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I feel compelled to comment on a new trend perpetuated and identified by other marketing bloggers. Amazingly, there seems to be an anti-buyer persona movement. That’s probably a little dramatic. What’s really happening is that some marketing bloggers have begun to question the effectiveness of using elaborately detailed buyer personas to market and sell products. It just so happens that they’re doing it at the same time and it appears like an avalanche in the marketing blogger world.
Substantiated or not, I find even the thought of underestimating the power of buyer personas dangerous, as should anyone who has and will find success by correctly using them.
I don’t believe that anyone reading this blog would require a primer, but Adele Revella offers a very small one, if you’re interested. Even in a few paragraphs, she manages to convey how important buyer personas are to any marketer. She says that marketers "use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers."
Pretty important, huh? Given her definition, one could venture to say that any extremely focused and successful marketing campaign would find the neglecting of buyer personas impossible. Buyer personas are intricately wound into the fabric of marketing.
I’ve gathered that the naysayers don’t truly value all of the information collected and integrated into a buyer persona. They seem to think that some, if not most, details are unnecessary, make marketing jobs harder and can often result in disappointment because of hyper-segmentation.
And to that, I say this:
It’s true that creating and catering to buyer personas can result in wasted effort, marketing money and lowered sales…but only if one or the more major components of identifying and appealing to a buyer persona is off.
But I know how they would counter…
They would say that the danger of relying too heavily on buyer personas to sell a product is simple: predictable personas, regardless of the amount of research put into identifying into them, cannot account for the unpredictability of real, live people. My retort would be that they’re missing the entire point of using buyer personas. The goal is not to collect as much irrelevant information about a particular group of a buyers as possible and throw it into a buyer persona. It’s to collect information and identify relevancies within it. To do that, you have to examine all the information you have and delve a little deeper for more.
Buyers are puzzles and their personal details are the pieces that make the whole. To see the big picture, you simply have to find connections to the different parts and have them work together in a marketing campaign.
In addition, creating buyer personas helps potential customers understand you. It aids marketers create copy that speaks directly to them. David Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, puts it simply: taking buyer personas seriously helps differentiate your copy from the "ego-centric gobbledygook" that characterizes so much marketing material today. By using buyer personas, marketers understand that buyers have problems (often immediate) that need to be solved and they won’t necessarily be "sold" on a product if you simply list your business’s achievements and incomprehensible product specifications in an effort to get them to buy. The worst thing any marketer could do would be to leave prospects on their own with this type of information and hope for the best, but that’s exactly what some businesses do and they often suffer for it.
Regardless of what types of information a marketer may gather about his target market and what he discards and uses in his marketing efforts, one thing cannot be denied: buyer personas were created and are used to help give an extra marketing edge in highly competitive markets. It’s a popular and successful strategy because everything in a person’s past and present (including the supposed extraneous details) influences his future. This includes his future purchases.
I know that some readers may remain unconvinced with this post. As mentioned before, questioning the value of buyer personas may be in vogue. But to those people who remain adamant that buyer personas bear exaggerated importance, I would direct you to Kim Klaver’s challenge: create a buyer’s persona for yourself using one of your favorite products. Apply all the buyer’s persona principles to yourself and dare to realize just how valuable buyer personas are.
Note from Ayat: This is a guest post by Samantha Gonzales.
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