Don’t Make These 6 Mistakes With Your Buyer Personas!
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Tell me if this sounds familiar to you:
You’ve read that audience segmentation is a BIG deal in marketing, and you totally get it. But actually gathering the precise data you need and turning it into personas that reflect your real audience is not as easy as the well-intentioned marketing books and blogs tell you.
Last week we wrote about the powerful benefits of creating buyer personas that illustrate your target audience segments. But maybe you know this already. Perhaps something related to the implementation of this idea isn’t quite working.
Maybe you’ve never done formal market research because someone at your company has full confidence they know the audience.
Or perhaps you’re relying on research conducted in that expensive, large-scale study years ago that may no longer apply.
Or maybe your data wasn’t set up properly to build your segmentation in the first place. It’s possible you’re looking at incomplete data—only secondary data, large-scale survey data, or data only from your current customers.
It’s even possible that you conducted your data correctly—your team took all the proper steps—but didn’t ask the right questions or had unskilled or biased moderators conducting primary research.
Or, your data is flawless, but you’re too close and can’t detach your hypotheses about the audience segments from the actual data.
None of these are fiction…In fact, these are such common mistakes that within the past 3 months alone, I could name at least one company we’ve worked with that’s made each of these mistakes.
In my two decades of market research and UX research, I’ve witnessed companies make the same damaging mistakes over and over when attempting audience segmentation and persona research.
Not only that, most of these mistakes are with the data itself, meaning that the impact is huge: these are sensitive mistakes that can lead to a snowballing effect of confusion, indecision, and (worst of all) crippling business decisions that companies truly believe are based on data.
This is one of the main reasons that some companies have given up on using data to make decisions: because it’s not trivial to get it right. There are several steps at the start of your research—from recruiting the right audience, to choosing the right combination of research methods, to synthesizing your data in a systematic, data-driven way.
In this article, I’ve compiled a list of 5 common mistakes to avoid when segmenting your audience and creating buyer personas.
Mistake #1: Job-based Personas
Photo by Hunters Race
I bet you’ve come across many buyer personas that lead with titles like “Accountant Aaron,” “Director Margaret,” or “VP Joyce.” Right? Because it’s so much easier to hinge personas on job titles. On the surface, it would seem like the perfect persona that could help you with lead gen too. But 99% of the time, this type of persona is extraordinarily flawed.
Look deeper, and you’d discover that these personas are nothing but heavy stereotypes. Because these buyer personas are often developed based on blanket assumptions around job titles, they often miss out on critical, helpful information about the target audience in focus.
For example, if you provide accounting software to companies, an “Accountant Aaron” persona would typically leave out non-accounting staff who are the ones sourcing and buying your accounting software. A project manager named Kathryn may be doing the research on different software options. Mike from IT may need the software to track his expenses. The app may also come in handy when Carla from marketing needs to file her quarterly social media marketing expenses report.
When you consider all these, you’d see how your “Accountant Aaron” buyer persona has done a great job at ignoring critical people outside the accounting department who can influence buying decisions of your product.
Often we see personas only for the decision-maker who’s writing the check. Last year one of our clients insisted their audience was only CTOs and Senior VPs, because that’s who they’ve sold to in the past. However, our research uncovered that these folks were only the ones approving the purchase; the real decision-makers were mid-level data analysts working across various departments.
Another problem: different companies have different titles for the same role. A “CMO” at one company may be a “Marketing Director” at another company or “VP of Marketing” or just “VP” or “Division Director” or “Lead Associate” or “Principal” somewhere else.
For these reasons, the goal is to make your personas based on behavior and psychographic commonalities, not on a job title or role.
Mistake #2: Fictitious Personas Created in a Conference Room
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com
More dangerous than creating stereotyped personas is the closely related mistake of developing personas without any field research at all. Many organizations don’t interview customers or prospects from their market before creating personas.
Now, this practice is usually well-intentioned. Honestly, we sometimes encourage this in ideation sessions to empathize with customers for companies who don’t have personas yet.
Most companies who create personas in a conference room really do intend to conduct research to “validate” these personas afterward. However, once those personas are sketched and words are in the PowerPoint slides, it feels done, and they can never quite find the time to revisit.
Raise your hand if this rings true for you!
If you’re in this boat, and can’t find the time to ensure that your assumptions are accurate, let’s set up a time to chat (yes, really) because by next quarter, wouldn’t you want to really start making decisions based on data, not assumptions?
Mistake #3: Relying on Just One Department
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi
Many companies begin and end their research with just one person or department.
Maybe it’s the manager who swears he’s talking to customers every day.
Maybe it’s the sales department because they always hear from customers and prospects. Perhaps it’s the product development team because they are expected to understand their product and the people they are designed for.
