Buyer personas support marketing tremendously – as long as the profiles are created properly. However, if you don’t have any experience in creating buyer personas, you might end up making some typical mistakes. This not only loses any potential effects, but also runs the risk of provoking negative reactions. So instead of going about it the right way, you end up using the buyer personas incorrectly, addressing the wrong target group, and possibly repelling potential customers.
Research and data collection are too one-sided
Before a company starts to develop buyer personas, data must first be collected. This costs time and effort – and does not only work via one channel. Those less experienced opt for the easy route and evaluate, for example, only information from the web analysis – and ignore the direct contact with buyers. Others use too small a sample, conduct interviews with only a handful of people, and then base their profiling on these not-very-extensive experiences and data. It is not possible to create meaningful buyer personas this way.
Profile generation is too strongly oriented around average values
Collecting as much data as possible is important, but you shouldn’t make the mistake of being too strongly influenced by statistical surveys. Buyer personas should be based on real people and should not end up encompassing average people. If you only calculate mean values and create different profiles from them, you can theoretically save yourself a lot of work, but that means that behind the alleged buyer personas, there is actually only a target group analysis with average values, which has been enriched with some photos and invented names.
Buyer personas are too creatively embellished
It is not helpful to orientate yourself too much on average values, but, on the contrary, you should not get carried away and let your creativity completely run free. It can happen that you quickly get lost when creating the new persona since new biographical details are being developed, and stories about the fictitious person have nothing to do with the information collected. In cases like this, the created profile is interesting and descriptive, but the data is often missing. Worst case scenario, all measures tailored to buyer personas like these end up going in the wrong direction, meaning the marketing measures completely miss the real interested parties, because the profile created hardly has anything in common with them.
Sample profiles are too superficially designed
In day-to-day business, it can be difficult to deal intensively with a project such as buyer personas – especially because these only indirectly increase sales. However, since you still want to get as much out of the buyer personas as possible, you sometimes create profiles that can be quickly finished, but offer hardly any information value. However, a buyer persona is only a helpful tool if the profile also contains extensive information. If the profile remains superficial, then it’s not possible to precisely adapt the marketing to the persona. You gamble away the chances of a good persona.
Too many or too few buyer personas created
Analyzing individual representatives of the target group can also go too far: when you don’t stop making buyer personas. You might think that creating lots means that you won’t forget any types of customers and will therefore cover as much as possible. But by doing this, you don’t develop a detailed marketing strategy, but end up achieving the opposite: a profile-less campaign, which does not fit anybody and therefore nobody ends up feeling addressed.
However, if you have created too few profiles – for example only one – you run the risk of not reaching many potential buyers. In such a case, the marketing strategy is often too specific: you gain a very limited customer base, which could have been a lot larger. As far as the number is concerned, however, it is generally better to start small, e.g. with three personas, and build on this when more capacity is available.