If you’ve seen many buyer personas, or read about them, you’ll have seen glossy decks full of weird names like “Marketing Mary/Mark” and “IT Ian.” They look tidy in PowerPoint. Headshots, hobbies, even a favourite coffee order, it sounds like you know who these people are. But they’re not useful when that’s what they focus
If you’ve seen many buyer personas, or read about them, you’ll have seen glossy decks full of weird names like “Marketing Mary/Mark” and “IT Ian.”
They look tidy in PowerPoint.
Headshots, hobbies, even a favourite coffee order, it sounds like you know who these people are.
But they’re not useful when that’s what they focus on.
Too many personas are built as an exercise. Something that should be done to say you’ve done it.
They give teams the illusion of customer insight, but never really get to the pain points, challenges or things that will make a difference to your content marketing.
The result is usually campaigns that fail, budgets that are wasted, and marketing losing credibility.
But, done right, buyer personas aren’t just nice-looking documents. They guide decisions across your business.
In this article, you’ll learn how to create personas that actually get used and deliver results.
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile of your ideal customer, based on research. At least that’s how HubSpot has always pitched it.
But it’s not a character sketch or a personality profile.
It’s a business tool that helps guide your SEO and content marketing, and other business decisions.
Strong personas focus on problems, goals, motivations, and buying triggers.
They explain why your customers buy, what stops them (or what stops them buying from you), and how they decide when and what to buy.
Demographics can be important, with details like job role, authority to spend budget, or company size, but only if these change the main challenges or buying decisions.
Look at these two examples:
Which one do you think is going to be more useful?
Personas matter because they can guide everything from content creation to sales scripts to product development.
Done well, buyer personas help with:
This is particularly useful with PPC and Paid Social because you can target your budget at the right audience to reduce waste.
With the right information from buyer personas, you can create content that speaks about real challenges and problems they face and position yourself as the answer.
Your sales reps will know objections before calls even start so they will be better prepared to deal with them.
Let customers tell you what features or upgrades they want instead of guessing.
Imagine if, instead of using personas that told you a company’s size and revenue bands, you had something that gave insight into genuine problems and challenges your potential customers were having, so you could create content, sales collateral and products that helped solve them.
Customer-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than companies that aren’t (according to Deloitte), and buyer personas are an easy way to achieve this.
Companies using personas generate 56% higher-quality leads and 36% shorter sales cycles.
More than 90% of firms hitting lead and revenue goals segment their marketing using buyer personas.
Websites built with personas in mind are up to five times easier to use. And convert better, according to HubSpot.
Persona-based emails double click-throughs, boost conversions by around 10%, and generate 18× more revenue than broadcast sends.
71% of companies beating revenue targets have documented personas. And are seven times more likely to keep them updated.
If you look at why buyer personas fail, it usually comes down to a few of the same things:
Buyer personas that focus on age, hobbies, and lifestyle aren’t going to influence buying decisions (at least not in B2B marketing).
If marketing is just brainstorming (or it’s done in the boardroom), then you’re not doing the right research you need to build an effective buyer persona.
Although you might need to convince multiple stakeholders during the buyer journey, you only need personas for the main people you deal with. Too many personas just confuse things and waste time and budget.
Personas can impact everything from market to sales to product to service, so all these departments should be involved in persona creation. Leaving departments out and just creating a “marketing” persona risks missing information from those closest to your customers.
Your business, products, and market change all the time. Your personas do too. Personas that aren’t updated lose relevance fast.
If you want to create effective buyer personas, these are some of the key things to focus on:
Talk to customers, prospects, sales reps, and support staff (even customers who’ve left or didn’t choose you, if you can). Ask them about challenges, blockers, and what information they use to make a decision.
Also, look at your CRM data, check website analytics and customer feedback surveys.
Buyer persona workshops can be great if you get the right people in the room. Ideally, you want at least one person from marketing, sales, service and delivery in one place so you can ask:
These can help you get information from every source in your business and can help uncover useful ideas for future content that you otherwise wouldn’t have thought of.
Instead of using job titles and demographics to group customers, use the challenges and pain points as the main segment. This is more useful for coming up with content and getting to the actual problems your customers are having.
Effective buyer personas should include (as a minimum):
Once you’ve created your persona, share it with your wider team to confirm ideas, test your personas against real prospect or customer conversations and then continue to build and update as things change.
To see how a buyer persona can be useful, vs something that reads more like a dating profile, look at the two examples below:
Ok, this is stripped back to the bare minimum, but you get the point. It’s not useful.
Creating a buyer persona is one thing, but it’s only useful if you use it.
Any topics or channels you use should be guided by your personas. Think, would the persona find this useful, and would it help them, or make them take an action? If it wouldn’t, don’t do it.
Use the common objections or sticking points as sales training for your team so they know how to handle them when they come up to keep sales moving.
Use what your personas tell you as a guide for new features or products that will solve their problems. If cost is a recurring problem, come up with features that prove ROI. If disjointed systems keep coming up, focus on integrations or making your product “all in one”.
Creating useful buyer personas can guide every department in your business to be more targeted, efficient and effective.
By focusing questions on pain points, challenges and objections or frustrations, you’ll have valuable information to help you market better, sell more, and create better products.
And by keeping on top of buyer persona development, you can be sure the information you have will be reliable for a long time, rather than gathering dust while you try some finger-in-the-air marketing.
If you want help producing accurate buyer personas that help, get in touch with our content marketing agency.
Or keep reading our blogs to get useful information on improving content marketing to win more customers.
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