Buyer Personas in Pharma
Reviewing the implications and use of buyer personas, with an application for the pharmaceutical sector.
In the highly competitive world of B2B pharmaceuticals, understanding your customers is key to success. That's where buyer personas come in. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data and research. They help you understand your customers better and make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviours and concerns of different groups.
Subscribe for marketing insights via email
What are buyer personas?
The best buyer personas are based on both market research and all of the insights that you gather from your different customer bases via surveys and interviews. There is no limit to the number of personas you can have for your company, you can have anywhere from 2 to 20. If buyer personas are new to you, start small and add more later on.
At the most basic level, developing personas allows you to create content and messaging that appeals to your target audience. It also enables you to target or personalise your marketing for different segments of your audience.
Just like buyer personas are unique to each company, so is their name for them. You may see buyer personas referred to as “customer personas", "marketing personas", "audience personas", or "target persona”. Each of these carries the same meaning but will look unique within your company.
What are Negative Personas?
Whereas a buyer persona is a representation of an ideal customer, a negative persona is a representation of who you don’t want as a customer.
Negative buyer personas help you understand which groups of individuals are the least likely to convert. Often these include individuals who you would consider not to be a good fit for your company.
A negative persona could include professionals who are too advanced for your product or service. It could also include people who may be students who are using your content for research or potential clients or customers who are just looking into your service or product.
What are Secondary Personas?
Secondary personas are additional buyer personas that you may want to consider while writing but aren't the primary focus. They're often similar to your primary personas, so their goals and needs can still be met by focusing on one of them. You don't need to build these buyer personas out in great detail, maybe just list a name, job title, and any pertinent information.
How can you use Personas?
The basic level of the buyer personas allows you to find out the different segments and sectors of your target audience you are marketing towards. An example of this is instead of sending the same email to your entire list of leads on your database, you can create different buyer personas and customise messaging to those different buyer personas.
If you take the time to create negative personas, you’ll have the added advantage of being able to segment out the “bad apples” from the rest of your contacts, which can help you achieve a lower cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer and see higher sales productivity.
How do you create Buyer Personas?
You create buyer personas by researching, surveying, and interviewing your target audience. It includes your existing customers, prospects, and anyone outside of your contact database who may be relevant to your target market. Buyer personas remind you to put your audience’s wants and needs ahead of your own and help you create content to better target your ideal customer.
Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:
Interview customers either in person or over the phone to discover what they like about your product or service.
Look through your contacts database to uncover trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
When creating forms to use on your website, use form fields that capture important persona information.
Take into consideration your sales team's feedback on the leads they are interacting with most.
The buyer persona should be broken down into different sections which are used to help you find out who your target audience/customers are. These sections include:
Background – Job Title, Career Path and Family Life.
Demographic – Male or Female, Age, Income and Location.
Identifiers - Demeanour? Communication preferences?
Goals - Primary goal? Secondary goal?
Challenges - Primary challenge? Secondary challenge?
What we can do to help - …to help our persona achieve their goals? ...to help our persona overcome their challenges?
Real Quotes - About goals and Challenges.
Common Objects - Why wouldn’t they buy your product/service?
Marketing Messaging - How should you describe your solution to your persona?
Elevator Pitch - Sell your persona on your solution
Who is your Buyer Persona?
Start by giving your buyer persona a name. The point of defining buyer personas at all is to help you market and sell more personally. Giving your buyer personas names makes it personal. Once you've got a name in mind, start writing down everything you discovered in your research.
How old is your persona?
What job titles might they hold?
Where do they live?
How do you prefer to contact vendors?
What associations and social networks do you participate in?
What publications or blogs do you read?
Describe your educational background. What level of education did you complete, which schools did you attend and what did you study?
What hobbies do they have, and what do they like to do outside of work?
What are their career goals? Are they looking to move up, or just hoping to cruise through to retirement?
All of these questions are used to help build your buyer persona and will help you provide the context for your buyer persona challenges and goals. How in-depth you go into answering these questions the easier it will be to help you understand what your customer/client wants and why they would want it. This will help you when interacting with the customer/client in the future.
Buyer Persona Goals?
Being able to understand what your buyer persona wants and needs are the most important when trying to offer them the marketing content and sales services that will help them find what they are looking for. The buyer persona goal could be anything, there is a wide range of different things they would want and need.
Buyer Persona Challenges?
There will be many different challenges which you need to identify for the buyer persona. The challenges help you work out the pain points of each buyer persona and helps you understand why the buyer persona would have these different pain points and how you would be able to solve them
Here are some questions which you could think about when looking at the different challenges the buyer persona would face:
What is keeping them from reaching their goals?
What parts of their job are difficult?
Do they have trouble selling initiatives to their boss?
Are they worried about making big investments?
Are they so busy that they don't have a chance to even consider how their business could improve?
Buyer personas in pharma
Here are some key factors to consider when developing buyer personas for the B2B pharmaceutical sector:
Role within the organization
The first step in creating a buyer persona is to understand the role of your target customer within their organization. Are they a prescribing physician, a pharmacist, a hospital administrator, or a procurement specialist? Each of these roles has different priorities, pain points, and decision-making processes, so it's important to tailor your messaging accordingly.
Industry trends and challenges
Next, you should research industry trends and challenges that are relevant to your target customers. For example, are there new regulations or reimbursement policies that are affecting the pharmaceutical industry? Are there emerging therapies or technologies that are disrupting the market? Understanding these factors can help you position your products and services in a way that addresses your customers' needs and pain points.
Personal and professional goals
As we picked up on earlier, an important factor to consider when developing buyer personas is the personal and professional goals of your target customers. For example, a physician may be focused on providing the best possible care for their patients, while a hospital administrator may be focused on reducing costs and improving efficiency. By understanding these goals, you can tailor your messaging to show how your products and services can help your customers achieve their objectives.
Communication preferences
Finally, it's important to understand your customers' communication preferences. Do they prefer to receive information via email, phone, or in-person meetings? Are they active on social media or do they prefer more traditional channels? By understanding these preferences, you can tailor your communication strategy to reach your customers where they are most receptive.
In conclusion, developing buyer personas is essential for success in the B2B pharmaceutical sector. By understanding your target customers' roles, industry trends and challenges, goals, and communication preferences, you can tailor your sales and marketing strategies to better meet their needs and preferences. This, in turn, can lead to more effective customer engagement, increased sales, and ultimately, a stronger competitive position in the pharmaceutical marketplace.
For more on strategic marketing approaches in the pharmaceutical sectors, visit our section on strategy.
