Marketers use buyer personas to help them better understand their prospects and customers. Buyer personas have multiple uses across your business from marketing to HR (personas are a great tool to use in the interview or onboarding process). Well-developed personas are full of rich insights into the motivations, pain points, and views that drive customer behaviour, whereas poorly developed personas just reinforce existing opinions.

Here are three common traps marketers fall into when building personas, and how to sidestep them:

1. Creating too many personas.
   Your organisation has multiple product or service lines spread across multiple regions. Your colleagues in various regions keep telling you that “things are different here.” They may be right, but don’t start building separate personas for each business line and region just yet. 

   Begin by building out no more than three personas. If you create too many personas, no one will remember them — which means that they will fall to the wayside. 

2. Focusing on the wrong personas.
   Build your personas based on your best customers, when assessing ‘best’ consider revenue, value and profitability. Don’t start out by creating personas for outlying business lines which attract a unique customer from the rest of the business — unless you know for sure it will be a strategic focus of growth for the business.
3. Ignoring your customers.
   The quality of insight that goes into developing personas ultimately determines their effectiveness. Your data can tell you which of your customer segments are the best and how they are currently engaging with you. Your sales team can tell you how customers interact with them and will help you to build up their profile details. But it is your customers who will validate (or not) your beliefs and provide insights you hadn’t considered. 

At Bluewolf, we believe the best way to build and mobilise buyer personas is to begin by leveraging insights from your data to identify your best customers, then gather a core team from marketing, sales and operations into a workshop to develop your personas. The purpose of the workshop is also to educate the team on best practices and drive engagement so that your personas are actually used outside of the workshop.

The work doesn’t stop when the workshop ends. This is where you validate and augment the details in your personas based on customer insights. You can gather these insights both formally through buyer persona interviews and win/loss debriefs and informally through conversations at events and in social scenarios. You should be continually developing and enhancing your personas whenever you gain more information from your buyers. Don’t stop speaking to your customers, this is how you keep your personas relevant.

Interested to start building buyer personas in your organization? Connect with Bluewolf experts to get started.