Why B2B Marketers Should Think in Networks
Buyer personas, customer journeys, sales qualified leads: there are plenty of powerful tools out there to help you sell your products. Digital marketing makes it easy to apply, measure, and optimize them to improve your results. But if it comes to B2B they often fall short of really making a difference. One reason is that you are dealing with an organization, not an individual.
Buyer Personas: How are they connected?
Creating a buyer persona is like profiling a serial killer. You take what you know about your customers, group them into different personas, and then make assumptions based on experience and statistics to complete a profile. You try to figure out interests, motivations, demographics, challenges, and finally round it up with a nice portrait and a fictional name. Then your content creators can look up to this wanted poster in search of inspiration for the next blog post.
Don't get me wrong: this works pretty well. It gives marketers a better understanding of their target groups and helps to provide real solutions to real problems. But in B2B marketing we often forget that the customer is not a single person but an organization. That's where thinking in networks becomes important. I strongly recommend using personas in B2B marketing but instead of asking for individual interests first, the initial questions should be: with whom in his organization is the persona connected?
Extend your profiling
While understanding individual interests and character traits can always make a difference, knowing how people connect within their organizations is crucial for a proper B2B buyer persona. Who is reporting to them? To whom are they reporting? Who works with them and who works against them?
Extend your persona profiles with information about their position within the company. Try to figure out how they influence the buying process, how they influence each other, how they influence the final decision-maker. Of course, your sales guys always want the highest ranking lead, the individuals who sign contracts. They don't want to waste time with people who cannot spend money. But in marketing, you want to affect the whole customer journey and in B2B this journey is often a relay race with many different people involved at different stages.
Profiling Organizations
With this said, it becomes obvious that we are not talking about simple personas anymore but about complex profiles of organizations. Selling to consumers can already benefit from addressing the needs of a parent focusing on security differently to an adventure-seeking single. In B2B, organizations have to be analyzed like a microcosm and here you will end up like some law enforcement officer in front of a clipping wall connecting the dots.
Of course, a persona is a tool that works by clustering many individuals into different groups. This helps to make the world easier to understand for us. It does not make sense, to create a persona for each customer in your database. The same is true for profiling organizations as long as you do not focus on just a handful of key accounts. What you want to do, as in individual profiling, is to find similarities and group your customer's organizations. Like people, companies are different from each other, but most of them follow the same basic rules. Sometimes it is not even the industry or structure that sets them apart and creates the organization's archetype, but the way of how they procure your product.
Take for example the case you are selling software. In all organizations, you will have different stakeholders in the buying process. End-users, IT-guys, data protection officers, and executives who sign your contract. You need to understand how the end-users influence the decision-makers, how the IT and the data protection guys work together, who tests the software, and to whom the executive is listening. I am aware that most of the time it's more complex than that but I just wanted to give you an idea of why profiling the networks within your customer's organizations is important.
The power of networks
After you analyzed the networking structure of a potential B2B customer, you can start marketing to each individual in it properly. Marketing has long understood how powerful networks are. You can advertise the hell out of your product, a proper recommendation will beat it on positively influencing the buying decision every time. And that's what you want to do in B2B also: you want to create influencers.
Your sales guy might only want to talk to the highest-ranking officer, but if you manage to address the people properly that influence this decision-maker, you will get your sales team a big step closer to a "close won".
tl;dr:
Customer journey mapping and buyer personas are great marketing tools. For your B2B marketing game, you should take a close look at how different personas connect in their organizations. Understand how they influence each other and consider them all together for your customer's journey. Your sales guys will love it.
Why a picture of cats? Just to grab your attention, dude!