Is it time to update your Personas?

In a previous post we talked about Personas, why they are important and how to create them.

Now you might be thinking, now that I’ve got my personas figured out, I don’t need to think about them again.  That would be wrong.  You need to update your personas regularly.  You want to add auditing personas to your routine audits and make them part of your marketing workflow.

As recent events have shown us, things change, and sometimes very quickly.  In times of change, you want to go back and review your personas to see if any of your original assumptions and data have changed.  You also want to take any new data you’ve collected since you created them and see if that would affect your personas.

Adding persona audits to your routine workflow

Many marketing groups know they need to perform routine audits of their marketing efforts.  You should review your SEO, website performance, blog activity, social media activity, and any paid advertising you may do.  This can be a fairly large amount of work depending on how many channels you use.  For paid advertising many companies will do daily or weekly reviews because the financial risk is higher than organic marketing.

At INO Solutions we recommend setting up a calendar and building routine audits into your marketing workflow.  When you perform routine audits is a matter for how active your marketing is, how volatile your markets are, and how competitive they are.

Markets that are very volatile and have a large amount of competition should be reviewed more often.  You should also watch for sudden and unique events that may shift the landscape of your industry.  The recent Covid-19 pandemic is a great example of an event that we recommend reviewing your personas to see how they may have changed.

Things to look for

Here are things to consider in your persona audits:

• Has your business changed?
  • New products or services launched
  • Changes to existing products or services
• New sales data:
  • Has your customer base changed?
    • Age
    • Location
    • Products or services purchased
    • Average order value increased or decreased
    • Average sales cycle increased or decreased
• New data from customer service
  • Changes in support requests
  • Changes in product or service performance and why
    • Quality problems
    • Delivery problems
  • Changes in customer satisfaction levels
• Website data:
  • Changes in traffic by:
    • Age
    • Location
    • Gender
    • Top pages visited
    • Pages per session and which pages drove the most engagement
    • Average session duration and which pages had the highest duration
• Changes in the competitive landscape
  • Has your competition changed
    • Added new products or services
    • Increased or decreased their marketing
  • Are there new competitors
  • How are you positioned relative to your competition
    • This may alter your approach to your markets and affect your personas
• World events
  • Has a world event changed how your customers behave?
  • Increased or decreased online activity
  • Increased or decreased the need for your product or service
  • Increased or decreased the cost of your product or service

Start with the big picture and work down to the smaller details.  In this way you’ll have a more complete view of causes and effects on your personas.

Don’t forget negative personas

Negative personas are personas of the people you do NOT want to attract.  Negative personas are particularly valuable when you are running paid ads.  You want to attract the right kind of prospect.  Negative personas can consume your ad budget when they have no intention of buying.

It is too simple to say negative personas are the opposite of your regular personas, but that is a good place to start.  Also consider:

• Similar product or service needs or wants that will attract people that are not a good fit
  • Clients that are too large or too small
  • People with too small of a budget
  • Typical market wording that is not very specific
    • • Ex. – house painting instead of interior house painting, people looking to paint the outside of their houses would be a negative persona

When to do your persona audits

We recommend doing at least quarterly audits on all of your marketing activities.  Take a day or two each quarter and gather all the data outlined above and sit down with several people in your company and review everything.  Include sales, product managers, and customer service at a minimum.

You will want to adjust your persona reviews based on your business and markets.  You may want to increase or decrease your audit frequency as time goes on.  Keep an eye on your customers and your business, they will tell you what is best.

But quarterly reviews are a good place to start.  You need enough data to make the effort worthwhile, but you don’t want to wait too long and miss a change in your market.