How essential or non-essential traditional buyer personas are for marketing development and research.
A user persona is used by companies to understand their target audience and customers. The persona acts as a fictional and visual representative of their ideal buyer or user.
The persona templates are used to guide marketers to construct persona profiles. Using consumer data and analytics, the profile is then created with the demographics, behaviors, and lifestyle attributes. On successful completion of the user persona, companies can then develop content, products based on understanding the needs of their customers.
Utilizing personas give companies an inside perspective and understanding of their buyer. But how effective the traditional methods are when compared with the rapid growth of technology? Let’s discuss some of the challenges of the traditional method of creating personas in the modern age.
No one is going to doubt the insightful data that personas provide. However, gathering insightful consumer data using traditional methods such as ethnology, focus groups, and surveys is a time-consuming project. On average, companies need 3-6 months to get the exact insights needed to start crafting a buyer persona.
Once this information is finalized, there’s still the process of presenting the personas with an appealing visual report. Most companies chose to use a persona template to display the collected data. Multiple marketing platforms offer persona templates as a complementary tool to help with this marketing research. However, the created personas are static and based on manually collected data, and such process does not scale. . In today’s digital landscape, consumer trends change frequently and having an automated process to generate and analyze personas and customers would help businesses stay well informed on the likes and interests of their audience.
Most companies have different audience segments depending on their markets, and therefore there will be the need to have more than one persona representing an audience. In fact, it’s common for most businesses to have 2-3 personas in order to personalize the marketing strategy to a specific audience and market.
We already know how labor intensive creating one individual persona is and creating multiples will extend the efforts and time for the market research phase and therefore delay the development of products mapping and campaigns.
The digital age has brought us more accessible technologies to rapidly scale consumer research. Like mentioned previously, many marketing platforms offer a variety of templates for building your personas. Having several choices means there’s more to consider in order to select the right template that helps you represent your ideal consumer.
From textual to visual elements, format style and sectionals differentiate and depending on the amount of data this is being inputted in, the template might not be able to present the buyer in the most concise and clear way. The traditional template selection adds another additional step of development in crafting a persona.
Stay connected with us to receive the insights and tips on consumer personas.