Personas! Such the rage for so long now, a marketing “absolute.” And now with AI generating them for us with input as simple as a website URL, they will be used even more widely.
They are so comforting. “Now we know our audience,” says the marketing manager after presenting the results to top managers.
Not so fast, friends.
It’s not whether you use personas. It’s WHEN.
Here’s the catch. What people do and where they go and what else they buy and their demographic particulars have NOTHING TO DO with why your customers buy from you.
And that is what you need to know—in all its reality and specifics—before you spend another single dollar on marketing.
Misuse of personas has been the single largest cause of billions of wasted marketing dollars and low conversion rates for years.
That’s the BAD news about personas. But there is GOOD news—and I’m always here to tell you the good news.
When to use personas
The time to use personas is after you have interviewed a sample subset of people who have already purchased from you. You will ask them open-ended questions in an audio-only recorded Zoom call such as:
- How do you feel about our product [or service]?
- How was the buying experience?
- What is your normal buying process for products like ours?
- Why did you choose our product over the other ones you looked at? (This should also answer the question: What others did you look at, and why did you reject them?)
- What are your challenges in this area?
- What trends do you see in this area?
- If you were searching for this product, what would you type in?
There are more questions, the rationale behind them, and the results you will get from them in Chapter 3 of my (book). Rivers of Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy also explains the four types of products and services in the world based on the amount of scrutiny applied to the purchase and the buying process for each type.
You only need to interview 5 – 7 customers of a given type to uncover bankable insights. Transcribe and present the results (again, see the instructions) and a Summary and Recommendations report that will eliminate all those silly arguments executives have about marketing (“But we did it this way at our last company . . . our competitors do this . . . I would never respond to a message like that” . . . and so on.)
This information will uncover their Mindset when they set out to buy, which consists of their desires, concerns, and questions. All of your marketing will now be grounded in the main drivers of the purchasing process. If they come to your site and see that you understand their desires and needs, quickly and correctly address their concerns, and then can answer their very specific questions, your chances of making a sale are miles ahead of what your competitors are doing.
These insights will drive your strategy and your messages.
You will be able to reverse-engineer your successful sales so you can produce them in quantity.
Then, and only then, can personas help you. Personas can answer a couple of very important questions: Which channels might be best used to carry these messages to my target audience? Where would they expect to find us?
Now, granted, you can learn some of this from the customer interviews, but to get affirmation on a larger scale, it’s good to ask AI.
AI can also help you find new markets if you ask it “Which industries contain customers with [this kind of problem—a problem that your product or service can solve]?” I’d use a combination of tools, such as ChatGPT, Perplexity.ai, and Microsoft’s Copilot. Always best to get a second or third opinion when it comes to AI.
What you say, how you say it, and where you say it are the three main marketing elements. Using this approach will make sure that you are getting the highest return possible on your marketing investment.
