Personas: Are You Getting the Good, Avoiding the Bad, and Escaping the Ugly?
Personas are a cornerstone of content strategy and marketing, representing our target audience segments. But are we using them effectively, or are we falling prey to common pitfalls? A recent episode of the Content Matters Podcast, featuring content strategist and founder of the Content Pool Alan Porter, delved into the good, bad, and ugly of persona development, offering valuable insights we can all learn from.
The Good: Putting the Customer First
At their heart, personas are about understanding our audience and catering to their needs. They help answer crucial questions: "Who is this content for?" and "What do we want them to do with it?" As Porter emphasizes, this customer-centric thinking is paramount for impactful content, marketing campaigns, and even technical documentation. Even flawed personas can be a valuable starting point for considering the customer's perspective.
Task-based personas, which concentrate on the jobs customers need to do, enhance this focus by directly addressing user needs. Porter stressed that developing personas helps us answer these fundamental questions when creating content, driving customer-centricity across various departments.
The Bad: The Trap of Assumptions & Stale Personas
A major pitfall in persona development is relying on internal assumptions instead of genuine customer insights. Creating personas in a vacuum, without interacting with real customers, results in inaccurate representations and missed opportunities. Porter cautions against this "inside-out" approach, highlighting the importance of customer interviews, focus groups, and analyzing authentic user behavior—even on platforms like YouTube—to validate assumptions and uncover the tasks customers are trying to accomplish.
He also pointed out the danger of static personas: those built once and never revisited. Given the rapid pace of technological change and shifts in customer behavior (like those seen during the COVID pandemic), regular review and updates are essential. Personas should be a process, not a project.
The Ugly: When Personas Become Caricatures (and a Waste of Time)
The most detrimental mistake is over-fictionalizing personas. Porter recounts a story of a team wasting three days searching for the "perfect kitten picture" for their persona. This excessive detail, while seemingly innocuous, can be harmful.
Overly specific personas, especially those anchored to narrow demographics instead of tasks and goals, risk excluding large segments of the audience. Porter’s point is driven home by his question: "How many customer interviews could they have done in that three days?" This highlights the opportunity cost of over-fictionalization.
Who Owns Personas? A Cross-Functional Approach
While persona development should involve a cross-functional team, Porter believes the ideal owner is a dedicated customer experience group. This ensures a holistic view of the customer journey and avoids departmental silos. If such a group doesn't exist, a marketing team with a company-wide remit could also be suitable.
AI: A Helper, not a Creator
While Porter acknowledges the potential of AI for pattern matching and analyzing large datasets to glean insights about customer behavior, he cautions against using generative AI to create personas. He sees current generative AI as ill-suited for this task, potentially leading to overly fictionalized and biased representations. However, AI can be a useful tool for identifying trends and patterns that inform task-based persona development.
The Path Forward: Task-Based Personas and Continuous Improvement
Porter champions a more pragmatic and actionable approach: task-based personas. Rather than crafting "Jane, the 30-year-old graphic designer," focus on "someone formatting complex visual layouts on a deadline." This approach mitigates bias and ensures personas are universally relevant.
Moreover, developing personas shouldn’t be a one-time project but a continuous process. Regular reviews and updates—at least annually and more frequently in dynamic industries—are vital for maintaining accuracy and relevance. He suggests leveraging data analysis and patterns observed in support calls, self-help portals, and other customer interactions to identify recurring problems and build task-based personas around them.
Unlock the True Potential of Personas
By prioritizing the customer, validating assumptions, and avoiding excessive fictionalization, we can unlock the true potential of personas and create content that resonates with our target audience.
Key Takeaways:
- Focus on task-based personas: Address user needs and jobs to be done.
- Gather real customer data: Adopt an outside-in approach to avoid assumptions.
- Avoid excessive fictionalization: Focus on actionable insights, not elaborate backstories.
- Maintain and update regularly: Personas should evolve with your audience.
- Involve a cross-functional team: Ensure a holistic view of the customer.
- Use AI strategically: Leverage its analytical capabilities, not its creative ones.
To learn more from Alan Porter's insights and gain practical advice on effective persona development, listen to the full episode.
