Adele Revella is the founder and president of The Buyer Persona Institute, a firm that helps marketers interview buyers for the insights that are the foundation of strategic marketing and sales enablement. She will deliver a pre-conference workshop “Building Your Buyer Personas” on Sept. 4, 2012, at Content Marketing World. Download her free eBook The Buyer Persona Manifesto. Follow Adele on Twitter @buyerpersona or on the Institute’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/buyerpersona.
Now that buyer personas are a widely accepted marketing practice, it’s time to course-correct. For far too many companies, buyer personas have become an attractive, air-filled object of desire that have little effect on the quality of marketing efforts.
Four years after my original version of this post, many marketers remain confused about what buyer personas are and how to build them. This confusion can turn an important credo into a useless chore.Continue Reading
Editor’s note: Because many marketers remain confused about what buyer personas are and how to build them, we’ve updated this post.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to see that marketers are starting to use buyer personas for content marketing. Buyer persona development is a positive trend that, when done correctly, helps content marketers become a strategic asset and deliver a real competitive advantage to their organizations.
However, there’s a lot of confusion about what buyer personas are and aren’t and how to develop them. I worry that ‘buyer persona’ could become just another meaningless buzzword. That would be a shame, because personas are such a useful tool.Continue Reading
