Whether you’re launching a new product or feature, revisiting sales assets, or building a product demo, buyer personas are a pivotal part of your product marketing strategy.
They should be at the forefront of your mind throughout the process and shape what you create - and how.
But it’s not always necessarily plain sailing. While designed to bring a whole host of benefits, there are times when personas fail - but when is this the case, and more importantly, why?
In this article, we’re going to answer essential questions, including:
- What are personas?
- Why can personas fail?
- How to improve your personas
- How to improve your personas
What are buyer personas?
Personas are fictional characters you create based on research, and they represent segments of your market.
When you’re creating your personas, research really is the name of the game; they can’t be built on internal assumptions.
While you might begin the process with internal assumptions, you need to validate these thoughts with qualitative and quantitative data from real customers, whilst also ensuring you update this data regularly. After all, your personas are always subject to change - they don’t remain the same.
James Shaw
Four reasons why your buyer personas aren't working
Personas are awesome tools used by companies the world over to:
- Create products your target market wants,
- Help you market your product effectively,
- Develop products and features,
- Understand the buying decisions of the customer.
However, it isn’t always a stroll in the park - not by a long shot. There are times when personas don’t quite hit the spot, and they can be misunderstood and misused.
There are several reasons why personas may not have the desired effect:
You don’t have leadership support
Support from leadership figures plays a fundamental role in the successful implementation of personas, but as we found in our C-Suite report, perceptions of product marketing aren’t always rosy; there’s sometimes a misalignment when it comes to the relationship between product marketers and leadership figures.
As a product marketer, you’ll immediately find yourself up against it if senior figures are reluctant to grant you buy-in to support your personas. In some cases, they may think they’ve got an idea of who your personas are, and could be reluctant to provide you with the backing you need to perform to your potential.
For example, position your personas as an alignment resource. Because let’s face it, if alignment in your company is skewed, this can lead to customer churn, and reactivating churned customers is no mean feat.
Your personas are forced on your colleagues
Teamwork makes the dream work.
Sure, it’s one of the cheesiest, corniest clichés in the book, but it rings true - this product marketing skill is essential when it comes to building personas that kick ass.
Companies can fall into the trap of creating personas in a silo and when personas are imposed on team members, they don’t know the ins and outs of how they were formed in the first place, let alone how to use them properly.
You need to adopt an inclusive mindset whenever you’re creating or developing personas. Including your team members, key stakeholders, and persona end-users will enhance the validity of your research.
You’re not communicating properly
“A lack of communication leaves fear and doubt.”
While we’d love to say we birthed those words of wisdom, we’re merely quoting actor Kellen Lutz, but the sentiment doesn’t change.
You could hit a home run and create the granddaddy of personas, but if you and your team aren’t on the same page, they’re useless.
The resolution? Organize a meeting, order pizza, and smash your internal communication; grab the bull by the horns and tell your colleagues how the personas can be used to impact your projects.
Oftentimes, if people don’t know what to do, they won’t ask. So, nip it in the bud before it reaches that stage and outline:
- What they are,
- What you’re going to do with them,
- How they’ll help you all do your jobs.
Your personas are invalid
Every persona you and your team create should be unique and built with a clear-cut objective; there’s no such thing as a general formula you can apply across the board.
Despite this, there are times when PMMs fall into the trap of either creating personas that don’t correspond to their needs or reusing the same persona multiple times, and this is a recipe for disaster.
View each instance as a blank canvas, and don’t be tempted to try and shoehorn square pegs into round holes to save time. Trust us, you’ll pay for it further down the line.
How to improve your buyer personas
Creating effective buyer personas is crucial for successful product marketing, but it's equally important to continuously refine and improve these personas as your business grows and evolves.
To find out more about improving personas, we sat down with Mindi Grissom, Director of Product Marketing at Sisense. You can watch her interview here, or read on as we unpack her key strategies for persona development and improvement.
Adopt an analytical approach
Leveraging analytics and surveys is a powerful way to gather more comprehensive information about your audience as your customer base expands.
This dual approach allows you to establish a baseline using third-party information while utilizing internal data to understand the purchasing cycle. Surveys can help you dig deeper into pain points and gain insights into who your customers really are.
Remember that the persona development process requires both qualitative and quantitative data. This combination enables you to track changes in customer behavior and interactions, make data-driven decisions, and justify the creation of new personas with supporting evidence.
Align your personas to business goals
When improving your personas, it's important to strike a balance between your current audience and your future business goals. Align your personas with your company's strategic direction by creating a mix of who your personas are today and who they might be tomorrow.
This approach ensures that you understand and segment your target audience appropriately while supporting your business objectives.
Tighten up your messaging
Effective messaging is crucial for resonating with your target audience. To improve this aspect of your personas, focus on solving pain points rather than adhering to specific content formats.
Take the time to understand what you're trying to convey to your audience and explore various ways to reach them through different content types. Ensure that your messaging communicates effectively with each persona, adapting your approach as needed.
Regularly review your personas
Implementing a feedback loop is essential to keep your personas relevant and effective. Regularly review and update your personas, recognizing that what resonated six months ago may not be effective today. Stay adaptable to evolving market conditions and customer preferences to maintain the accuracy of your personas.
Recognize that personas are not static documents. Regularly update your personas to reflect changing human behavior and account for evolving decision-making processes within organizations. Be prepared to adapt as people move in and out of the sales cycle, ensuring that your personas remain accurate representations of your target audience.
Find a balance between broad and hyper-targeted segmentation
Finding the right balance in segmentation is crucial to avoid common pitfalls. Don't go too broad, as this can lead to generic messaging that fails to resonate. Conversely, avoid being hyper-targeted, which can confuse your sales team and fragment your market unnecessarily.
Experiment with different levels of segmentation to find the right balance, and be prepared to group similar personas together if you find you have too many distinct segments.
When improving your personas, always keep the human element in mind. Consider the emotions and motivations driving your customers, thinking beyond job titles and roles to understand the person behind the persona. Use this empathetic approach to create more relatable and effective personas that truly resonate with your target audience.
By implementing these strategies, you can continuously improve your buyer personas, ensuring they remain relevant, accurate, and valuable tools for your product marketing efforts.
The key to successful persona development is staying adaptable and maintaining a deep understanding of your evolving customer base. As you refine your personas, you'll find that your marketing efforts become more targeted and effective, leading to better engagement with your audience and improved business outcomes.
Get Persona Certified with Product Marketing Alliance
Whether you’re new to personas or a veteran, B2B or B2C, this course is packed with the practical tips, real-life case studies, and expert advice you need to create, use, and roll out game-changing personas.
Personas have the power to make or break not just your product marketing efforts, but that of your sales, marketing, product, engineering, and customer success counterparts too.
Throughout the course, we explore every element of the personas process. From use cases to preliminary work, interview guides to data consolidation, company-wide communication plans to reviewals, you name it, this course has got it all.
By the end of the course, you’ll be able to:
🔥 Create, build, and deliver personas that actually work.
💪 Streamline the persona process by focusing only on extracting and mining data that drive bottom-line impact.
⬆️ Take your entire company’s product, marketing, sales, and customer-focused efforts to the next level.
🎯 Get everyone in your org rallied around your personas and clearly demonstrate the tangible value they deliver.
👌 Understand where and when personas should be used and provide clear use cases to key stakeholders across the business.
💁🏼♀️ Show off your shiny new certificate to everyone in your network.
Avoid unnecessary mistakes.
Get Persona Certified
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