Marketers, it's time to let go of Buyer Personas.
Once the go-to for marketers, the industry standard is now almost completely obsolete.
I’m going to preface this email with a disclaimer. I still believe that for some business, in some niches, buyer personas CAN still be useful.
I thought I’d start strongly with it being the first ever edition of Marketing on Mondays, and some of you may find this a little bit controversial, so sorry not sorry and all that.
It’s Q4 of 2022. It’s time to let go of buyer personas for your business. In most cases they are counter-intuitive at best and completely useless at worst.
Of course, for very specific B2B niches, they are always going to be useful. But B2B isn’t the be all and end all. And, of course, B2B is changing too.
In my opinion, if you’re still working solely with buyer personas in 2022, you’re wasting your time.
Time for an example? I think so.
eCommerce Retailer, Home Goods Niche, £1,500,000 2021 Revenue
A business like this is going to have a whole host of customers that could be marketed to in so many different ways.
Take Moira for instance. She’s 69, retired, owns her own home and lives in Wakefield. She’s seen the company after searching for “mirrors with gold edging” on Bing and has landed on the website, seen something she likes and converted.
Good old Moira.
Then there’s John. He’s 22, just purchased his first home (lucky duck) and needs a new rug for the place. He’s not ready to purchase just yet but has signed up to an email list in the hope of getting a discount in the future.
Or there’s Lucy. She’s 29 and is looking to re-decorate a flat she’s purchased as an investment. She’s seen the company advertise on Instagram and loves what they do. She goes and converts immediately via Instagram.
Sure, one of these buyers (probably Moira) is going to spend more on average. But is it really worth your marketing team spending all their energy and budgets targeting Moira, leaving all the revenue from John and Lucy on the table?
Come on, now! That’s inefficient. So what do you do instead?
Potential Buyer Scale (PBS)
I stepped away, officially, from working with specific buyer personas back when I left the B2B sector in early 2020 and have been working with the PBS (as I’ve coined it, I’m sure someone smarter than me has come up with something similar before) ever since.
For most businesses, in fact almost all businesses, they will have more than one customer that purchases from them. The PBS is my preferred way of categorising these customers and segmenting them out based on who offers the highest ROI for a business.
You can use metrics like:
Revenue Per Customer
Customer Lifetime Value
Average Order Value per Customer Group
And so on to determine who comes at the top of your PBS.
Let’s use the example above, just to explain things a little further.
Moira, who purchases around 4x per year, spends around £500 each time. Moira originally cost the business around £255 to acquire.
John purchases once per year and spends £65 each time he purchases on average. He cost the business approximately £10 to acquire.
Lucy finds herself purchasing around 5x per year and spends around £125 each time. She costs the business around £1,000 to acquire initially.
Based on these metrics above, our PBS will look like this:
Moira
Lucy
John
So now that you have your PBS in place, you know exactly who to put the most time, effort and cash into acquiring to generate revenue. You can focus on Moira first, she generates the most money over the course of a lifetime, but don’t forget John and Lucy, you’ll be leaving money on the table for competitors if you do!
So, what do you think?
Do you still find value in buyer personas? Want to talk to me more about switching to a PBS model for your business?
Whatever you want to talk about, I’m here to discuss!