A Practical Guide to Marketing Personas
How a marketing persona is built from real customer research, and why personas sketched out in a single brainstorm rarely survive an actual campaign.
A marketing persona is a semi-fictional profile of a specific type of customer, built to make decisions about messaging, content and channels more consistent across a team. Done well, it replaces a dozen slightly different mental models of “the customer” floating around in different people’s heads with one shared reference point. Done badly, it’s a laminated poster nobody looks at after the workshop that produced it. The difference comes down entirely to how it’s built.
Where the raw material comes from
A persona built purely from a marketing team’s assumptions about who buys the product is just a guess with a name attached. The useful version comes from direct sources: interviews with actual customers, sales call notes and objections the sales team hears repeatedly, support ticket themes and whatever behavioral data is already sitting in analytics or a CRM about who converts and who doesn’t. Ten real customer conversations will surface patterns no internal brainstorm will, because they reveal the actual language customers use and the actual sequence of doubts they work through before buying.
What a useful persona contains
Demographics are the least important part, and often the part teams spend the most time on. Far more useful: what specific outcome is this person trying to achieve, what’s currently stopping them, what alternatives are they weighing (including doing nothing), what objection comes up right before they’d normally walk away and where do they go to research a decision like this. A persona built around those questions tells you what to say and where to say it. One built around age brackets and job titles mostly tells you who to target with an ad platform’s filters.
How many you need
Most businesses overestimate this. A B2B company selling one core product usually finds two or three distinct buyer types, not seven. Building more than that tends to produce personas that overlap so much they don’t change any decisions, which defeats the purpose. If two “different” personas would get the same content and the same messaging, they’re one persona, not two.
Where personas earn their keep
The real test of a persona isn’t whether it exists, it’s whether it changes a decision. Does it change what topic gets written about next, which channel gets the next round of budget or what objection gets addressed on a landing page above the fold? If the answer to all three is no, the persona is decoration, and it’s worth being honest about that rather than pretending the exercise paid off.
The most common way this goes wrong
Teams build the persona once, in a single workshop, using whatever assumptions were in the room that day, and then never update it as real customer data accumulates. A persona is a working hypothesis, not a finished artifact. The businesses getting genuine value from personas in 2013 are the ones revisiting them against actual sales and support data every few months, and being willing to admit when the original guess was wrong.
More on Marketing Strategy, or browse everything from 2013.
