What Your Personas Should Not Be [Caveat]

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For example, rather than sending the same nurturing emails to all your leads, you can segment your campaigns by persona and target your messages based on what you know about each of your personas and their stage in the buying cycle.

It is important to emphasize that personas are useful regardless of the size of your business. Focusing your efforts on the customers who really matter is interesting for all businesses. It is often thought that this method of personas is reserved for large companies, those with thousands / millions of customers spread across hundreds of cities and countries. This is not true. Even a small website needs to know its main customer segments and therefore build its personas.

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Let's say you run a small cooking website, a site where you share your recipes, tips, and advice for healthy cooking with your visitors and people who have subscribed to your newsletter. A search on your personas costa rica whatsapp list may make you realize that the majority of people who follow you are young mothers in their thirties. Knowing this will allow you to adjust your content and offers to your target audience much more relevantly, as well as the design of your website. With the key, a richer experience for your visitors, better conversion rates, and more revenue.

What Your Personas Should Not Be [Caveat]
But be careful, you should not try to build personas for the sake of having them. Your personas are only of interest if they present actionable information about your audience, "useful". For example, information on the preferences of your target customers, on the communication channels they use or prefer, on their main challenges. We should not say to ourselves: "my company has reached X euros of turnover, or X customers, I must build my personas". Personas are not a gadget. The objective is not to build beautiful presentations and beautiful visuals. We can very well have beautiful personas and not understand anything about our customers. A persona is more than vague adjectives and nice photos.

If your personas aren’t “actionable,” if they don’t help improve your marketing strategy, they’re useless at all. A persona isn’t just a description of your potential buyers. They should tell you about the characteristics, behaviors, and preferences of your target audience so you can better manage your marketing efforts, focusing on the people most likely to convert into customers.

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What are “negative personas”? What are they used for?
Negative personas represent customer segments that are wasting your time and resources, i.e. customers who have no intention of purchasing or a low probability of purchasing. It is important to take the time to build these “negative personas” because they represent the individuals who reduce the profitability of your company: they consume your resources (the time of your salespeople and your marketing budget) without bringing you anything.

Identifying negative personas will allow you to better allocate your marketing resources by focusing only on your best customer profiles. An example of a recurring negative persona? The "students" who consult content on the internet for their research and learning! But we can think of individuals who do not have the budget to acquire the products offered by the company. In e-commerce, we can think of individuals who consume a lot of resources from the company's customer service (by asking a lot of questions) and who, in the end, do not buy. We can also think, in SaaS, of users who unsubscribe from the service just before the end of the free trial period.