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Creating a Buyer Persona is the first step, essential to building a successful inbound marketing strategy. Buyer personas will help you better understand your current customers and potential customers by identifying their goals, questions, challenges, problems, and behaviors so you can locate your content to meet their needs.
But are you making mistakes when you’re creating your Buyer Persona?
While every company is totally different and there is no one-size-fits-all approach for all buyers, but there are some wrong approaches you might be using. Below, we include some of the most common mistakes that most inbound marketers and sales funnels make and explain how to avoid them.
Mistake No. 1: Having too many people.
Creating a buyer pool is appealing, especially when you have a lot of data at your fingertips. And while it may make sense to create a buyer image for each individual customer you want to target, having too many people can be detrimental.
With too many people, your marketing shoots in all directions and often lacks a real focus. Also, you’re likely to find that several of your people are quite similar to each other and that there aren’t many distinguishing factors.
To avoid this mistake, start by creating a single Buyer Persona that represents the majority of your customers. As you analyze the data about your most successful customers, you’ll start to see where one person ends and another begins.
Mistake No. 2: Just using Buyer Persona in marketing.
We often see shoppers as a “marketing thing.” But buyer personas should be used by your entire organization, including your sales and customer service teams.
While the marketing team uses personas to help attract the right people, your sales team uses them to engage with prospects. By having a great knowledge of Buyer Persona, your sales team will be able to deliver value faster and not waste a potential customer’s time with irrelevant information.
Your customer support team also benefits greatly from buyers, helping them confirm a prospect’s values and communication preferences. And by understanding the Buyer Persona, your support team will be able to provide better service to customers.
Mistake No. 3: Think of your Buyer Persona as an individual person.
Buyer personas are generalizations of your ideal buyers, but it’s easy to forget that people aren’t individual people (especially when you have specific people in mind when creating your ideal customer archetypes).
Instead of identifying a person’s challenges, pain points, goals, and needs, focus on gathering a collection of characteristics about your ideal customers.
Mistake No. 4: Relying too much on demographics.
Demographic information, including age, gender, salary, industry, and company size, can be helpful in quickly identifying potential customers who match your existing buyer persona profiles. But demographics shouldn’t be the data you primarily rely on.
When you rely too much on demographic information, you can miss out on the real insights that help you improve your inbound marketing: the challenges, pain points, and questions your characters have that lead them to make a purchase decision.
So, instead of defining your persona as “male, 20-25 years old, commercial,” think about what that person’s role looks like, what challenges and roles they present, how they measure success, and how they consume information.
That said, you should include demographics in buyer persona profiles.
Mistake No. 5: Making assumptions about Buyer Personas.
When you first create Buyer Persona, you’ll probably discover anecdotal information about these people from other members of your team. While it’s important to talk to your sales and customer support teams to learn more about your personas, your research shouldn’t stop there.
Instead, set a time to interview your best customers. During the interview, ask questions about your:
Personal experience.
Industry and business.
Job.
Goals.
Challenges.
Objections.
Sources of information.
Base your characters on real conversations you have with real customers. After all, if your characters are too generic, your content won’t be any better than it was before.
Mistake No. 6: Not creating Buyer Negative People.
Negative Buyer Personas, also known as exclusionary personas, allow you to identify anyone who is not right for your company. They help you eliminate bad apples by proactively identifying the types of leads that could drain resources or cause major headaches for your team.
It may seem counterintuitive to spend time meeting people who will never be your customers and generate revenue. But in the long run it will save your team time and money, since you will not waste your selling time on people who do not fit well with your goals.
Mistake No. 7: Not updating your Buyer Personas.
Many marketers think of people as a “set it and forget it” initiative. But people, and the challenges they face, the goals they are trying to achieve, and where they look for information, are always changing.
In addition, as your business grows, your target audience and your ideal customer can also change. Reevaluate your Buyer Persona at least a couple of times a year to see if they are still accurate and up to date.
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Build your buyer persona with our Clientify app.
The best solution to correctly create your buyer persona is our Clientify Buyer Persona tool with which you can build your ideal customer in a very detailed and efficient way. Access and build your ideal customer.
