Understanding the Disconnect Between Real Life Experiences and Buyer Persona Expectations

Content marketing is gaining streams as being a proven strategy in the marketing world and more businesses are taking delve in it to build buyer personas. According to the buyer personas survey conducted by customer thinks, 57% of respondents did their first ever buyer persona development initiative within the last two years, but this is not the most interesting find of the survey. The interesting part is that despite trying hard to get to know their buyers, only 15% of survey respondents thought that their efforts were successful.

So as many as 85% respondents believed that their efforts to creating buyer personas are not being sufficient, than worry not because we are here to help you with what seems to be the issue:

You stick with only what you know

The first thing many businesses do when developing buyer persona is the profiling of their existing customers. Then, they use their own perspective and understanding of their products for developing pain points and unique selling propositions. This although being a good strategy can land many in a mistake. This method though helps you in targeting the people who are already using your product but ignores the demographics of other customers who are yet to include your product in their repertoire. Start off with what you know and use this information as a launching point for some in-depth research into your target audience.

You fail to stand out

Buyer persona can work wonders for the business, if only used in the right way. Buyer persona can actually make your corporate website design up to five times more effective for your target consumers. It is their effectiveness that makes them the most popular marketing tactic worldwide. Therefore, it is very possible that if you are targeting a specific persona that is relevant to your market, some or all of your competition are as well, and in this scenario it gets difficult to nurture leads, especially when your company is at the startup level.
Because of this, competition analysis should also be one of your important considerations when developing your buyer persona strategy. Luckily for you, competition has many pain points and you need to find a unique one that will set you apart from the rest.

You lean on sales intelligence

This is especially for businesses who are just beginning to adopt buyer personas, it’s easy to confuse with buyer profiling. According to the Customer Think’s survey, this is a big problem:

• 80 percent were confused about the difference between buyer personas and product management/sales intelligence type buyer profiling
• Nearly 60 percent said they were frustrated their buyer personas were based on typical product management and sales intelligence

Buyer personas should be built in collaboration with the sales team, but they shouldn’t be driven by sales intelligence. Effective buyer personas come from:

• When you listen to your customers
• Customer data analysis for demographic information
• Keeps in consideration the goal of your buyers
• Paying attention to important and unimportant elements around you.

All this information comes together to narrate a story about your unique audience. This helps you in building empathy for them and understanding their needs as you look for ways to meet with your products and service offerings.

They are checked off your to-do list

One of the primary steps of creating a content marketing campaign is to set a buyer persona strategy. But like any other important task, it can never be checked off your to-do list completely, even when done. Your company is growing and the economy is changing, while people’s social positions and job security change at an amazing rate. All of these things (and more) are factors that affect the state of your target audience.

If you don’t make the effort to regularly dig for new insights and adjust your understanding of how people are thinking, feeling, and acting, you won’t have a good idea of what their needs are, or how your business can help.

You have a content disconnect

In determining why your buyer personas aren’t effective, consider that the reason might not necessarily be because they’re not accurate. The truth is, many businesses create great buyer personas and use them to develop pain points and a USP, but then never refer back to them for other content marketing tasks.

Buyer personas should be used to brainstorm content ideas.

And since 60 percent of marketers create at least one piece of content per day, they should also serve as a daily litmus test — with every new piece of content created, marketers should have a good understanding of how their ideal buyers would think, feel, and respond to it.

All your content should be designed to drive certain behaviors in your audience. You won’t know how effective your potential content will be at this goal unless you take a hard look at your buyer personas for each piece.