Thinking beyond the persona

If you’ve been following our B2B personas blog series, you know the importance of creating personas, how to enhance them with data and AI, and maintenance techniques to keep them relevant over time. Now that you’ve done the work to build your organization’s personas, it’s time to put them into action.

When used effectively, personas provide a powerful tool to drive alignment, enhance decision-making, and ultimately create business impact. However, too often, personas are created only to gather dust. The key is to transform them from static documents into actionable guides that fuel business success.

Read on to learn how you can bring B2B personas into the spotlight to direct marketing strategy, product development, customer experience, and more.

Drive company-wide adoption

To make personas meaningful, they need to be embraced across your organization. Start by socializing them across teams and departments to ensure everyone understands and considers the target users in their efforts.

Here are a few practical tips to drive company-wide persona adoption:

• Centralize access: Highlight persona documents in shared digital spaces (like SharePoint or Google Drive) to make them easily accessible.
• Include in onboarding materials: Include persona documents in new employee materials to familiarize team members from day one.
• Tie to decision-making frameworks: Make personas a staple in meetings and discussions. For example, ask your team, “How would Persona A react to this?” to align decisions with customer needs.
• Host recorded training sessions: Develop training sessions that explain each persona in-depth, and the reasons for using them. Remember that your organization's culture will inform which approach works best to help personas feel real and relevant to everyone. A small, nimble startup may benefit from informal persona workshops, while a global enterprise might need structured training sessions across offices and teams.

During this stage, it’s important to understand how various teams practically use personas. Each department in your organization may have a different use case for leveraging personas to add value to their work, including:

• Marketing: Personas are the backbone of marketing efforts as they outline who to target with marketing dollars. Personas should be used to build an overarching strategy, select an appropriate channel mix, and craft messaging that resonates with your audience.
• Product Design: Product teams use personas to align on the problems they’re solving with product releases. Personas provide clarity on the needs, frustrations, and motivations of end-users, leading to more targeted solutions.
• Sales: Sales teams use personas to enhance outreach. By outlining key buying factors and challenges, personas help create more effective demand-generation content and productive sales conversations.
• Customer Service: Training customer service teams with personas enables them to better understand customers’ mindsets and pain points. This leads to more accurate and effective problem resolution.  

Promote cross-functional collaboration

When a project spans multiple teams to solve a pain point and provide value, personas help keep the customer at the center of the conversation, ensuring the solution addresses their core challenges. This helps break down siloes and connect individuals to the bigger picture.

Website improvement is an excellent example of multi-disciplinary teams coming together to solve issues that demand awareness of consumer behavior and needs. Personas can assist teams in better understanding who website visitors are and what tasks they’re trying to accomplish. If there are multiple personas, it may require prioritizing one around which to focus the messaging and experience. From there, branding, design, and copy can all be aligned to resonate with the target persona, and back-end processes and platforms can be streamlined to support the user accomplishing their goals as efficiently as possible.  

Use personas to shape business strategy ‍

Beyond individual projects, personas can be a tool for obtaining buy-in for large, cross-functional projects or securing deeper investment in a specific business area.

If you’re collecting data on an emerging persona, you can present this budding market segment as an opportunity for business expansion and growth.  

When it comes to allocating investment for product and service design, personas can further refine your focus. Do you have a primary persona driving an outsized portion of the business? If so, determine how you can alleviate their specific pain points.

Mapping the customer journey using personas can help provide additional strategic insights ranging from emotional (e.g., where a persona might get nervous, excited, or frustrated in the journey) to channel preferences, such as text versus email or phone calls.

Build solutions and products with distinction

Amplify your impact and how you resonate with customers by applying personas to your next business challenge. OneMagnify can help you effectively leverage your personas, make data-driven decisions based on how personas are interacting with your brand, and more.