Why You Should Be Constructing Buyer Personas When Hosting A Webinar (& How To Do It)

Most life science marketers would like to think that they know their target buyer. After all, aren’t you interacting and thinking about that audience on a daily basis? The success of your marketing efforts are reflective of how well you know your audience; if you want to optimize your efforts, you’ll need to review your assumptions frequently since a buyer’s wants and needs can change quickly in the life science industry. Using data that is generated from a webinar series can be a great way to review your assumptions about your potential buyers, and in-turn, construct a buyer persona to optimize your marketing efforts.

Why Should I Use A Buyer Persona and How Can I Use it?

Constructing buyer personas should be a vital component of every life science marketers tool-set, and should be referenced whenever your team is developing any type of content. When referencing your buyer personas, you’ll be able to better develop appropriate types of content, or even use the personas to segment your audience and match the right content to the right audience. As I’m sure most of you have learned, personalization can be extremely effective in increasing an audience’s engagement.

After all,

• Nearly 70% of B2B buyers rely more on content to make purchasing decisions than they did a year ago
• 75% of those surveyed used webinars to research their purchase decision
• Leads who are exposed to targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities (DemandGen)

Chances are, you aren’t using a buying persona to help your content development; In fact, less than half of B2B marketers are using them(ITSMA). You might not be actively using buying personas, because they aren’t detailed enough, or you’ve been bogged down in details that don’t matter to your product or service, thereby making the buyer personas seem irrelevant. Items that might matter in a B2C marketplace – like income level, number of family members, etc. – don’t apply to the B2B life science marketer.

That’s why we’ve come up with a comprehensive Buyer Persona Template for B2B Life Science Marketers that you can download at the bottom of the page.

How to Construct a Buyer Persona

Webinars are a great tool for not only distributing your content, but also obtaining data for your buyer persona. There are five main instances across the life cycle of a webinar where you’re able to learn something about your audience.

1) Pre-Webinar and Post-Webinar Registration Page

In addition to contact information, you’ll be able to gain key information to help construct your personas such as, job titles, organization, company type, company size, and comment boxes.

2) Comments During the Webinar

During the webinar, you’ll find that the most engaged members of your audience may comment on your presentation. When we’ve matched these data with registration data, you can use these comments to help refine objections, likes, or even general quotes that an individual may have to help define your buyer personas.

3) Poll Questions

Webinar attendees can be asked poll questions during the webinar that may contribute to your review of your buyer personas. You may determine responsibilities, tasks, buying stage, needs, and market drivers. Want more help with this? Why not check out our Guide to Poll Questions.

4) Q&A Session

The Q&A session perhaps gives you the best opportunity to determine an audience’s most pressing concerns, frustrations, needs, and obviously, desires for clarification, that can help you optimize your content efforts.

5) Follow Up Questions

Members of the audience (or individuals who watch a recording) may continue to send you comments or questions if you’ve included contact information during your webinar. Use this as an opportunity to refine your buyer personas even more.

You’ve Constructed Your Buyer Personas. Now What?

Make sure to use your new personas every time you develop content, whether it be for future webinars, articles or advertisements. When combined with market segmentation techniques, and buying cycle information, not only will your content be more engaging and beneficial to your audience, it will help them spend less time with content that is not relevant to them. You can even use your new personas for training new marketing and sales staff.

After you’ve collected data from a webinar series, combine with data collected from other research and interviews to further refine your buyer personas. You’ll develop primary personas which may include, influencers, decision-makers, and buyers. Within each main category you may find these can be split into more refined groups such as, decision-maker/skeptic, influencer/data-gatherer, buyer/innovator and influencer/collaborator, etc. As you construct your personas you’ll find that not all will be involved in all stages of the buying process. But if you’re segmenting your efforts – how can they contribute?

Download the Free Buyer Persona Template for B2B Life Science Marketers by filling out the form below and subscribe to our Webinar Production Tips Blog! (We’ll send you an email to confirm your subscription.)

Have buyer personas helped you? Let us know in the comments section below.