demographics
   As depicted by the name, this category of questions will be related to the user background. They will help you with getting a clarity of which section of society will be your right audience and thus, not waste your efforts upon the whole society.
2. Customer Behavior
   This set of customer persona questions will cover everything you need to know more about the habits of your customers and introduce your application into their daily life smartly.
3. Customer Goals
   These user persona interview questions will empower you to find what the users exactly desires for and thereafter, coming up with those functionalities and making your application their favorite.
4. Customer Challenges
   This section will basically provide you with knowledge about the pain points of the customers and help you to determine what you can implement in your app development plan to gain higher profits.

Now while this information would have given you a sound knowledge of how to create B2B buyer persona questions in a profitable manner, here are some of the queries you can look add to your persona:-

1. What is your target audience’s age range?
2. Are they male or female?
3. Which city/nation do they belong to?
4. What type of society they live in?
5. What is their relationship status – single, married or divorce?
6. What is their educational background?
7. What is their profession? What level are they at in their current role?
8. What industry they work in?
9. What do they do in their leisure time?
10. How much time do they spend online?
11. Which device do they usually use?
12. Which website/platform they visit more often and why?
13. How is their social life? Which social media channel they prefer?
14. How often do they make a purchase?
15. Which factor prompts them to make a purchasing decision?
16. What are their core pain points?
17. What problem can you solve?
18. What frustrates them about currently or similar projects?
19. In what scenario they are likely to pick your product?
20. What type of user experience do they expect from your products/services?
21. What app features do they desire for?
22. What features are must in MVP?
23. What payment solution do they consider?
24. What type of communication medium do they prefer?
25. What type of user experience are you planning to deliver?

B – Building a Persona

Once the answers to all the user persona interview questions are gained, the next step is to present the data in different forms. When performed wisely, this practice provides you with the opportunity to look into the same situation from different outlooks and thus, make a persona that act as the focal point of your mobile application marketing efforts.

Another thing that you should keep into attention when building personas is that you should not restrict your efforts to creating an individual entity. Rather, you should invest your time and efforts into developing multiple customer personas. This is because when you have multiple options, you can easily compare them and choose the one with better options, implying paving the path to better outcomes in the market.

C – Curating App Plan Based on Personas

Now, when you have invested into buyer persona development and come up with the most potential persona, the next step is to transform it into an app plan. That means, a plan that clearly defines what factors and functionalities to introduce into the mobile app development process and enjoy vibrant customer relationships.
So, these are the steps that can help in creating customer personas that distinguish the apps that hardly survive and those who go viral.  The personas that can help your app generate higher revenue and gain the limelight in the market – but not for a lifetime.

This implies that the user person created once won’t continue to deliver the same responses – making it necessary for you to look into when to edit/update your persona.

When to Update Your Buyer Persona

While there’s no fixed time frame of when and how often you should revise your plan of creating customer personas, here are some of the possible situations to watch out for:-

• Change in Market Needs
  With the advent of new innovations, the customer behavior and expectations changes frequently. This brings a drift in the market trends, which eventually makes it necessary to revisit the user personas and update them.
• Change in Business Strategy
  It often happens that the businesses and app developers realize that the business strategy behind their app has gone outdated/less popular in the market. To reap the benefits, they need to change their business strategy, which implies update their existing buyer personas.

• Change in Product/Service
  It is also advisable to update your app’s user personas when making changes in terms of products or services you offer. This is because every product/service has its unique demand in the market, signifying a change in the product/service will also bring a change in the user demographics and the market you target.
  Likewise, the change in technologies you plan to integrate into your application will also demand a change in the existing buyer personas.

• Merge of Companies
  When two or more companies merge, they come up with different ideas, goals and strategic plans to cater the existing problems. They unleash the opportunities that have not been considered by their persona’s at any individual level. This creates the need for both companies to sit together and work on their user persona from scratch, which means updating their existing persona to gain better outcomes.

• Rebranding
  Lastly, the process of rebranding will also make it necessary to go back to the chalkboard on your customer persona. This is because, when rebranding, you would be focusing on the factors and features not taken into attention earlier. And, with the modifications of the factors and features brought into the limelight, the output of the buyer personas will also change – leading to changing or updating the persona.

With this, we have covered everything you need to know about Buyer personas in the article – from understanding its importance to looking into the strategies to build an effective persona and deciding when to update it.

So, don’t just sit back.

Use the knowledge gained to build a persona that makes your app more profitable – starting from paying attention to how to create B2B buyer persona questions. And in case, you find yourself stuck at any point and need expert advice, feel free to connect our Business development team.

THE AUTHOR

Prateek Saxena

DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER