Your buyer personas might look impressive with their stock photos and detailed demographic profiles, but here’s the uncomfortable question: do they still reflect your actual audience? If your marketing team created them more than a year ago without updates, they’re probably misaligned with reality.
Customers evolve and market conditions continuously shift. This causes your messages to miss the mark when your personas don’t match real people. If this is your reality, it’s time to create personas you can actually use.
(Possible) Reasons Your Persona Is Wrong
Although not all businesses make the same mistake, different errors can lead to the same outcome. The first step to building a persona that works is to understand what you might have done wrong.
You built it from assumptions instead of customer data.
Too many personas get created in conference rooms through brainstorming. Professionals base their ideas off of who they think their customers are instead of researching. In this scenario, you imagined your ideal buyer’s pain points, preferences, and behaviors when you should have been talking to real customers or analyzing real buying patterns.
One research report found that 59% of meaningful interactions happen during the buying journey. So if your interactions don’t cater to actual people, you’re bound to lose.1 Fiction is great for novels but terrible for marketing strategy.
Your market has changed but your personas haven’t.
The business landscape shifts constantly. Economic conditions affect buying priorities. New technologies change how people research and make decisions. Competitor actions can also reshape what customers expect.
If your personas were created more than a year ago and haven’t been updated, they’re almost certainly stale. Markets don’t freeze in time just because you documented something once.
You’re confusing demographics with actual buying motivations.
Knowing that your buyer is a 45-year-old director who lives in the suburbs and has two kids tells you basically nothing useful. You need to know why they would choose your product or what messages will resonate with them.
Demographics are easy to document, but they rarely explain the real drivers behind purchasing decisions. Psychographics and behavioral patterns matter way more than age and job title.
Your personas don’t account for different stages of the buying journey.
The same person has completely different needs and concerns when they first recognize a problem versus when they’re comparing specific solutions. Their motivations may also be different when they get final approval to purchase.
A single static persona can’t capture this complexity. If your content isn’t effective, you might not be matching where your prospects actually are in their decision process.
Read more: Meeting Your B2B Buyers in the AI Era: The New Discovery Journey
Persona Check-Up
Companies that successfully personalize buyers’ experience see 40% more revenue growth than those that don’t.2
But before you can fix your personas, you need an honest assessment of what’s actually working and what’s just collecting digital dust.
Ask yourself these diagnostic questions to evaluate whether your current buyer persona strategy needs an overhaul or just a tune-up.
- When was the last time you updated these personas with fresh data? If the answer is “I don’t remember” or “more than a year ago,” they’re probably wrong.
- Does your sales team actually reference these personas or do they ignore them completely? Sales teams have zero patience for theoretical frameworks that don’t match their daily reality.
- Can you trace specific content pieces or campaigns back to persona insights? If personas don’t influence actual marketing decisions, they’re decorative rather than functional.
- Do these personas reflect customers you’ve acquired in the past six months? Your newest customers are your best data source for understanding current market conditions.
- Do different team members describe your target customer differently? Inconsistent understanding across teams means your personas aren’t providing the clarity they’re supposed to.
How to Build Personas That Stay Current
Ready to transform your outdated personas into living documents that actually guide strategy? Follow these steps to build profiles based on reality instead of wishful thinking.
1. Start by interviewing recent customers about their buying journey.
Talk to people who purchased from you in the last six months. Ask them what problem they were trying to solve, how they researched solutions, and what almost stopped them from buying. It’s also crucial to know what ultimately convinced them you were the right choice.
Record these conversations and look for patterns in their language, concerns, and decision criteria. Real customer voices beat your assumptions every single time.
Pro tip: Don’t just interview your happiest customers—talk to the ones who almost didn’t buy. Their hesitations reveal the real barriers your personas need to address.
2. Analyze your customer data to identify segments based on behavior.
Dig into your analytics to see how different customer groups actually behave. Which industries convert fastest? What company sizes have the highest lifetime value?
Let the data reveal natural segments rather than forcing customers into boxes you pre-defined based on gut feelings.
Read more: Optimize Lead Scoring for Better Conversions
3. Collaborate with sales to validate and refine your findings.
Gartner’s research shows marketing and sales typically collaborate on only 3 of 15 commercial activities.3 This needs to be improved.
Schedule working sessions where marketing presents their research and sales adds context. Sales reps know which objections come up repeatedly and which messages resonate during pitches. This collaboration ensures your personas reflect both data and real-world selling experience.
Pro tip: Record these sales collaboration sessions. The exact language sales uses to describe customer pain points is gold for your messaging.
4. Create content and messaging guidelines directly from persona insights.
Don’t let personas be standalone documents that nobody connects to actual work. For each persona, go the extra mile by documenting the:
- Specific language they use
- Content formats they prefer
- Questions they ask at different stages
Make personas actionable tools that content creators and sales teams reference regularly.
Read more: Create a Drip Campaign That Converts (Not Annoys)
Build personas that drive real results.
Great personas inform great marketing. Allied Insight helps you turn audience insights into thought leadership content, strategic campaigns, and marketing programs that connect with the right buyers at the right time.
Ready to build marketing that actually reflects your audience? Contact us today.
References
- Winters, Barbara. “The Buyer’s Journey Is the Portfolio Marketer’s Key to Planning For 2022.” Forrester, 4 Oct. 2021, www.forrester.com/blogs/portfolio-marketing-planning-assumptions-2022-takeaways/.
- “The Value of Getting Personalization Right – or Wrong – Is Multiplying.” McKinsey, 12 Nov. 2021, www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying.
- “Gartner Survey Reveals Marketing and Sales Functions Collaborate on Only Three Out of 15 Commercial Activities.” Gartner, 4 Jun. 2024, www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-06-03-gartner-survey-reveals-marketing-and-sales-functions-collaborate-on-only-three-out-of-15-commercial-activities.
