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Serious question, why does everyone push buyer personas so hard?
I spent like 2 years building all these detailed buyer personas for our cyber security firm, thinking it was the magic bullet. But last month at a booth at RSA Conference in San Francisco, I talked to 50 real SOC managers and none of them matched my 'perfect' profile. That moment clicked for me - I was writing marketing for imaginary people instead of asking real ones what they actually needed. Has anyone else ditched formal personas and just talked to customers directly?
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grace891d ago
Ugh, I've been there too. I think the problem is that buyer personas turn into these perfect fictional characters that never exist in real life. @bettyroberts is spot on about texting real users - I started doing that with our customers and it changed everything.
Only thing I'd gently push back on is the idea that formal personas are always useless. They can be helpful as a starting point for brainstorming, as long as you treat them like a rough sketch and not a final portrait. The trap is when you spend months refining a persona document instead of just calling a couple people and asking what keeps them up at night.
Real talk is way better than imaginary profiles every time.
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bettyroberts1d ago
Oh man, I had almost the exact same wakeup call three years ago when I was building personas for a home security software product and none of the people I actually called matched my made up ones. I just stopped doing the formal persona stuff and started texting a handful of actual users every month instead, it's way more real and way less wasted effort.
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