What's the best way to define your target audience for B2B lead generation?

1 Identify your buyer personas

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on data and insights from your existing customers, prospects, and market research. A buyer persona helps you understand the goals, challenges, motivations, and behaviors of your target audience, as well as their decision-making process and preferred communication channels. To create your buyer personas, you can use a variety of sources, such as surveys, interviews, social media, analytics, and CRM data. You should aim to have 3-5 buyer personas that cover the main roles and segments of your target market.

2 Segment your market

Once you have your buyer personas, you need to segment your market based on criteria that are relevant for your business and industry. Market segmentation is the process of dividing your target audience into smaller groups that share similar characteristics, needs, or preferences. By segmenting your market, you can tailor your marketing messages, offers, and campaigns to each group, and increase your chances of generating qualified leads. Some common ways to segment your B2B market are by industry, size, location, revenue, budget, pain points, or buying stage.

3 Evaluate your fit and attractiveness

Not all segments and personas are equally valuable or reachable for your business. You need to evaluate your fit and attractiveness for each segment and persona, based on how well they match your product or service, and how likely they are to buy from you. A simple way to do this is to use a scoring system that assigns points to each segment and persona, based on criteria such as relevance, profitability, accessibility, competition, or growth potential. You can then rank your segments and personas by their total score, and prioritize the ones that have the highest fit and attractiveness for your business.

4 Create your value proposition

The final step in defining your target audience for B2B lead generation is to create your value proposition. A value proposition is a clear and compelling statement that explains how your product or service solves a specific problem or need for your target audience, and what makes you different from your competitors. Your value proposition should be based on the insights and feedback you gathered from your buyer personas and market segments, and highlight the benefits and outcomes that matter most to them. You should also test and refine your value proposition, based on the response and results you get from your target audience.

5 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?