Learn B2B SaaS Marketing

B2B SaaS Buyer Persona Checklist

by 

Lauren O'Bryan

Last updated: July 31st, 2024

In B2B SaaS marketing, the accuracy of your buyer personas can significantly influence the success of your campaigns. Identifying and refining buyer personas helps marketers craft highly targeted messaging to customers at any stage of the marketing funnel. It’s an intricate process worth understanding, and this guide will help you do just that.

We’ll start by defining buyer persona and explaining how to correctly identify your SaaS buyer personas. We’ll also include a B2B SaaS buyer persona checklist and outline common mistakes to avoid when developing your buyer personas, so let’s get to it.

Buyer Persona, User Persona, and ICP – What’s the Difference?

Firstly, it’s important to distinguish between the buyer persona, user persona, and ideal customer profile (ICP).

The ICP identifies the type of business that aligns best with your product, providing a broad target. The buyer persona is another step down the line from that, and it identifies the individuals within those companies responsible for making purchasing decisions. A user persona is a little different because it represents the actual users of your product, meaning the individuals who will interact with and benefit from your product the most.

Now that you understand these differences, let’s get you started developing your buyer persona.

The B2B SaaS Buyer Persona Checklist

1. Segment your audience
2. Identify individual personas within the segments
3. Research and add detail to your buyer personas
4. Pinpoint priority pain points
5. Develop a product promise from each pain point
6. Craft a campaign and messaging around each persona, pain point, and promise
7. Implement your first campaign

Now, let’s get into more detail.

Developing a Buyer Persona

Segmenting your target audience is a crucial first step. You can segment your audience based on demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral factors. This includes data like gender, age, location, attitudes, lifestyle choices, purchasing patterns, or interests.

With these separate audience segments, you can pinpoint the specific buyer personas within them. For example, the check signer who approves all financial decisions or the manager who agrees to strategic decisions.

Adding Detail to the Buyer Persona

The next step is understanding your segmented audiences’ motivations and pain points. You can gather this information through interviews, surveys, sales feedback, and online review sites. The data you collect will help you add more detail to your buyer persona, making your messaging more targeted and effective.

Each buyer persona profile should include:

• Demographic details, like age, gender, and location
• Their role and responsibilities within the company
• Publications or blogs they follow
• Preferred contact methods, marketing channels, and social media platforms
• Current pain points in their systems and processes
• The solutions they’re looking for

Be aware that it’s not uncommon for a buyer persona to have multiple pain points or not yet be 100% certain of the solution they require.

Positioning Your B2B SaaS

When you have all your buyer persona details, the next step is to develop your SaaS product positioning to align with these personas and your messaging. It’s worthwhile using a SaaS positioning canvas to streamline this seven-step process.

Prioritize each of your buyer personas and decide which you will target first based on the relevance or importance of your product fit to their pain point. One by one, build a persona, a problem, and a promise.

If a persona has multiple pain points, focus on the most critical ones first. Identify the main problem a persona faces and craft a promise your product provides as a solution. For example, if the buyer’s problem is inefficient document management, your promise could be a simple, easy-to-use dashboard that allows users to easily store, edit, and send documents.

Launch a Campaign

After completing the SaaS persona checklist, connecting a problem and promise to each persona, and developing clear marketing messaging, it’s time to implement your buyer personas and launch a campaign. Run each campaign individually, allowing the first one to gain momentum before launching the next.

This is essentially the same principle Clay Collin recommends—develop one product, identify one target market, settle on one conversion tool, and stick with it for one year. You implement a campaign and give it time to work. Knee-jerk reactions and short-term commitment will not produce the desired results.

Common Mistakes When Identifying a Buyer Persona

Even when you follow a SaaS persona checklist, mistakes can still happen when identifying and developing buyer personas. Here are some common pitfalls:

• Making assumptions: Don’t fall into the trap of developing a buyer persona based on opinions, anecdotal, or outdated information. Always carry out fresh research free from personal bias. Relying on assumptions is a common mistake that can undermine your messaging from the start.
• Not being specific enough: If your buyer personas lack enough detail, your messaging won’t hit the mark. It won’t resonate strongly enough, and your marketing campaigns will be less effective.
• Ignoring negative personas: Just as it’s important to identify your target audience and priority buyer personas, you also need to identify negative personas – those who are not a good fit for your product. This will help you avoid investing resources in unproductive leads.
• Siloed personas: All teams should use the defined buyer personas. If one department uses them while another takes a different approach, they won’t have anywhere near the same impact or usefulness. Having the whole team—both marketing and sales—use the buyer personas ensures that everyone is on the same page about messaging.
• Infrequent persona updates: Buyer personas should be regularly updated to reflect new trends and changes. If you don’t revise and update your buyer personas, you risk your marketing losing its effectiveness.
• Not developing persona-specific content: By not developing specific content for each of your buyer personas, your messaging won’t appeal to any specific group, resulting in lost engagement across the board.

Understanding and avoiding these common mistakes is crucial for developing effective buyer personas. Once you have accurate and detailed personas, you can leverage them to enhance your marketing strategy in several key ways.

How the Buyer Persona Compliments Your Marketing Strategy

With well-defined buyer personas, every element of your content will be razor-sharp and precisely targeted. You can develop personalized messaging that addresses specific pain points, making prospects feel seen and heard, which fosters positive customer relationships.

This process of buyer persona identification allows you to establish a clear value proposition that resonates with the priorities of your target audience. By highlighting the specific benefits and outcomes that matter most to each persona, you increase the likelihood of capturing their attention and differentiating your offering from competitors.

This personalized content will not only better appeal to your buyers but can also be aligned to various stages of the sales funnel. This way, lead nurturing efforts will be more efficient and result in better conversion rates.

Additionally, this process of target audience research often reveals opportunities for product development, helping you to better meet the needs of your target market.

Wrapping Up

The buyer persona forms the basis of any targeted messaging you craft. Although it can be time-consuming, developing buyer personas is crucial to building a winning SaaS marketing strategy. You can’t expect maximum scalability without a well-defined and well-implemented marketing strategy.

Of course, you can get a headstart on understanding your business scalability by trying our SaaS scalability score self-assessment. This acts as an ideal baseline and takes into account how well you currently attract, engage, and convert customers. From there, you can strategically implement improvements and start scaling.