Four Ways To Use Buyer Personas

Updated October 25, 2024

Alternative & Interesting Uses

If you’ve ever read about Content Marketing you’ve heard of buyer personas. Buyer Personas are a kind of straw man, describing your ideal customer in a simple and memorable way. They also allow you to dig a little deeper and work out if you have more than one type of typical customer. But once you’ve built buyer personas, they can be used for some other interesting things that you might not have thought of.

How To Build Buyer Personas

Building a buyer’s persona is a process that should involve your whole team, from sales to your CEO and marketers. All of you get together and pool the information you have on your customers. By gathering information from multiple sources and touchpoints, you can build a portrait of what one looks like. But don’t forget to use all the data you have. One place, that is often overlooked, is in your Google AdWords and Analytics accounts. Here you can find demographic information on website visitors, people who click on ads and if you run a remarketing campaign, much more.

If you’ve built strong personas you can use them for more than just your sales team. Here are some more ‘out of the box’ ways you can use a buyer’s persona to help you:

1. Make Your Ad Spend More Programmatic

Programmatic ad buying sounds very complicated and is bound to impress your boss if you drop it into a conversation. But all it really means is using data to decide where you spend your ad revenue. If you build strong buyer personas they should help you to do this. The data behind your persona should mirror where you are buying ads. If you put a lot of money into SnapChat and your demographic is 65+, maybe it’s time to look at your personas again.

2. Human Resources

You don’t just have to build personas just for clients. Try building them for your own team too.

Use your experience in building them for clients to help build them to improve recruitment. If you want to hire people who would fit in well into your organization, then an employee persona for different roles is helpful.

According to People Keep, studies have shown that the cost of employee turnover can reach 6-9 months’ salary on average. Costs typically include recruitment as well as training and onboarding. So using a persona or several personas to help you find, cultivate and retain employees could help the company’s bottom line.

Personas can help you in crafting the job description and ad so you attract the right candidates. It can also help you shape the behavior-based questions you ask during an interview.

Partner With Companies Your Buyer Personas Like

One great idea we’ve seen for using your buyer personas is to use them to build marketing partnerships. If your company sells basketballs, then why not partner with a sneaker company? If you sell chocolate, then team up with a local cake shop or local winery. Having strong personas will make it easier to spot possible partnerships, as you build a more rounded idea of who your buyer is. When you understand your ideal customer, why they buy from you, you’ll be able to make other inferences about their lives. Personas can help show you links less obvious that Sneakers and Basketball.

Build Negative Personas

Building negative personas is often overlooked. Here we don’t mean people who don’t buy your product, but rather people who do and don’t like it. If you find you’re selling something to people and they continue to be unhappy with it, then it might not always be a product problem. Perhaps you’re just selling to the wrong people. Sometimes marketing misses the person it’s aiming for and negative personas can help show you what’s going wrong.

Here’s one example that comes from the B2B SAAS world. Your ads are directed to someone who wants your software but may not have the buying power to implement your service. They might buy the software, but if they can’t influence the integration process across the organization, they can end up dissatisfied, which reflects badly on everyone.

Build It and They Will Come

If you’re interested in building out some buyer personas there are some other great resources out there you can check out like the guides from HubSpot and Marketo. Another way to gather information is through in-depth client interviews. We’ve done this for many clients where we gather critical intel on the buying process (for buyer personas) as well as client testimonials, case studies, and revamping AdWords ads and landing pages.

Are you using buyer personas? We’d love to hear if they’ve helped your business.

Photo credit – Top: Joe