Persona Grata: Understanding Your Buyers and Users

Building a deep understanding of your audience is critical to better inform all aspects of your business – from product design to go-to-market strategy and through to customer success. You may have built great products, but if you’re not crystal clear on who you’re building for, even the best product will not reach its full potential. That’s where personas come in.

Well-crafted personas help you make better informed decisions about messaging, features, sales strategies, and customer success. To the outside market they will give your customers the confidence that you truly understand them. Internally they ensure alignment across teams by giving everyone a shared understanding of who they’re targeting.

So, what are personas and how do you use them most effectively?

What Are Buyer and User Personas?

Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and insights. Done well they represent all the stakeholders at your customers, from the buying process through to those using your products.  

Buyer Personas:

These focus on decision-makers and influencers. Who is signing the contract, deciding which solution is best fit for the company needs, approving it meets company policies, or driving the purchasing process? In the case of Legal Tech this is often General Counsel, CTO, CIO, Head of Data Privacy, or Innovation Lead.

User Personas:

These represent the people who use your product daily. They may not have the final say in purchasing, but their feedback can have a significant impact on the decision and the successful adoption of your solution. For example, a Legal Operations Manager may not hold the budget, but if your product transforms their work then they will be a strong advocate for purchase.

Understanding both buyer and user perspectives (noting that in some companies they may be the same person) is key to crafting a product marketing strategy that resonates with your target audience.

Building Effective Personas: What You Need to Know

To create valuable personas, they must be based on real-world insights. Here’s how to get started:

Gather Data from Multiple Sources

Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative research to build an accurate picture of the audience you are targeting:

• Customer Interviews: Talk to both buyers and end-users to understand their pain points and motivations.

• Sales and Support Teams: Your customer-facing teams know what prospects struggle with the most.

• Product Analytics: Usage data can reveal what features are used and valued heavily and where friction exists.

• Competitive Analysis: Identify who your competitors target and where gaps exist.

Identify Key Characteristics

To build out valuable personas that will support go-to-market planning and product design there are a range of key data points that you should capture:

• Personal Demographics: Age range, location, job title, experience, and key skills

• Company Profile:  industry, market sector (eg enterprise vs small-mid), geographic reach

• Pain Points: What are the high priority challenges the persona is looking to solve? What will trigger their interest in exploring your products?

• Goals: What does success look like for them? Think about this in both professional and personal contexts. What are their motivations & aspirations? To really enhance how you resonate with your audience you must understand people beyond their job title and job objectives.

• Decision-Making Factors: What is most important and will be most influential in their decision or recommendation? For example, price, features, data security, integration capabilities?

• Purchasing Influence: Is this persona the ultimate decision maker or an influencer on the edge of the vendor review process?

• Potential Barriers: What might prevent them from choosing your product?

• Communication Tones: What type of communications do they typically respond best to? For example, formal, technical, causal, high-energy.

Create a Clear and Actionable Profile

Your persona should be easy for your team to reference. Below is an example of a fictional buyer persona working in the corporate legal industry that pulls together the criteria we discussed above.

DOWNLOAD: Click here to download a PowerPoint (.pptx) file that you can use as a template to build out your own personas.

Using Personas to Improve Product Marketing

Once you’ve built your personas you can then move to applying them. Here are three key areas where they make a major impact:

 Sharpen Your Messaging

I wrote in a previous article (Why You? Crafting Your Unique Value Proposition) about the importance of communicating benefits over features and using the persona for this will ensure that you are laser-focused on the outcomes that matter most to your audience.

Prioritise each of your core benefits (& associated features) by persona to help inform messaging and tailor your website, emails, and sales materials. For example, your sales brochure for the respective personas might be phrased as follows:

• For Mary (General Counsel): “Enable your team and 3rd parties to collaborate on a single document version in real-time.”

• For Alex (CTO): “Reduce complexity and ensure security - all documents stored in a single cloud repository with full control of access permissions.”

Consider each persona’s involverment, motivations, and benefits at each stage of the customer lifecycle to help inform how you refine your messaging in articles, webinars, early sales discussions, through to negotiating terms.

TIP: If you use AI tools to help generate marketing content, summarise your personas in a paragraph and include them as part of prompts to help craft your articles to specific target audiences.

Align Sales and Marketing

Personas ensure your sales and marketing teams speak the same language. Use the personas as the foundation when you are building out sales enablement collateral such as pitch decks, talk tracks, and battle cards. Where appropriate create separate versions for each persona involved in the buying process. This will ensure that your sales teams can bring to the fore what’s most important to the customer representatives they are talking with. Following on from the example scenario mentioned earlier in this article:

• For buyers (Alex - CTO): Emphasise security, integrations, cost savings.

• For users (Mary - General Counsel): Focus on ease of use, automation, and collaboration.

Guide Feature Development

Your product team should be using personas to help prioritize the features and stories in your backlog that will create the most valuable outcomes for your customers.

Ask: Would Mary or Alex care about this feature? If the answer is unclear, reconsider its priority.

Key Tenets of Good Personas

Personas are powerful, but only if done right. Here are the things to keep front of mind:

• Don’t Rely on Assumptions: Base personas on data, not gut feelings. Foundational assets such as personas are no different to the products themselves, you need to undertake ‘early access testing’ to make sure you have got it right. Try them out with some friendly customers and your sales team to make sure your persona profiles are hitting the mark. If you have established user communities and customer advisory boards then these are great forums to use as well.

• Continuously Review and Iterate: Review and update personas regularly. Market trends evolve, customers’ organisation structures change, competitors advance, and new entrants emerge – make sure you stay relevant.

• Be Specific: Avoid the assumption of ‘one size fits all’ and invest the time to understand the differences of each persona involved in your customers’ buying process and use this to adjust your positioning and messaging appropriately.

Final Thoughts: Personas Are a Competitive Advantage

Creating and maintaining a deep understanding of your audience is half the battle. Personas give you the clarity to build better products, craft sharper messaging, and ultimately drive growth.

If your company isn’t leveraging personas yet, now is the time to start. If you would benefit from guidance on creating personas or embedding them into your go-to-market strategy then get in touch with us.

Schedule a free consultation and make a start by downloading the Personas template.

Written by Steve Smith