Marketing Personas 101. As marketers, you might not like to…
By: Trapica Content Team
Tags: Mistakes, Marketing, Hubspot, Improvement, Artificial Intelligence

As marketers, you might not like to hear that you’re doing something wrong, and this is natural. Nobody likes to hear that they’re wrong — especially when it’s something they’ve been doing for many years. However, marketing personas are probably something that you could improve. By the end of this guide, we’ll hopefully convince you to use marketing personas differently. When all is said and done, a buyer persona should help your marketing strategy and put you on a better course for the future.

What’s a Buyer Persona?

In short, a buyer persona is a single representation of your target market. Essentially, you pin everything you know about the ideal customer to this profile and use it for marketing purposes. Although you might name this person, they don’t exist in reality. Instead, it’s just something (or someone!) for the marketing and sales teams to focus on. Rather than creating content for a huge audience, keep the buyer persona in mind and create something that resonates.

Read More: How to Create Buyer Personas for Your Business

A typical buyer persona contains the following information:

Age

Education

Gender

Religion

Location

Marital status

As you will have noticed, this is for the most part demographics and basic information about the individual. By the end, you might have the following:

18–30

College degree

Male

N/A

United States

Single

Suddenly, you have a basic profile to work from when creating content, developing products, and performing other tasks within the business.

The Problem with Most Buyer Personas

Here comes the issue (sorry!) — most marketers and businesses work backward and in a way that doesn’t make sense to create a buyer persona. At the moment, we create buyer personas to deploy across the business and then struggle to enjoy any benefit. For years, we’ve been looking at the solution while searching for the problem.

Although it’s interesting to learn about the people who buy our products, there’s often nothing actionable that we can take from it. Therefore, we’re still left fumbling around in the dark but this time with a pretty buyer persona to ignore.

Another problem is that buyer personas don’t normally contain the right information. As a marketer, what can you really do with the information that somebody is creative and organized? How can you implement this information into your marketing strategy? Sadly, most people look for a template online and gather the information that has no relevance or importance to the business itself.

Over the years, we’ve seen plenty of businesses that continually update their buyer personas without ever understanding why. Line managers chase the updated personas and workers attempt to desperately build them.

Too often, the buyer persona contains information about the buyer with no way for the marketing team to put it into action. Yet, leaders in businesses still put teams under pressure to create the latest edition of buyer personas.

Current Personas

At the moment, personas are biased and contain stereotypes which is unhelpful for the business. They’re often gathered from guesswork, informal interviews, and other poor sources of data. Though they’re designed to broaden our understanding of customers, they actually narrow it because they suggest that only one type of person will like what the business has to offer.

New Personas

In the marketing world, everything is always changing. We’re suggesting a change in how businesses develop buyer personas. We believe that buyer personas should include information that finally helps the marketing team appeal to the right consumers. It should also include the source of all information to help its potential accuracy.

Furthermore, the buyer persona should cover the full range of customers you’re likely to encounter rather than just one, which is a big change. If you need to target specific individuals, the buyer persona should have segmentation to allow for this. Otherwise, you can create content for and market to several individuals within the same persona.

Building a Buyer Persona

With this problem in mind, how do you go about creating a buyer persona? First and foremost, we should note that a personalized approach is always best. If you choose a template from the internet, you’re following a formula that worked for one business. Unfortunately doing this, you aren’t guaranteed to find the same success. You might look at the template and realize that 50% of the fields are irrelevant to what you need.

Read More: Personalize Your Business with Conversational Marketing

There’s nothing wrong with looking at templates for ideas, but you need to build your own buyer persona depending on the problems you’re trying to resolve. It doesn’t matter if you paid for an online seminar and they gave you a stress-free, guaranteed success version of a buyer persona — there’s no such thing. The one most likely to contribute to your business is one that has been specifically shaped for your business.

After the Second World War, members of the United States air force were struggling to control planes in the air. As a result, scientists decided to create a new cockpit based on the average dimensions of air force pilots. After much deliberation and research, the new cockpit and seat were made available. Around 4,000 people tested the new seat, and not one single pilot fit into the seat comfortably.

At this time, the world learned that an average is exactly that…just an average. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing because this ‘average’ approach doesn’t fit anybody and there is no average consumer. If you take the one-size-fits-all approach to buyer personas, you’ll end up like many businesses before you — filing away the document and not looking at it again until it’s updated one year later.

HubSpot understands that businesses need their own buyer personas, and this is why it developed a tool called ‘Make My Persona’. Using this tool, you’ll complete the following sections:

Preferred method of communication

Their job is measured by…

Tools they need to do their job

Job responsibilities

Biggest challenges

They gain information by…

We won’t pretend that the tool is perfect, but it allows businesses and marketers to build a visual buyer persona just by answering some common questions. The reason we’re talking about the HubSpot tool is that it manages to avoid the one-size-fits-all mindset that seems to plague this corner of the industry.

Depending on what you need, it’s possible to add sections, delete them, include more detail, take detail away, and more. In the end, you will have created a buyer persona that works for YOUR business rather than one that has been created to meet the needs of another.

We aren’t saying that you need to use HubSpot because there are now lots of buyer persona tools that have adopted this new mindset. Alternatively, you might combine elements from various platforms and create your own persona. Either way, it’s important to get out of the one-size-fits-all mindset and create an actionable persona that helps your business.

Benefits of the New Persona Approach

Actionable Insights — Firstly, you get real, actionable insights for your business and the audience. Suddenly, the marketing team uses the buyer persona to do their job more effectively (something that wasn’t happening before!). With source details, you understand the accuracy of all data and can segment the audience to learn more about each.

Focus — Marketers now have an actionable buyer persona to inform their decisions and better understand what consumers need. With a clear target, you’ll have a focal point for content creation, product development, and other aspects of marketing.

Decision-Making — As well as helping to make decisions, having this new buyer persona approach allows you to defend them too. With the existing buyer persona approach, it’s hard to defend decisions because the persona didn’t provide actionable insights. It’s still too subjective and different people might uniquely interpret the information. With this new approach, the team has actionable insights and can defend decisions if something were to go wrong.

Unique Approach — Finally, you’re not just following a formula that worked for somebody else but rather creating a persona that suits YOUR business. You don’t need to worry about doing buyer personas in the right way — if it works for your business, then you’re doing it right.

With a bad persona, your team makes bad decisions, it doesn’t contribute to marketing efforts, and it’s more effort than it’s worth. With a good persona, the business has direction and real insights to help meet the needs of customers.

What are we doing wrong with marketing buyer personas? We’re stuck in the past and scared to generate personas that actually contribute to marketing.