B2B marketing personas are useful for a number of reasons. They help you shape your content marketing efforts, ensuring any content will resonate more effectively with your target audience. They can be given to agencies and partners to assist them with their work. And they can also be used for sales enablement, giving your colleagues in sales an understanding of the issues your target customers might face.

So how does one go about building such a persona? While there are templates available, we think it is actually better to start with a broader overview before going straight into building a persona. As such, the frameworks below will help you do that.

Jem9’s B2B Customer Persona Ecosystem Template

 

 

The B2B Customer Persona Ecosystem Template presents a visualisation of your buyer’s ecosystem. These are the elements that influence, enables and constrains choice. When using the template it is suggested that elements that have the most influence be towards the top and the components which influence each other be located next to one another.

Content Marketing Institute Buyer Process Map

 

 

You cannot build a marketing persona without considering the stages your customers will go through in the buyer’s journey. The Buyers Process Map template from the Content Marketing Institute is an in-depth way to do just that.

Value Proposition Canvas

 

 

Part of building a usual persona is knowing what your buyers’ pains and gains are. Strategyzer’s Value Proposition Canvas is a useful tool that will help you form a picture of those pains and gains. It will also show how your solution will relieve the pains and help create more gains.

Job to Be Done Template

 

 

The concept behind the Jobs-To-Be-Done is that if you understand the job it is easier to focus on what matters and make improvements, if necessary. Paired with a persona it can be a very valuable tool. Here are six steps on how to use the Jobs-To-Be-Done:

1. Identify jobs-to-be-done
2. Prioritise to identify best opportunities
3. Observe how people solve the problem &
   interview to identify success criteria
4. Map and identify related jobs
5. Identify opportunities e.g. new solutions
6. Devise experiments to test opportunities

Tony Zambito Buyer Persona Canvas

 

 

Tony Zambito’s Buyer Persona Canvas provides a detailed framework to help develop an in-dept persona. The canvas focuses on ten key areas which you need to know about your buyer so you can understand them more acutely.

What are your favourite templates?

Do you have any preferred templates or examples that you use frequently? Or have you got any experience with using the frameworks above?

Leave us a comment and let us know.