How to stop wasting your time on pointless buyer personas

Buyer personas can be a yawn-fest (c’mon, you know it’s true)

Check this gem out that I once got sent:

Every morning at 7am, Chris (42M, IT Manager) drags himself from the bed he shares with Grace, his wife of 14 years, shuffles down the stairs to the kitchen, eats his muesli alone and checks his phone. If Grace or their 13-year-old son, Max, ask, Chris pretends he’s reading The Economist. Really, he’s scrolling through Twitter, reading comments about Meghan Markle, with whom he is secretly obsessed. But Grace and Max don’t ask. Grace hasn’t spoken to Chris since their fight on Tuesday and Max has his headphones in, waiting for his mother to shout at him, as she does every morning, to hurry up before he makes her late for work…

Yes, you read that right.

Not an unfinished novel. Not American Beauty fanfiction. A buyer persona.

And guess what this client’s company sells?

Cloud storage.

I have no idea how this marketer thought Chris and Grace’s marital problems would influence a B2B tech company’s marketing strategy.

But I do understand how he arrived at this long-winded, fluffy mini-story.

There’s a ton of advice floating around on how to write a buyer persona - and most of it’s… bad.

So, how should you write a buyer persona?

To get to the root of this, the question you should be asking is: what is the point of it?

The crux is, a buyer persona should bring laser-like focus to your marketing messaging and content strategy. You’re figuring out exactly what will persuade prospective buyers that your product or service is the one they need.

While most people write their fluffy buyer persona based on assumptions, there are actually two parts to the process:

Buyer profile

This is your hypothetical buyer archetype. It includes demographics and psychographics. As long as they’re relevant to understanding your audience and how they relate to your brand.

Buying insights

This is the truly important bit you can’t live without. Buying insights are your potential customers’ motivations, expectations and goals, as well as perceived barriers and concerns they might have about your product.

Essentially, they’re the nuts and bolts of exactly how a real life customer was feeling when they decided to use your product/services OR why they didn’t.

So what are marketers doing wrong?

Here’s the problem: usually marketers are told to include as much detail as they can. To build a complete picture of the human they’re selling to.

But as you’re starting to see, that’s a waste of time. You don’t need to know everything about a potential customer. Only the details relevant to their purchase decision.

I’ve used an extreme example, but you’d be amazed how often a buyer persona for an AI startup mentions a brand of tea. Or a real estate marketer describes the political leanings of their imaginary clients.

There are three major problems with this:

1. It doesn’t help you understand when, how or why people buy from you.

2. It’s so hyper-specific it rules out almost everyone.

3. It intensifies any biases or assumptions you already have, causing you to miss out on prospective clients.

Allow me to explain in a bit more detail.

Understanding when, how and why people buy from you

It’s fair to say that analysing a prospective customer’s daily habits and routine can be useful. For example:

1. Establishing that your customers tend to take coffee and lunch breaks at regular times helps you tweak the timing of social media posts.

2. Knowing they’re likely to grab a sandwich and eat at their desks might mean you structure content around easily-scannable, bitesize chunks (pun intended).

3. Figuring out whether they’re checking Instagram or catching up on industry news helps you pick where to place ads.

… But unless you’re a food brand, fixating on whether the sandwich they’re munching at that moment contains cheese or hummus probably won’t help.

The same goes for why people buy from you.

Does Chris' deteriorating relationship with his son impact his choice of cloud storage provider? Seems unlikely. But what about Chris’ position in the company? His chances of promotion? His desire to impress his boss?

Now we’re talking.

It’s way too specific

In theory, everything in Chris’ buyer persona could be valuable - right down to the muesli - if the only person you’re marketing to is Chris. But you’re not. You’re targeting people who are like Chris in ways that are relevant to your brand.

Let’s assume this buyer persona was based on a real person.

First of all, it’s great that the marketer interviewed real people, scratching beneath the surface to discover what makes them tick. But only if it illuminates how other prospective buyers think, feel and behave, too.

You need to bear this in mind even when you’re picking out super-relevant details.

On the face of it, it’s more valuable for a B2B company to ask prospects about their work-related frustrations, pressures, and pain points. Or how they feel about products, services and professional publications (than what celebrities they follow on Twitter).

But even then, over-specificity can be a trap. If you interview one person, you have no idea if their perspective reflects the wider industry, their company’s idiosyncrasies, or their personal opinion.

The only way to know is to conduct multiple, well-structured, focused interviews, so comparing answers side-by-side.

It reinforces (seriously unhelpful) biases

Here’s something I’ve noticed about buyer personas in the B2B tech world: without exception, clients always describe their imaginary customer as male.

This is odd because a quarter of CIOs in Fortune 500 companies are women.

In fact, globally, 2 in 5 managers and 21% of all C-Suite execs are women.

Sure, it’s a minority, but it’s a sizeable one. If a quarter of your clients were based in Germany or worked in the healthcare sector, you’d probably consider this significant enough to warrant targeting.

So why don’t women get a mention? Most likely, for one of two reasons:

1. B2B tech companies don’t want to tailor their content by gender. In which case, gender isn’t relevant to their buyer personas; it’s an unhelpful distraction.

2. These companies are basing their buyer personas on a (biased) assumption, which defeats the point of a buyer persona.

The whole point of a buyer persona is to help you establish who you’re talking to so you can figure out how to reach them.

And if you default to the same stereotypes as everyone else, how will you compete?

Imagine just one B2B tech company said: ‘let’s create a separate buyer persona for this 21% of female CIOs our competitors are ignoring. See things from their perspective. Identify distinct channels to reach them through.’

How much more effective would they be at reaching a fifth of their prospective customer base?

Using buyer personas as a way to identify key customers your competitors aren’t targeting is far more valuable than reinforcing the same old assumptions. (At The Creative Copywriter, we call this “zigging while the industry zags”.)

And finally…

The point of all this is to get inside prospective buyers’ heads.

How they think about the problem you solve. How it fits with their broader ambitions. The way they see themselves.

What were they thinking when they decided they needed your product?

What triggered it on that very day? (spoiler alert: it won’t be the cup of tea they had in the morning).

What will put them off - or actually made them decide NOT to buy?

Keeping these questions in mind keeps you on the right track, focusing on the factors that actually convince and convert.

Without wasting your time on the teeny tiny details that don’t.