How to Craft B2B Buyer Personas For Ad Targeting
Hey there B2B marketing grasshopper 👋
In this article, we're channeling our inner Mr. Miyagi from "The Karate Kid," because we're about to master the art of creating B2B buyer personas.
Wax on, wax off style – but with less wax and more wisdom!
Let’s dive into it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
- What Is a B2B Buyer Persona?
- 3 Major B2B Marketing Personas
- How to Develop a B2B Buyer Persona
- The Five B2B Buyer Persona Segmentations
- B2B Buyer Persona Template
- Translating B2B Buyer Persona’s into Ad Targeting
What Is a B2B Buyer Persona?
Just like Daniel-san needed to understand his opponents in the All Valley Karate Tournament, it's important to understand your B2B buyer personas to win in the market.
It's critical because these personas are your roadmap – they guide every marketing punch and kick you make.
If you don’t do this, your marketing efforts might be as off-target as Daniel-san trying to catch a fly with chopsticks on his first try.
We're talking about misdirected resources and messaging that misses the mark, leaving your ROI down and out — so let's break it down, Karate Kid style:
What is a persona? It’s the semi-fictional characters that make up your target audience. It’s a great way to unpack who makes up your ideal customer profiles, called an “ICP”
3 Major B2B Marketing Personas
In B2B marketing there are 3 major personas or roles to understand in the sales process.
This is also referred to as a buying committee:
- Decision Maker – The person who makes the final decision to purchase
- Champion - A person who enthusiastically supports your product or service in their organization
- Influencer - A person who can influence other members of the buying committee
Your marketing and advertising efforts should address their needs and concerns when it comes to buying and using your product or service.
Knowing what these personas are looking for will help you tailor your messaging to make your ads stand out.
For example: imagine your buyer persona 'Finance-Manager-Frank'. He's in his mid-40s, loves numbers more than karate, and is always on the lookout for tools that bring efficiency and balance. Where does he find his information? → LinkedIn and financial blogs
Knowing this, you’d be able to hone in your advertising strategy to use LinkedIn ads to demonstrate how finance managers find more efficiency from their investments by using your product.
How to Develop a B2B Buyer Persona
There’s 5 major segmentation buckets to consider when putting together a B2B buyer persona:
- Demographic Segmentation
- Targeting potential customer based on their role (ex: Job Titles, Job Functions)
- Firmographic Segmentation
- Targeting potential customers based on company traits (ex: Industry, Company Size)
- Geographic Segmentation
- Targeting potential customers based on their company and physical location (ex:USA)
- Technographic Segmentation
- Targeting potential customers based on the tech they use (ex: Slack, Teams)
- Behavioral Segmentation
- Fine tune your messaging based on your potential customers Jobs To Be Done, decision-making process, and more.
Within each segmentation, there’s key information you should collect to build your personas which will ultimately inform your advertising channel strategy, targeting, and messaging.
Getting crystal clear on your buyer personas will also help you maximize your resources, build internal trust with your sales and service teams, and drive better results.
Let’s dive into the five segmentations in greater detail.
The Five B2B Buyer Persona Segmentations:
Demographic
Target potential customer based on their role
- Role: Identify the job title and role they’re in and what level in their organizations they fall (individual contributor, middle management, or in the C-suite – chief roles including CEO, CFO, CMO, etc).
- Responsibilities: Identify all the key areas they oversee and manage. Pulls who they report to.
Firmographic
Target potential customers based on company traits
- Company Industry: ex: Technology, Manufacturing
- Company Employee Size: ex: 500 - 1,000 employees
- Company Revenue Size: $1,000,000 - $10,000,000 ARR
Geographic
Target potential customers based on their company and physical location
- Company Location: ex: United States, Canada
- Employee Location: ex: United Kingdom
Technographic
Target potential customers based on the tech they use
- Tools: This breaks down the tools they use or need to do their jobs (ex: Slack, Teams)
- Company Competitors: list out any relevant competing technologies
Behavioral
Fine tune your messaging based on your potential customers Jobs To Be Done, decision-making process, and more.
- Goals: This details how their job is measured by
- Jobs to be Done/Pain Points: This elaborates on the biggest challenges they face in their role
- Decision-Making Process: This goes into detail on who they need approval from when buying a new product/service, who signs the contract, who owns the budget
- Evaluation Process: This details how this persona typically decides on a product
- Objections & Concerns: this outlines what prevents them from making a decision
- Consumption Habits: how do they gain information for their job and what social media networks do they use
B2B Buyer Persona Template
To help you put this into action get a free copy of my B2B Buyer Persona template in Module 2 - Lesson 2 of my B2B Advertising Foundations Course when you sign up for free. With this template you will be able to easily map out your buyer persona across the five segmentations.
