Buyer personas are discovered, not created
Learnings from a failed product launch, what a buyer persona should achieve and contain, and a simple process to craft personas that actually exist.
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90% of buyer personas are ignored.
Well, I made the number up… but I bet it’s not too far off.
Back in 2012, ‘Marketing Mary’ buyer personas were all the rage. Where did our customers go on holiday? What books do they read? What brand of car do they drive?
Full of creative information… but lacking anything useful.
And here we are, in 2021, and I think most startups are still stuck in the past.
Why does this happen? Why are personas fluffy pictograms of faux customers, when we have tons of data and insight at our fingertips? Why are buyer personas ‘built’ through internal workshops, rather than ‘discovered’ through qualitative interview and quantitative survey research?
Maybe we just don’t know what a good persona explainer should do, let alone what a good persona explainer should look like.
What is the goal of a buyer persona?
Buyer personas are designed to help your internal teams build an understanding of the types of people they will interact with in the market.
They need to do just three things…
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