Buyer persona

A usable persona fits on half a page and holds four things: the situation they are in, what they want to achieve, what slows their decision and where they look for information. For example, a marketer at a manufacturer with a trade fair in three weeks who needs a video and has never commissioned one. That is a persona. Age and city are absent, because they change nothing about what needs saying.

Why it changes your copy: once you know the customer is afraid of missing a deadline, you start answering questions about timing before questions about quality. A company that wrote down three personas found two thirds of its content was written for the purchasing officer while the engineer was the one deciding. Rewriting two pages on the website changed the enquiries.

How to build one in an afternoon: do not start with research, start with a list of your last twenty customers. Call three of them and ask what they were dealing with before they contacted you and what held up the decision. The answers start repeating by the third call. That gives you two or three personas, which is all you need and all anyone will remember.

Where it goes wrong: invented personas with a stock photo and a name, Peter, 42, enjoys running. That persona helps nobody write a single sentence. Building one per segment is equally damaging, because ten personas means none get used. And in B2B remember several people decide together, so a persona is a role in the decision rather than one individual.

We write a persona as a single first person sentence, for instance: I need a video for a trade fair in three weeks and I am worried we will not make it. The brief and the copy are then written against that sentence. Try it today: ask your salesperson which question customers ask most often and write it down exactly as they say it.