Personas: your secret weapon to great marketing
What are personas? Why do they matter?
We’re big fans of personas at Olivine. Personas are representations of your real users (and buyers), and they help you understand their experiences, feelings, behaviors, pain points, and goals. When they’re built out successfully, you’ll start to see benefits across your entire business. Some of these benefits include:
Alignment across your business
An understanding of who you’re building for, selling to, and marketing to
A shared language that all employees can rely on
The ability to inform product in an impactful way
So, the more you humanize your personas, the better off you’ll be. Take the time to really understand who this person is, what matters to them personally and professionally, and what kind of emotional experiences they care about.
This all sounds straightforward, and for the most part it is. But there are some common pitfalls you can avoid to ensure you’re building out powerful personas that impact your entire organization.
Common pitfalls to avoid when building personas
01. Vague
Generic personas aren’t memorable
and fail to build empathy
02. Siloed
Results not shared effectively or frequently get forgotten.
03. Long
Too long and too detailed means it
won’t be digestible or actionable.
First off, some personas are too all encompassing and vague. They’re not really fleshed out in a personal way, so they’re hard to connect to. It’s hard to build empathy for a vague, generic persona, let alone remember it. Put in the work to make it as human as possible.
The second thing we see happen is after the persona work is done, the rollout to the rest of the time is done in a siloed way. When the results don’t get shared effectively or frequently, they’re usuallyforgotten. Make sure everyone is on the same page at the same time when you’re sharing personas. This is also why I suggested creating them in a group setting from the get go.
Finally, we see when personas are too long or detailed, they don’t work very well. Yes, detail is important, but you want to think about the right details. People need to be able to digest a persona and feel like they can take action on it. Stay focused on important and relevant points.
Where to use personas
Product
Ideate and innovate to solve real
user’s problems
Prioritize roadmap features based
on target persona
Sales
Create buyer maps to help new sales development reps get up to speed
Create sales collateral designed specifically for your personas
Marketing
Package and price product based on
user segments
Craft copy on your website and on key landing pages that speaks to the heart
of buyer persona
Craft targeted ads and ad channels
based on your personas
Personas can apply to countless areas, but the main three they’re absolutely essential for are product, marketing, and sales. For the product team, they can help ideate and innovate when it comes to solving real users’ problems. They also help with deciding which features to prioritize and build on a product’s roadmap. At the end of the day, the product team has to know and understand who they’re building for.
Within marketing, common areas to use personas are for pricing and packaging, website copy, and targeted ads and ad channels. Key landing pages that speak to the heart of your buyer personas are so much more effective than writing generic, catchall messaging. For sales, you can create buyer maps based on personas to help new sales development reps get up to speed. You can also create sales collateral designed specifically for your personas, whether they’re a buyer or user of your product.
Buyers vs user personas
We see a lot of products targeted to their users, but usually at some point, someone in finance or the decision maker will have to approve the purchase. Buyer and user personas are equally as important for B2B SaaS companies, and we want to quickly note the difference. In simple terms, buyers sign the checks while users get your product in the door. You need to understand the needs, behaviors, and wants of both, because you’re speaking to both. Then you can sell effectively within your targeted organizations.
There are two stages of personas work: proto and validated
The next piece in personas work is distinguishing between proto personas and validated personas. Proto personas are the users we think we have, along with our assumptions for their pain point, motivation, and use cases for our product.
Validated personas are the users we know we have, along with validation on what they actually care about, what their pain points are, and why they’ll use our product. Sometimes in our retainer phase with a client, we’ll couple persona validation questions with interviewing customers for case studies and testimonials.
Examples of personas work in action
Loom
We love showing this example from Loom because they’re mapping their website navigation based on solutions, which is another great way to speak directly to each of your personas on your website.
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You can see they have several deep dives under ‘Use Cases,’ speaking to engineering, sales, and recruiting. It’s clear they’ve done some persona work to be able to address these three different personas. For example, when you click on ‘Engineering,’ you get a full page that is speaking only to them— showing that Loom really thought about what’s important to engineers when they use it.
Envoy
In our long-term partnership with Envoy, the sales team said that a security persona was an important buyer during a personas workshop. But, leadership and the product team didn’t think this was a target buyer for their core offering. In diving deeper and bringing all the teams together to explore this security persona more, we decided to run a smokescreen ad and landing page specifically for it, and conversions were very high.
We ended up going even further with the persona, including creating a customer story video and an entire sales process. Both created higher engagement and more conversions.
Product decided to build a few new features to close the gap for the security persona, and now, you can see Envoy speaking to this persona on their website. We’re proud to show how personas work expedited the discovery of a key revenue line for Envoy.
Figure out how to speak to your real users and buyers with our team of PMM experts.
P.S. Huge shoutout to Angie Ennamorato for her copywriting skills and support on this post!
