Buyer personas can be extremely helpful when it comes to understanding your customers, crafting products and messages that will appeal to your target audience, and attracting more visitors to your website.
However, you can have too much of a good thing. Having too many buyer personas can lead to confusion rather than clarity. It also takes work to properly understand and describe each persona, and there are diminishing returns for each persona you add.
So how do you know when you have enough buyer personas, or whether you have too many?
Having the Right Personas
There is an ideal number of buyer personas you should have; however, that number is different for each business, and can change over time as your business or industry changes.
The one thing that is true for all companies is that you do need at least one buyer persona. That's because you do have buyers, and you have to understand what their needs are if you are going to meet those needs. And, in some rare cases where you have a highly specialized company and a limited target market, one buyer persona may be all you need.
Most likely, though, you will need multiple personas. The distinguishing factor which requires you to split your target market into multiple personas is a fundamental difference in buying behavior. If half of your customers are motivated to buy your product because it will help them grow and expand, and the other half are solely interested because your product will save them money, that is a big enough difference in goals that you will want to have two buyer personas and present your message in two different ways.
When to Eliminate Personas
Not every little difference in buying behavior requires a different persona, though, and there is a limit to the number of personas you can handle. You may have too many buyer personas if:
- You cannot manage that many different marketing messages. This can especially be a problem for smaller companies with limited resources. If you cannot tailor your sales message or marketing materials to take advantage of buyer persona insights, the excess personas are not going to do you much good.
- Your personas are too similar. If a single approach can work well with two different types of customers, you can combine those into a single persona.
- They are based on roles or job titles rather than goals and motivations. Buyer personas are based on how people think and behave, not what their job description is. People with different jobs or business types can still have very similar needs and pain points.
- They are vague. If you can't clearly describe the persona, you can't get much use from it.
- They don't make good customers. These could be described as "negative buyer personas." Though they might be a real and distinct set of customers, they may not be worth trying to sell to.
- They are out of date. Perhaps your business has changed, or you no longer offer a particular product. Though the buyers might still be there, you no longer need to market to them.
By having the right buyer personas--and not too many of them--you can make your marketing strategies more effective. The end result will be something you can never have too much of: more customers and more sales.
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