Nope, nope, and nope.
No single person has the complete picture of a customer’s journey, and you can’t expect a single team (except, perhaps, a research or consumer insights team!) to have all the critical pieces of information needed to create a comprehensive set of personas.
There’s no better person to ask about how a shoe pinches than the one wearing it. The sales team may know all the objections once someone is ready to buy. The product team may know the ins and outs of the product they build for the customers and prospects…
But only the real buyer would know why and how they interact with the products, where they learned they even needed your product, or what their process was like learning about you and comparing you to alternatives.
Mistake #4: Too Many Personas
Photo by Laura Crowe
You know that famous saying of the more, the merrier. Right? When creating buyer personas, throw that age-long maxim out of the window if you want to avoid confusion, indecision, and fatal business decisions.
Many marketers make the mistake of thinking that they have to account for every possibility to get maximum results from personas. In reality, the reverse is true. It’s a waste of time and resources to detail personas for groups you know you will not target.
Spend your energy on just the audience segments you’re going to target, with no more than 6 audience segments (and often, far fewer).
Any good researcher knows that your audience is not a monolith. But the point of personas is that they’re easy to remember and market to. You should know them like a best friend. And who really has more than 6 best friends, right?
Recently, an organization we were creating audience segmentation for told us that their audience was “all women across the US.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Once we dug in, they were down to 3 personas of specific niche groups that they could readily identify and target with exactly the right messages and messengers. Spread too thin, their impact would have been minimal because they would have created messaging for people who would never be their audience.
I’d go so far as to claim that there is no way to target more than 6 distinct market segments at once effectively. Honestly, even more than 3 is a stretch. So what’s the point of wasting precious time and resources creating personas for groups?
You might even want to start by creating one ideal customer avatar and expand to a second target segment once you’ve mastered the products and messaging for that group.
Mistake #5: Recruiting the wrong people for the study
Photo by Steve Johnson
To save on budget, companies often use a “friends and family” approach to recruiting for their audience research. I hate to be blunt here, but this approach doesn’t work. It doesn’t matter how many friends and family you talk to. If they aren’t the right people for your brand, you’ll get bad data.
Whether you’re hiring a professional recruiter, finding your own participants, or using a software tool like SurveyMonkey, where you can pay extra for recruiting, my best advice is to be highly specific and discerning about your screener criteria and requirements to become a participant.
Participants who aren’t a good fit will mess up your data, seriously compromise the integrity of your research, and set you up to make decisions that actually don’t align with what makes sense for your real prospects or customers.
Mistake #6: Not Following Your Persona Templates
Photo by Jim Wilson
Market researchers spend a lot of time, energy, and resources to plan market research, recruit the perfect audience, ask the right questions, use data to validate their assertions, and deliver a comprehensive persona template.
If you’ve done this at your company, I’m jumping up and down, cheering for you! Excellent work!
After all that research, the worst mistake would be to create a big honkin’ report and then…
File it away on a Drive folder or keep it at the top of the shelf – forgotten and never referred to when launching marketing campaigns.
Kind of counterintuitive, strange, and funny at the same time. Don’t you think? So many marketers are guilty of this mistake, creating comprehensive personas that make everyone go “wow,” then never surface them again, launching marketing campaigns without them, and then wondering why the target audience isn’t engaging or resonating with the content.
Creating buyer personas is vital, but they are NOT enough to get results. You must constantly refer to your persona templates at every point of your marketing, sales, and product planning process to keep your products valuable and your message on target and powerful enough to drive massive conversion.
An effective way to keep your buyer personas usable and top-of-mind is to condense them down to the essential data, print them out on paper and stick them on the wall, refer to them in meetings, creating a checklist item to check in with your personas to make sure your products or campaigns are going to resonate with them. Talk about your personas as real people; this practice will normalize empathy for your consumers throughout your company.
Conclusion
Although this blog post is not an exhaustive list, it has covered what I consider to be the biggest mistakes people make with audience segmentation and person research. Use the ideas shared here as a guide to avoid common mistakes and pitfalls when creating your personas.
If you’d like to hand over the challenges, confusion, and stress that come with market research to a team with two decades of experience creating flawless buyer personas, we’re waiting with open arms. Click here to book a time to talk.
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If you liked this article, you might like my blog post on The Best B2B Market Research Planning Template
Sarah Weise is the CEO of award-winning marketing research agency Bixa and the bestselling author of InstaBrain: The New Rules for Marketing to Generation Z. For 15 years, Sarah has been a guide to hundreds of leading brands, including Google, IBM, Capital One, Mikimoto, PBS, and U.S. Army, to name a few. Sarah helps brands achieve a laser focus on their customers and build experiences that are downright addictive. She lectures at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and speaks at conferences and corporate events worldwide.