A lot can change in a few years. Maybe your company rolled out new products. Maybe it shifted its focus on particular services—or finds itself serving different customers.
No matter what’s changed, your marketing strategy needs to evolve accordingly. An important part of that evolution may be updating your buyer personas.
Refining your buyer personas every few months or years can help ensure you’re targeting your highest-value prospects with messages that speak to their current needs.
Here, we identify some signs that you might need to refine or update your buyer personas, offer some advice on how to create more effective personas, and run through some practical uses for personas in the B2B world.
Let’s quickly clear up some potentially confusing terminology.
Marketers often discuss “target audiences” and “segmentation” when talking about buyer personas. Sometimes, these terms are used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be.
Let’s be clear:
Buyer personas don’t represent a single audience member, nor do they include every trait of every member of the group. Instead, they summarize key, shared characteristics of individuals in that segment, like:
If you’re new to the concept of buyer personas, or could use a more in-depth refresher, check out our other post about developing buyer personas. We offer a functional definition of buyer personas and lay out some steps for creating them.
If your company engages in account-based marketing (ABM), you may wonder about the difference between buyer personas and ideal customer profiles—a concept that’s often a part of ABM programs.
There are three major differences:
To read an in-depth comparison between buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, check out this HubSpot article.
Advice on how often to revisit your buyer personas varies, but in general, it’s a good idea to update your personas when significant changes have occurred in your business, or when existing personas are too vague or impractical to be helpful.
A 6-month or one-year check-in is a reasonable timeline to open your personas up and see if changes are needed.
Look for the following signals when deciding whether it’s time to update and refine your personas:
HubSpot outlines several of these situations in detail in this post.
This one sounds obvious. Wouldn’t your persona already match your business’s needs?
Here’s what I mean: if your business or industry has quirks that affect your sales cycle or customers’ buyer’s journeys, make sure that these are accounted for in your buyer persona(s).
For example, consulting firms always have at least two, very different target audiences: potential clients, and potential consultants they would like to hire. As a result, consulting firms should always create buyer personas for each audience.
Another example is a manufacturing or tech company launching a new and largely unknown piece of machinery or software.
This sort of company would need to spend a lot of time building awareness for its products and educating potential customers.
As a result, their buyer personas should emphasize awareness-stage concerns, such as FAQs about the product that will need to be addressed in ads and content.
In the midst of the flurry of the update process, it can be easy to lose sight of why you have personas in the first place.
Personas are tools. If they become so convoluted that you never want to look at them again, they're not doing their job.
Use these best practices as loose guidelines to develop the tool that will actually help your team get the job done. Only include information that you feel you'll actually use.
For example, if you feel like your team's ideal persona tool would only include your persona's pain points, motivations, goals, company size, and job title, leave it there. If, on the other hand, your company would benefit from a more in-depth profile that includes, for example, a day in the life description, then do that.
Ultimately, personas are cheat sheets that remind you who you're talking to every day.
The longer your sales cycle and more complex your customers’ buyer’s journey (or sales funnel stages, if you prefer), the more detailed your buyer persona will likely be.
The reason for this is practical. Buyer personas are meant to help marketers, salespeople, and customer service personnel appeal to and serve specific types of customers throughout your business relationship.
If their needs, objections, and common obstacles to purchasing aren’t detailed in the buyer persona, you risk reinventing the wheel every time you communicate with a client.
If your sales cycle is long and complicated, like many B2Bs, your buyer persona should include details such as:
Let’s say you’re a SaaS company trying to sell software to CEO’s like this one.
Here’s a person who’s open to adopting new technology, but only if the science is airtight and you can demonstrate how your product improves his bottom line with concrete numbers.
He’s going to have a lot of specific questions about your product, and you will need to be prepared to answer them quickly, since he doesn’t have a lot of time.
A buyer persona like the one pictured above covers all of this crucial information, including motivating factors, objections, pain points, personality, and content consumption habits. It captures a snapshot of this persona’s buyer’s journey.
And what if your sales cycle is short? Let’s say your business provides branded name tags, pens, and other supplies to companies, and the biggest concerns your client may have are cost and quality.
In this case, you will still want to include many of the same details, such as the persona’s needs, motivations, pain points, and objections.
Since the transaction is simpler, you probably don’t need to go into as much detail about the persona at each stage of their buyer's journey, such as outlining long lists of potential objections or FAQs.
Tip: your buyer personas are cheat sheets for what makes your clients tick. Conor Wilcock recommends that you ask yourself why you’re adding information to the profile, and what concrete purpose it serves.
If your salespeople have wasted time on bad leads or your business has gotten burned by clients who were too costly to serve, consider creating negative buyer personas. They can help you spot and avoid bad leads early.
A negative buyer persona represents a segment of your audience that you want to avoid.
For example, a negative buyer persona could represent a competitor scoping out your content or a business that cannot afford your services.
To create a negative buyer persona, follow all the normal steps of creating a regular buyer persona, but instead focus on identifying audiences you don’t want to target.
So, how can you put buyer personas to practical use? Here are some tips.
Use them to help you understand your audience: Buyer personas are tools designed to help marketers understand who their customers are and what makes them tick.
They help copy and content writers remember who they’re speaking to so they can craft messaging that addresses customers' concerns and needs.
As a reference for writing surveys: Up-to-date challenges and pain points in buyer personas can help survey creators write more specific, relevant questions.
As a tool for client meetings: Buyer personas can act as cheat sheets to help marketers remember common daily challenges, fears, and objectives of people like their clients. This can help improve communication.
As a tool to humanize audience segments: Your buyer persona represents a segment of your audience. As a result, it can help put a human face to the data you’ve gathered.
Plus, keeping track of how similar your actual customers are to your personas can help you identify which segments are most important to your business.
As references for customer service: Personas that list common problems and FAQ could help customer service provide preemptive service to answer potential questions and solve problems before they occur
As a training tool: Personas can help new hires better understand who your company serves
Whether you’re freshening up old personas or creating new ones, well-researched, human, up-to-date buyer personas tailored to your business’ needs are powerful tools for writing compelling messaging and communicating better with clients.