By Michael Kling
Many marketing experts recommend developing buyer personas.
A fictionalized, composite picture of your customer, a buyer persona improves understanding of potential buyers and their purchasing behavior. Personas help better target the brand’s specific audience and better meet the audience’s needs. Also called marketing personas, buyer personas are often touted as essential for content marketers to develop and promote content to a targeted audience.
Many marketers may not understand personas so avoid them. Myths abound.
These are some of the main misconceptions about creating and using marketing personas, cited by Bonnie Harris of Wax Marketing.
Personas don’t describe behavior. Personas are based on enormous amounts of information about behavior, including problems customers experience with products and influencers. Some marketers consider customers in terms of demographics and psychographics. They don’t understand how to analyze for behavior and therefore are unable to add that information to their personas.
Digital marketing relies on data, so personas are irrelevant. Many digital marketers believe that analyzing quantitative data is the main path to meeting their goals. They focus on gathering data to determine what messages will be viewed and which messages will convert. Unfortunately, they do not understand their customers or prospects reading their content. That knowledge would help them construct better personas that help them reach their goals faster.
Personas are too narrow and you’ll miss customers. Some marketers worry that they’ll choose the wrong personas, which will not match their target customers. However, choosing the wrong persona at first and then adjusting that persona is preferable to pursuing a wide demographic. In addition, perusing a wide demographic is difficult if not impossible. Shooting an arrow carefully at a single target, or a few targets, is better than blindly shooting at many targets.
Personas don’t work for B2B. B2B businesses often rely on sales teams that stress human connections and prefer to view client interactions as unique. They eschew personas, believing they entail a cookie-cutter approach. Although they don’t replace the human connections, personas can help B2B sales and marketing reach those connections faster.
Personas are not real customers. Some marketers argue that they should meet real customers, not “hide behind personas.” The problem is that you can’t meet all your real customers. In addition, the ones you can meet might not be provide enough information to create a marketing strategy. People in focus groups might not reveal their honest opinion. Even if you do meet them, actual customers might not reveal their honest opinions either, except when mad.
Other Persona Myths
Other marketers also cite common persona myths.
Personas are limiting. Many businesses contend they have too many different kinds of buyers. Creating and marketing content to all those personas is too difficult, they say. Most businesses do have different types of buyers. But in fact, the more scattered the customer base, the more likely there’s benefit from the laser focus of a single persona, at least initially, says Emily Inman, an inbound marketer and senior content strategist at Cleriti.
You don’t need research to build buyer personas. Not without making stuff up, stresses Keith Gutierrez at Modigility. Research and data is mandatory.
You need a catchy name. Some marketers like to give their personas alliterative names like “Marketing Mary.” That might be helpful, but it doesn’t provide additional insights. Simple names are sufficient.
You need a graphical representation. Your sales team may view a graphical representation of a persona as marketing fluff. Instead, tell them what you learned about the buyer and an outline of important insights.
Bottom Line: Developing a marketing persona is a key step in content marketing. Still, many marketers hesitate to embrace them due to prevailing misunderstandings.
Michael Kling is manager of public relations, marketing and social media at Glean.info, a media monitoring and measurement service that provides customized media monitoring and PR analytics solutions.
