Maximize the Potential of Your Buyer Personas

You may have encountered the term ‘buyer persona’ many times… but do you know what it means? And even if you do, are you using these profiles to their full potential to extract the maximum benefit for your business?

Let’s be real—crafting buyer personas isn’t just an eye-opening experience; it is actually your organization’s secret weapon. However, it cannot be a one-time exercise. Buyer personas should be developed to provide continuous value - they can go a long way in giving your company an edge in dealing with sales support and training, enhancing content curation efforts, and more.

Buyer Persona - What Does it Mean?

According to HubSpot, a buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses! Basically, personas are detailed profiles that include the demographic information, purchasing behaviors, pain points, challenges, and goals of your ideal customers. 

For instance, consider two friends, one of whom has a simplistic personality while the other is an academician with a more layered approach to things. Suppose you want to target the first friend as a potential customer and use complex messaging full of jargon to cater to him… You’re possibly not going to have any luck. However, if you use the same messaging for the second friend who is an academic, you have a much higher chance of success.

Thus, creating buyer personas assists in efficiently marketing and selling to diverse customer segments, taking their individual characteristics and attributes into consideration.

Through the process of HubSpot implementation, you learn to develop ideal buyer personas. Here are some of the takeaways from that learning curve.

Create Easy-to-Use, Concise Personas

Creating precise and actionable buyer personas means digging up extensive background data that go way beyond the basic demographic information… You need to put yourself in the shoes of the persona and think of:

• Their go-to industry information sources.
• The KPIs that work for them. 
• Their preferred communication channels. 

While there is always a temptation to include every piece of data that you have managed to gather, it is vital to keep in mind that anyone and everyone from the marketing and sales teams will rely on the personas built. Who are we kidding? Not everyone on your sales and marketing dream team is going to comb through a 30-page report on buyer personas.

Thus, you need to curate comprehensive summarized reports on buyer personas that feature the most essential details in a clean, concise manner and are easily scannable. 

Adapt Personas to Specific Channels

When we create buyer personas, we're basically building the bedrock for all your marketing and sales adventures – websites, paid media, emails, events, you name it!

To maximize the effectiveness of your personas, it's crucial to perform some initial work by adapting each persona to the specific channel you're focusing on. The secret sauce? Task analysis which involves studying how users complete tasks to achieve their goals.

Consider the subtasks linked to each task, the approach each persona would take, and the channels they are inclined to use. That way, your personas will be spot-on across all channels.

Regularly Update the Personas

As Revops consultants & HubSpot Diamond Partners, we sometimes come across organizations that created their buyer personas eons ago (we are not kidding) and haven’t updated them since. As a result, when they needed to rely on these built personas, such reports were deemed out-of-date, and important decisions were made without them being referred to.

When you are dealing with B2C or B2B buyer personas, updating them as your industry and organization evolve over time is crucial.

Giving your buyer personas a yearly refresh is a good idea to keep them on point.

Do Not Get Blindsighted by Personas

While building buyer personas is integral to forming a sound strategy, expanding your catalog, or creating content, it is not and should not be the end-all criteria for all decisions. It is very important to judge every idea on its merits; do not simply discard an idea because it does not adhere to your built personas.

Suppose you are launching a new fitness apparel line, and your buyer persona suggests that young adults aged 18–30 are the ideal consumers. However, focusing solely on this  will mean you will fail to attract adults aged 50 and above who are also interested in health and fitness and possess a higher disposable income. By overlooking this demographic, you risk missing out on opportunities for broader market reach and increased sales.

Get the Most Out of Your Buyer Personas

Some companies think buyer personas are not the ‘IT Thing’. We like to disagree. Companies often neglect to keep their personas up-to-date and miss out on their full potential. Don't let that be you. Keep your personas fresh and you'll see they're still as relevant as ever.

As an agency full of HubSpot CRM experts who specialize in offering Revops as a service, we are fully convinced of buyer personas' effectiveness and the instrumental role they play in crafting a successful marketing or sales strategy. We're here to help if you ever need any assistance in creating or refreshing your buyer personas.