Most businesses have a buyer persona.
It lives in a slide deck or a document somewhere. It has a name – usually something like “Marketing Mary” or “CEO Sam.” It has an age, an income range, a job title, a list of frustrations, and a list of goals. It was produced thoughtfully, probably after some research, and it represents a genuine attempt to understand the buyer.
And the marketing built from it still does not convert at the rate it should.
The persona is not the problem. What the persona describes is.
What most buyer personas get right – and what they miss
A buyer persona that describes who the buyer is – their demographics, their role, their general frustrations – is a starting point. It tells the marketing team who they are trying to reach. It does not tell them what that buyer needs to understand or experience to make the specific decision the marketing is designed to influence.
The difference between a buyer and a converting buyer is not age, income, or job title. It is the specific combination of:
What problem they are carrying at the moment the marketing reaches them. Not a general frustration – the specific version of the problem that is live for them right now, that has reached the threshold where they are actively looking for a solution.
What they have already tried. The alternatives they have considered, the approaches they have taken, the reasons those approaches did not fully resolve the problem. The marketing that ignores this writes as though the buyer has never thought about the problem before. The buyer has. The message needs to acknowledge that.
What would make them confident enough to act. Not what features are impressive. What evidence, what proof, what specific signal would allow them to decide that this business is the right choice at this moment – rather than a reasonable option to consider at some point.
A persona built without these specifics describes a person. It does not describe a decision. And the marketing that needs to influence a decision cannot be written from a person description alone.
Why demographic personas produce generic marketing
A persona that defines the buyer primarily by age, income, sector, and job title produces marketing that speaks to those characteristics rather than to the decision those characteristics are making.
“Business owners aged 35-50 who want to grow” is not a decision. It is a category. Every marketing message written for that category sounds like every other marketing message written for that category – because the insight that would make the message specific is not in the persona.
The marketing that converts is specific enough to exclude people who are not the right buyer, because it names a situation, a problem, a stage of decision that is precise enough to be recognisable rather than general. A buyer who reads the first line of a message and thinks “that is exactly my situation” is already significantly more likely to convert than one who reads it and thinks “that is roughly applicable to me“.
What a useful buyer persona actually contains
Not a stock photo with a name. The examined answer to a specific set of questions.
What specific event or realisation typically precedes this buyer looking for a solution? What were they doing before they started looking, and what changed?
What have they already tried? What did not work about it? What did work about it that a new solution also needs to offer?
What are the specific objections or hesitations they carry into a first interaction? What would they need to see or hear to resolve each one?
Who else is involved in the decision? What does that person need to understand or be reassured about?
What does success look like for this buyer – not in six months, but in the first week?
These questions require research, not assumption. They require talking to actual buyers and listening for the specific language they use to describe their situation – not the language the business uses to describe what it offers.
The persona produced from that research is much shorter than the demographic version. It contains less information about who the buyer is and much more information about how they decide.
That is the persona marketing can actually be built from.
Find out whether your buyer understanding is specific enough to build marketing from
