5 Ways You Should Be Using Your Buyer Personas (But Probably Aren't)
At 30dps, we're big believers that you can't market to an audience you can't "see." That's why we emphasize buyer personas—detailed characterizations of the people you're trying to reach.
Creating personas takes real effort. Unfortunately, many companies don't capitalize on that investment. When asked how they use their personas, they say something like, "Marketing uses them for campaigns, I think."
If that's all you're doing, you're selling your personas short. Here are five areas where personas should guide decisions—and usually don't.
1. Product Development
Marketing knows who you're trying to sell to. But do the people actually creating and enhancing your products?
Product teams make decisions every day about features, interfaces, and priorities. Those decisions should be informed by deep understanding of end users—their needs, their frustrations, their context.
Share your personas with product development. Include persona considerations in feature discussions. The products that emerge will serve customers better.
2. Sales Conversations
Your sales team talks to prospects every day. Are they adapting their approach based on which persona they're addressing?
Different personas have different priorities, different objections, different decision criteria. A technical buyer needs different information than a financial buyer. A risk-averse persona needs different reassurance than an innovation-seeking one.
Train sales to identify personas early in conversations and adjust accordingly. The same product can be positioned very differently for different buyers.
3. Customer Service
When customers contact support, understanding their persona context improves every interaction. A technical user frustrated by a simple issue is a different situation than a non-technical user genuinely confused.
Service teams equipped with persona understanding can anticipate needs, adjust communication styles, and resolve issues more effectively.
4. Content Planning
This seems obvious—personas should drive content decisions. But many content calendars are driven by what the company wants to say rather than what specific personas need to hear.
Map every piece of content to a specific persona and a specific point in their journey. If you can't identify who a piece is for and what it helps them accomplish, question whether you should create it.
5. Technology Configuration
Your marketing automation, CRM, and analytics tools can all be configured around personas—segmenting data, personalizing experiences, and measuring what matters for each audience segment.
This is where persona investment increasingly pays off. AI-powered personalization tools can deliver tailored experiences at scale, but only if you've defined who you're personalizing for. Clean persona data becomes the foundation for effective automation. Without it, even the most sophisticated tools are just guessing.
Making Personas Organizational
The common thread: personas shouldn't live only in marketing. They should inform decisions across the organization—anyone who touches the customer experience.
Post persona profiles in common areas. Include them in onboarding. Reference them in strategy discussions. Make them part of how your company thinks about customers, not just how marketing segments campaigns.
The investment in creating personas only pays off when the organization actually uses them.