4 steps to define the audience in a B2B demand generation campaign
B2B marketing professionals often wonder what are the steps to follow to define an audience in a B2B demand creation campaign. The first step is always to identify your audience. Based on that you will be able to map pain points, define a relevant offer, a message and finally create your campaign.
Basically, the audience will be the group of companies or people for whom your service solves a problem and who are willing to pay for it. And here we will make the first important division: if we think of companies, we will be thinking of our Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), while if we think of people it will be our Buyer Persona (BP).
These two concepts are fundamental to define an audience:
– ICP: is a fictitious company that represents our perfect client. It has all the qualities that would make it the best choice for the solutions we offer.
– BP: is a generalized representation of our customers that explains the demographics, goals, motivators, and challenges those people face.
Once we have these clear concepts, we return to the main question: How to identify your target audience? Here, four steps that will help you:
1. Your audience can be several audiences
The first thing is to understand that it will not always be a single audience, many times there will be more, and they will surely have several buyers within the same ICP. This is because in a B2B campaign, the number of people involved in a decision process is usually very large and we need to cover everyone.
2. Define your Ideal Client Profile
Once we have understood this, we will have to ask ourselves several questions to begin to imagine our audience. The first and most important: What is my value proposition and what specific need am I going to solve? What kind of companies am I going to solve it for? Large, medium, small companies? National or international? From what industries? Many of these answers will be found in your current customers. When you have these points clear, we can say that you will have your Ideal Client Profile.
3. Define your Buyer Persona
We already know what types of company we will target, now we must understand who our audience is within those companies. You have to define the Buyer Persona. We do not need to create one for each position we want to target within the company, but rather the different challenges that we are going to try to solve. Think about what their day to day is like, how you can help them, how you can impact them, what you can offer them to capture their attention. The normal thing is to have between 2 and 5 buyers.
4. Validate your results
You already have your ICP and your BP. The time has come to put them to the test. The important thing now is to talk to everyone:
– Develop interviews with representative people of your buyer persona. Ask them about their challenges, their problems, their day to day, understand what their pain points are and how you could help solve them.
– Develop interviews with your sales team. Know first-hand the feedback from Them, your prospects and current customers. Understand your strengths and weaknesses and ask them for their opinion on the proposed segmentation.
– Develop interviews with your current customers. Validate with them also the pain points, but above all take the opportunity to understand the reasons why they chose to hire you and confirm that they coincide with your BP.
Once you have done all this, you will have much more clarity about the profile or profiles that your campaigns have to target. Remember: create as many buyer personas as necessary, and with the highest level of detail possible. This will be the point you and your team will return to in the future when you have any questions about the audience.