3 Biggest Mistakes Made with Buyer Personas

SEO Web Design Mistakes in San Diego, CA

Buyer personas are now a commonly used marketing practice that helps businesses better understand their target audience and how to communicate with them. However, many businesses remain unsure exactly what a buyer person is and how to create one. Here are a few common mistakes San Diego digital marketing companies are still making when creating buyer personas.

1. Describing the Buyer, Not the Decision

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is profiling the buyer rather than the buyer’s decision. After all, buying is the behavior all marketers want to influence. When creating a buyer persona, your first priority should be to understand decision criteria, buyer attitudes, and what causes buyers to believe one option is better than the other. Outside of retail environments, things like marital status, hobbies, and gender rarely matter.

2. Making Stuff Up

Most buyer personas are based on information marketers get by talking to sales reps, product experts, or by conducting online research. Rarely are buyer personas based on information provided by the buyer. Your content won’t be any better than it was before creating personas if the personas are based on generic information. Spend several hours every month having in-depth conversations with recent buyers, both those who chose your product and those who chose another.

3. Having Too Many Buyer Personas

Buyer personas are meant to help marketers, but creating new persons defined by company size, industry, demographics, age, motivations, etc. can create an unmanageable amount of personas to keep up with. Instead of creating a new person for each segment, ask yourself if you’ll increase revenue by building separate strategies. Separate buyer personas are really only important when buyer insights differ significantly, and those are rarely impacted by things like company size, industry, or job title. If buyers have identical priorities and challenges, regardless of industry, age, etc., a single persona may be the most effective means of marketing.

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