How To Build More Human B2B Personas

Welcome to Attention Matters, the newsletter from Storythings which gives you practical insights and tools on how to tell better stories and grow your audiences’ attention.

Over the last six weeks, we’ve been sharing insights and expertise about story finding, and why finding unique stories is so important to building your brand, developing a loyal audience, and ultimately converting new customers.

This week, I wanted to go back to one insight about how we build personas for B2B audiences, and share some tools from entertainment and media for creating really effective personas. But before that - we’ve had a lot of interest in our story finding sprints, so if you are ready to find great stories about your organisation and stand out from the horde of bland B2B marketing, we’d love to help:

In our last series about story finding, I mentioned some great research from LinkedIn I saw at a London B2B conference about targeting buyer groups. The core insight was that in B2B marketing you are not targeting one individual, but a group, and that means you have to focus on the social context of buyers, what they want, and how they reach agreements on decisions to buy. Key to this is understanding the emotional drivers of B2B decision making, something we rarely see in our clients’ ICPs or marketing plans:

The biggest mistake we make in B2B marketing is assuming we’re targeting a single individual who makes a decision. This is almost never the case - every decision is made by a group, and the emotions and dynamics of a buying group are far more complex than an individual. In fact, these emotional dynamics are far more important in decision making that technical and product specifications. And what does most B2B marketing focus on? Technical and product specifications. But buyers group decisions are far more likely to be driven by whether your colleagues know and trust a brand - emotional factors - than product features. The interviewees in the LinkedIn research overwhelmingly agreed that they would pay more for similar products if one option was more well known and trusted by their colleagues in the buying group:

So the dynamics of groups are inherently defensive, and will prioritise the safety and cohesion of the group over introducing risk or uncertainty. If you are a new market entrant, or even a challenger brand, your job is not just to make your target ICP aware and informed about your products, but also to make them share your messages with the group in a way that makes you seem like a safe choice.

To learn how do this, we do what we love doing at Storythings - borrowing from other sectors for ideas that we can apply to B2B marketing. In this case, we’ll borrow an insight from our friends at the brilliant Everybody At Once, a US agency who have decades of experience building engaged fan communities for some of the biggest entertainment brands.

Their whole approach is based on one idea - your audience has an audience. We love sharing stories and insights with our peers, whether that is fellow fans for your favourite movie or TV show, or your colleagues working with you on a buying decision. In both cases, we need to look underneath the surface persona of a ‘fan’ or ‘B2B buyer’, and look for the underlying human emotional context in which we’re making a decision. It’s only when we understand and address that emotional context with our marketing that we’ll really make an impact on our customers’ decisions, and we can start to unlock some of the trillion dollar value that LinkedIn discovered in their research.

We’ll go into some of the ways you can do this in future posts, but here’s three quick tips you can apply right now:

1 - Design your marketing for the relationship between two people - find stories that are surprising, insightful or useful for your audience, and make it easy for them to retell the story to their peers. This means creating simple formats with a strong structure, and repeating them consistently, so your audience builds familiarity and confidence in how they retell your stories. If every story you share is a completely different format, you’re creating more work for your audience every time they want to retell your stories to their peers.

2 - Make your target buyer group feel better about themselves - we know that group dynamics are defensive, especially in a work context, where individuals might be scared of trying something new and risking their careers. So tell stories that don’t just reassure, but elevate the work that they do. Celebrate the impact of their work, and make them heroes of your stories - this will make the whole group feel better, and more positive towards your brand.

3 - Make your stories more human - this is probably the thing that B2B marketing most struggles with. The focus on product specifications and technical jargon means your audience will struggle to recall and share the messages in your marketing. Finding compelling human stories will help recall and make it easier for people to share your brand’s core messages.

So, if you’re sitting there with an overly technical set of personas or individual Ideal Customer Profiles, it’s time to rip them up and create something more human, emotional, and social instead. Because your target audience are not robots, but warm human beings, who just want to feel good about themselves. If you’d like our help building more human personas, we’d love to help!

We’re recording interviews with B2B leaders who we think are doing a great job of making B2B marketing more human, and taking risks to elevate themselves and their work from the horde of bland B2B jargon. If you’d like us to tell the story of a great B2B project you’ve done at your company, hit reply and let us know!

If you found this valuable, we’d love to hear from you! Please reply to this email to get in touch, or share the article on Linkedin tagging Storythings.

See you next time!

Matt