Let’s start with this: persona-based marketing is a subset of inbound marketing that is creative, fun, and the kind of thing that people look forward to developing at work vs. dread dealing with. Just like kids celebrate when the teacher rolls in the TV and says, “Who’s up for some Star Wars?”, grown-ups get all happy inside when their boss says, “Let’s do some brainstorming about persona-based marketing!”
Of course, it’s easy to understand where the joy comes from. Persona-based marketing is about taking raw psychographic, demographic, and historic purchase data and translating it into fictionalized profiles for different groups of ideal customers. It’s part big data analytics and part corporate storytelling. What’s not to get excited about?
Well, here’s what: in our experience which goes back decades, most businesses — and even more surprisingly, many marketing agencies that are supposed to know this stuff inside and out — are making some massive mistakes with persona-based marketing. Here are the top 3 swings and misses:
1. Profiles aren’t robust enough.
There’s a line between substantial and superficial. It’s not a thin line, and you can probably see it from outer space. Yet despite this, an incredible number of buyer personas are squarely and permanently in the superficial bucket. As such, using them to predict customer behavior — which is the whole point of having profiles in the first place — is about as scientific and valid as shaking up a magic 8-ball (“all signs point to no”).
2. Profiles are missing.
While building buyer personas isn’t rocket science or brain surgery, it’s not a simple task. It’s a complex and manually-intensive process that can’t and shouldn’t be done in a matter of hours. It’s more like days and weeks.
However, businesses that don’t realize the workload ahead — and marketing agencies that want to cut corners — invariably end up having gaps in their buyer personal roster. Yes, they often get some main players in there. But they leave out secondary and tertiary customer types, including influencers who don’t directly make purchases, but have a major role in the overall buying process.
3. Profiles aren’t updated.
We all know that “the only constant on the business landscape is change.” Yet knowing something and putting it into practice aren’t the same thing, and this is vividly illustrated in persona-based marketing.
Specifically, many businesses and agencies that put together buyer personas fail to realize that it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it thing. Buyer personas shift and adjust based on a variety of factors and forces, such as those driven by regulations, trends, technologies, perceptions and competition. Unless they’re regularly updated, they’re no longer accurate or relevant, which turns them into a liability rather than an asset.
The Bottom Line
At Leap Clixx, we have the expertise, technology, resources, and reach to build robust and functional buyer personas for our customers — without letting customer types fall through the cracks, or allowing profiles to grow stale, irrelevant and unreliable.
To learn more, contact us today and schedule your free consultation (and you can leave your magic 8-ball at home!).
Also, be sure to check out our FREE eBook on inbound marketing best practices:
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