How to Create Meaningful Buyer Personas for the Buyer’s Journey: Decision Stage

The buyer's journey is an important part of Kuno Creative's marketing success. Our strategies continue to evolve based on the buyer's journey for each of our clients. This six-part blog series describes each stage of the buyer's journey and how buyer personas can help facilitate promising strategies and success. This is the fourth blog within the series.

No one at a company wakes up one day and decides they are going to make a large purchase out of nowhere. When the time comes to decide what to buy and from where, there has been lots of careful consideration, many discussions and lots of information provided.

A buyer in the decision stage is looking for product information, and they want to know enough about your product to evaluate its relevance to their problem. It’s important to remember that although a potential buyer has gotten to this stage with your product or service, you can still lose them at this part of the process. This is a critical stage in the buyer’s journey.

According to the 2020 B2B Buyer Behavior study on how buyers buy, it’s important to note that the COVID-19 pandemic has had varying effects on companies’ purchasing decisions. 47% of buyers had to put off purchases due to budget freezes. But 30% of buyers actually expedited purchasing plans to accommodate their rapidly changing business needs.

The pandemic won’t last forever, but its effects will impact companies and their buying behaviors long after it ends. This requires consideration for buyers and how they can make purchases. Here are some things to consider when crafting buyer personas for the decision stage.

Buyer Persona Development for the Decision Stage

If, up until now, you’ve been interviewing one person, focus on that person’s perception of the group dynamics of the decision at this stage. Here are some questions you might want to ask:

1. When you looked at our solution, who was on the buying team?
2. How did each person on the team get information about our solution? What were each of their initial reactions to what they saw? What questions did they have? What content or information was the most compelling to each person?
3. Were there any dynamics that reflected internal tension about making purchase decisions? Did you have to clear any internal hurdles that were unrelated to our product to move on to the next stage? How did you all come to an agreement to move forward?
4. How did the coronavirus pandemic affect your buying decisions? How will it affect your company long term?

Create a model of what you find. Once you have the answers to these questions, enter them into a spreadsheet to segment them out. Make notes about each person on the buying decision team, what their thoughts were and what content they found most compelling. Also make a note of any internal conflicts that were taking place between the individuals on the team, with the goal of noticing patterns from client to client, should they emerge.

Type of Content at the Decision Stage

What should you do with this knowledge? First, make sure you’ve got content for each person on the team. If specific members of the team had certain questions, create a document that answers those questions with their role in mind. Create more of the kind of content they indicated resonates with them and promote it via segmented email if you’re using marketing automation. Include it in blog posts, your Knowledge Center and consider creating a checklist broken out by areas to consider when making a purchase decision.

Help Them Make The Right Decision

If you arm everyone on the buying decision team with the content they need, this vast array of knowledge should give enough confidence to make the decision to buy from your company. A purchase is the next step in this process, and it’s also the signaling behavior that gets us to the next stage in our journey: the often-overlooked but still important, support.

Read Part 1: Buyer Personas

Read Part 2: Awareness Stage

Read Part 3: Consideration Stage