Translating B2B Buyer Persona’s into Ad Targeting
After completing the B2B Buyer Persona template you should be very clear on who you’re going after.
Now you’ll want to review your persona’s segmentation and find possible targeting opportunities in the platforms you’re considering advertising on – your options will vary greatly by channel.
Create a draft campaign in your ad platform of choice and review all of the audience targeting options available – sometimes you’ll need to get creative! (example below of LinkedIn Ads).
And that my advertising friends is your way to craft a buyer persona you can use to identify the audiences you’ll be targeting in your B2B advertising.
Hope you found this article useful!
Jumpstart Your B2B Marketing Career
If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising then you definitely need to check out my free course that will teach you the foundational knowledge to becoming a high-performing B2B marketer who knows how to use advertising to drive legit business and revenue impact without the fluff or wasting your time and money learning the ropes the hard way.
- Module 1: you’ll get a crash course in the B2Bverse and master terminology, sales processes, and working across teams.
- Module 2: you’ll learn how to become your customer's psychologist and understand them deeply with buyer personas that allow you to craft effective messaging.
- Module 3: you’ll master the B2B funnel and learn how to think like a CEO to identify performance bottlenecks and convert more leads into revenue.
- Module 4: you’ll learn how to put it all together and build your go-to-market strategy that gets your ad in front of your dream buyers and converts attention.
This course was designed for absolute beginners in mind.
Accelerate your learning curve and start the course today for free.
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- Twitter (X) Ad Specs
- Quora Ad Specs
- Reddit Ad Specs
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- Google Discovery / Demand Gen Ad Specs
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Google Display Ad Specs
Source: support.google.com
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LinkedIn Ad Specs
Source: business.linkedin.com
Browse examples at: linkedin.com/ad-library/home
X (Twitter) Ad Specs
Source: business.twitter.com
- You can request to have video lengths increased up to 10 minutes
- Carousel can use images or videos but must be in the same aspect ratio (ex: 1:1 or 16:9)
Quora Ad Specs
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Reddit Ad Specs
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Meta Ad Specs (Facebook/Instagram)
Source: business.facebook.com
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Resources for Mastering B2B Advertising
Hope you found this ad specs article useful!
If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising then you definitely need to join 1,000+ B2B marketers leveling up their paid advertising skill sets in AdConversion.
Here’s 4 reasons why you should consider joining. Every one of our on-demand courses are:
✅ 100% free access.
✅ Taught by vetted industry experts.
✅ Have workbooks, resources, and templates.
✅ Less than 10 minutes per lesson.
We believe every marketer should know how to scale paid ads so they can:
• Scale their ideas
• Level up their careers
• Make a positive impact
Click Here to Join 1,000+ B2B Marketers Today and start leveling up your advertising skill set.
Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously I timed it 😂)
3 Powerful Strategies For Scaling SaaS Google Ads You Need To Know
Google Ads is a blessing and a curse.
You're blessed with intent and cursed with scale.
It’s a powerful channel for scaling pipeline for SaaS startups but low search volume is a challenge.
In this article you’re going to learn 3 powerful strategies for scaling your SaaS google ads further.
This won’t solve your limited search volume issues that's just the nature of your target keywords and B2B SaaS but these strategies will help you squeeze more performance from your account.
Let’s dive into it 👇
TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Strategy #1: Broad Match Discovery
- Strategy #2: Advertising outside of English
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Strategy #1: Broad Match Discovery
Before you click away I’m not talking about using broad match in the traditional sense.
Where you let Google show your ads for WHATEVER they think is relevant.
Broad match discovery is where you combine broad match keywords AND an audience.
It essentially means you’re giving Google the flexibility to show your ads for whatever they feel is relevant but within the confines of your targeted audience.
I would not recommend testing this approach unless you have:
- Strong negative keyword lists
- Proven converting phrase match keywords
- Significant conversion volume (> 15/month)
The benefit is you get to scale your top keywords safely past phrase match.
How to implement broad match discovery:
Step 1: Find proven converting phrase match keywords
Review your performance across converting phrase match keywords to identify which you’re going to prioritize testing with broad match discovery.
Don’t rely on “total conversions” make sure you’re viewing performance by keyword based on the custom metrics that matter for your business (ex: Demo, Trial, SQL, SAL, Opp, etc).
Once you’ve identified some worthwhile keywords it’s time for step 2.
Step 2: Brainstorm your targeted audiences
Google has 5 audience types you can leverage for targeting in your search campaigns.
