The Right Way to Leverage Personas in B2B Marketing

If you’ve worked in marketing for any amount of time, you’ve likely heard someone talk about personas.

You may have heard them referred to as buyer personas or customer personas or user personas or client avatars or ideal customer profiles (ICPs)—they go by lots of names—but they’re all referring to the same basic tool, which is a well-developed and carefully considered representation of your customer that invites you to understand and empathize with them on a deeper level.

To put it succinctly, a persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical customer or the target user of a product or service.

It’s a visual representation, often depicted as a presentation slide or document, that includes a photo and a name, as well as behavioral traits and psychographic information (as well as other criteria that we’ll explore below), that help to bring the persona life.

“The whole point of personas,” writes NN/g Senior User Experience Specialist Page Laubheimer, “is that they are memorable, actionable, and distinct from one another—they are there to sum up the main needs of our different audience segments so that we can recall and empathize with them easily.”

Proto, Lightweight Qualitative, and Statistical Personas

Creating personas is one of the most revealing and useful exercises you can engage in as an organization.

It’s a relatively easy and low-cost way to gain alignment around who your customers are.

You can either create them based on what you already know, with no new research—these are known as proto personas—or you can make lightweight qualitative personas based on small-sample qualitative research that comes from surveys, interviews, and observations.

Of course, you can go much deeper into ethnographic research and data analytics and use your qualitative research create a survey instrument that is then used to gather a large sample size, from which you would then create what are known as statistical personas.

Regardless of which persona types you decide to create, the key point to remember is that the research and effort you put forth needs to be both palatable and realistic.

If you’ve got a small team or not a lot of time, opt for proto personas.

Cross-functional ROI

Personas are remarkably versatile tools that can drive significant return on investment (ROI) across various departments and tasks.

Marketing teams can use them to create targeted content and campaigns, often resulting in increased website conversion rates and more efficient ad spend.

Sales teams can leverage personas to tailor pitches and improve lead qualification, typically achieving higher close rates.

Product development teams can use personas to prioritize features and inform design decisions, leading to products that better meet customer needs.

Customer support teams can anticipate needs and challenges, customizing service processes to enhance customer satisfaction and potentially increase lifetime value.

Design and creative teams can refine brand messaging and visual design to resonate more effectively with target audiences.

While the exact impact can vary by industry and implementation, the strategic use of personas consistently drives measurable improvements in business outcomes, from more efficient operations to enhanced customer engagement and increased revenue.

In Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members, UX researcher and consultant Aurora Harley writes that common pieces of information to include in persona are:

• Name, age, gender, and a photo
• Tag line describing what they do in “real life”; avoid getting too witty, as doing so may taint the persona as being too fun and not a useful tool
• Experience level in the area of your product or service
• Context for how they would interact with your product: Through choice or required by their job? How often would they use it? Do they typically use a desktop computer to access it, or their phone or other device?
• Goals and concerns when they perform relevant tasks: speed, accuracy, thoroughness, or any other needs that may factor into their usage
• Quotes to sum up the persona’s attitude

Here at Thrive, you can see in the image below that we take it a bit further when we help our clients develop personas.

What we’re after is a true-to-life representation of a specific customer so that the decisions we make are rooted in reality.

We often see organizations create between three and six personas, but depending on the type of business you’re in, you could have upwards of fifteen.

Empathy Now, Empathy Always

The point to remember is that persona creation is really all about empathy.

You want to be able to empathize with your customers to the highest degree possible, because this is how you create services, products, communication, and customer experiences that are memorable, meaningful, and highly personal.

It also happens to be how you create marketing campaigns with messaging your customers will actually hear and respond to.

If you have customers buying products and services from you, then you’re by definition successful.

People want what you have, and that means that, contrary to what you might think at times, they want to hear from you in a language they understand, about topics they care about.

Peter Drucker once wrote “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits them and sells itself.”

It all starts with the right persona.