- Your data = website visitors or contact lists
- In-market = people actively researching a given topic
- Life events = people who’ve accomplished a life milestone (ex: create a business, get married)
- Detailed demographics = industries, company sizes, education level.
- Affinity = people who are interested in a certain topic
You can use a mixture of all these different types of audiences to layer on top of your broad match discovery campaigns.
If you’re dealing with < 500 searches/month for your keywords I recommend clustering a minim of 10-15 audiences on top of your campaigns to help with delivery.
Step 3: Setup a campaign experiment
The safest way you can test broad match discovery is in a 50/50 experiment alongside your top converting phrase match campaign.
You can easily AB test in Google Ads using the campaign experiments feature.
Located under Campaigns > Experiments
Using this feature build an experiment splitting the traffic by 50% for your original campaign vs the experiment version using broad match AND the targeted audiences you brainstormed in step 2.
Strategy #2: Advertising outside of English
English is the most competitive language in the world with the majority of advertisers.
We’ve seen reductions of up to 70% in our average CPC targeting other languages.
If your company has the resources to sell in multiple languages – take advantage of localization!
Localization campaigns are when you target keywords, write ad copy, and design landing pages that all are in your audience's native language (ex: Spanish, German, Portuguese).
You’ll reap the benefits of lower costs due to less competition.
The downside however with localization is search volume.
If you’re already advertising in English outside of North America and finding success, definitely recommend testing this strategy.
How to implement localized campaigns:
Step 1: Find proven converting phrase match keywords
Review your performance across converting phrase match keywords to identify which you’re going to prioritize testing with broad match discovery.
Don’t rely on “total conversions” make sure you’re viewing performance by keyword based on the custom metrics that matter for your business (ex: Demo, Trial, SQL, SAL, Opp, etc).
Step 2: Brainstorm your targeted languages
Ask your internal team what languages your sales team is able to sell in.
Based on your options make a list of potential languages.
Next, if you’re advertising outside of North America, review the top performing countries and identify their local languages and see if you have the internal resources that can speak that language.
If you can’t sell in this language then this strategy won’t make sense.
Step 3: Hire a local translator
Don’t make the mistake of relying on Google Translate to perform the bulk of your translation.
You’ll want to hire a translator that grew up in the area in which you want to advertise.
For instance, if you’re advertising in Portuguese.
The dialect for Europeans living in Portugal and those living in Brazil is very different.
A local brazilian can tell if it’s not their dialect just like a native portuguese.
I recommend hiring locals off Upwork can be as low as $12/hour depending on the language.
These translations will make a world difference in your ad and landing page copy.
Strategy #3: Industry campaigns
Industry campaigns can be great for coverage and quality.
This is where you’re going to bid on a desired keyword and add a related industry term.
For example, let’s say bidding on the keyword “crm software” here’s how you can modify this keyword to make it industry specific:
- healthcare crm software
- crm software for fintech
- crm software for small businesses
The benefits of industry campaigns:
- Personalized ad copy that can yield greater CTRs
- Higher quality leads due to a more qualified search term
- Lower cost per click prices due to less competition
The downside however is search volume (the constant struggle of Google for SaaS 😅).
How to implement industry campaigns:
Step 1: Find proven converting phrase match keywords
Just like the other strategies we’re going to identify proven keywords first that we can create industry variations for.
Step 2: Brainstorm your target industries
Run a win rate analysis in your CRM and understand which industries have the shortest sales cycles and largest deal sizes? Based on your findings, prioritise the industries in which you want to target.
Step 3: Build and prevent keyword overlap
Once you have your keywords and target industries you’re ready to build your campaigns.
Make sure to add your industry terms as negative keywords in your generic non-brand campaigns.
Otherwise you can have people seeing your generic ads for your industry terms.
Hope you found this article helpful!
Best of luck scaling your Google Ads campaigns for your SaaS.
Resources for mastering B2B advertising
If you’re serious about mastering B2B advertising then you definitely need to join 1,000+ B2B marketers leveling up their paid advertising skill sets in AdConversion.
Here’s 4 reasons why you should consider joining. Every one of our on-demand courses are:
✅ 100% free access.
✅ Taught by vetted industry experts.
✅ Have workbooks, resources, and templates.
✅ Less than 10 minutes per lesson.
We believe every marketer should know how to scale paid ads so they can:
- Scale their ideas
- Level up their careers
- Make a positive impact
Click Here to Join 1,000+ B2B Marketers Today and start leveling up your advertising skill set.
Takes < 90 seconds to sign up (seriously we timed it 😂)