Buyer personas are a foundational component of many brands’ marketing strategy. Personas often serve as a blueprint that guides marketing campaigns, customer journeys, and even product development.
Even though buyer personas are highly effective, they often miss the helpful context that marketers need to effectively serve the various identities their ideal customers possess. As a result, personas aren’t converting certain consumers at the rates that they could be.
In this post, I’ll share where traditional buyer personas miss the mark and how to fix it.
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The Gap in Most Buyer Personas
As an inclusive marketing strategist and consultant, I work with my clients to audit various components of their customer experience. This often includes reviewing and providing feedback on their creative briefs as they work on creating campaigns. It also involves getting consumer feedback on what they make.
Whenever I flag materials that can be improved regarding consumers with specific identities, brands have included specific buyer personas in their creative brief.
However, the execution of the materials wasn’t as successful. That’s often because the personas lacked the depth of information about the various identities of the consumers that the brand wanted to reach.
And as a result, the corresponding campaigns often fail to effectively engage consumers who are part of underrepresented and underserved communities that also fit the buyer persona profile. That’s a missed opportunity. Getting it right makes buyers feel seen, supported, and like they belong.
Here are some examples of challenges that arise with personas that lack specificity. I should note that these are all complaints I’ve heard directly or seen consumers commenting on in various channels:
- Magazine covers that don’t have plus-sized people featured.
- General market ads that don’t feature any Hispanic consumers.
- Website pages that don’t take into account accessibility features to support consumers with disabilities.
- Ads that feature people from underrepresented and underserved communities but lack cultural intelligence elements. The messaging doesn’t speak to their needs or objectives.
- Visual imagery that features people from underrepresented and underserved communities in a stereotypical way.
Consumer identities are often part of their decision-making process.
Every consumer has identities that influence what they buy and who they buy from, whether they know it or not.
For instance, I’m a Black woman. I’m left-handed. I follow a gluten-free diet for health reasons. My husband is a Spanish-speaking immigrant. And, together, we have a mixed-race bilingual child. As both a consumer and a business owner, at least one of these aspects of my identity influences what I buy in more instances than not.
For example, as a business owner, I often look for success stories from other business owners who “look like me.” After relocating to the U.S. from Buenos Aires, when we went to buy a car, my husband and I chose our salesperson based on whether or not they spoke Spanish. When I buy clothes, dolls, and toys for my daughter, I intentionally look for options where the images reflect girls who have curly hair and match her skin tone.
Other consumers don’t have the choice of considering their identity when it comes to making buying decisions. That’s because societal influences shape their experiences. How others respond to and/or engage with them is different. That’s especially true when compared to others who fit what has traditionally been considered the “mainstream.”
To illustrate, I worked with a client who had both service providers and the end consumers in their customer base. During research, we often heard from service providers that aspects of their identity (including race/ethnicity and gender) impacted the way they were treated while doing their work.
The service providers’ identities did not impact how well they were able to perform at their craft. But, their identities sometimes impacted the kinds of experiences they had with others. That wasn’t the case for people with identities that were part of the “mainstream”.
As consumers, our identities are a core part of who we are. Most consumers don’t compartmentalize or separate their identities when it comes to the buying process — even if marketers aren’t necessarily considering or infusing identity effectively into personas.
For buyers, their identity is so ingrained that they might not even realize how much it is a part of their decision-making process. And if marketers don’t ask about it during research, their identities may never come up as a point of consideration.
Therein lies the disconnect between many buyer personas and the consumers they are intended to represent.
Marketers must remember that the customers they serve are both consciously and unconsciously looking to answer this fundamental question when engaging with your brand: Is this product for someone like me?
That someone like me could be a variety of things:
- A solopreneur.
- Someone who isn’t tech savvy.
- Someone who is neurodivergent.
- Someone who speaks English as a second language.
- A woman.
- Someone with a bigger body frame.
- Someone with textured hair.
- Someone with kids.
- Someone without kids.
- Someone who is single.
- Someone who is married.
- Someone who practices Hinduism.
- A gay male.
- An immigrant.
- Someone with a disability.
- Someone who is 53.
And the list goes on and on.
If a consumer doesn’t feel like what you have to offer is for “someone like them,” they will move on to something or someone else.
Brands face a challenge: They must clearly and quickly communicate that their offering is for the specific identities of people who face the problem they solve. To meet this need, marketers need to call out those identities and acknowledge them in personas.
So even though a neurodivergent consumer fits one of your buyer persona categories to a tee, that doesn’t mean he will feel seen, supported, or like he belongs with your brand. That’s especially true if your personas don’t mention any aspects of his identity.
How to Make Your Buyer Personas More Effective
One of the core tenets of customer acquisition is choosing the specific identities you want to serve as customers. By infusing those identities into your buyer personas, you’ll set your brand up with the foundation needed to effectively serve all the consumers you want to target.
There are two ways you can approach this.
1. Add identity layers within your personas.
This involves taking your existing personas and adding more of the identity-based context. The extra information will help marketers execute on campaigns.
It’s always a good idea when data can inform the identity-based layers you want to include. So whatever data you can access about your ideal consumers from an identity standpoint, dig into it.
If you can’t access that data from your own internal or third-party data sources, consider sourcing this type of information from surveys, 1:1 interviews, or other direct engagements. That way, you can start to build the layers of the identities into your buyer persona profiles.
Once you have more specifics about what the identities are, be intentional about clearly and quickly communicating that what you have to offer is “for people like them” throughout your customer journey.
Here’s what adding in more identity-based information could look like for Creator Carmen.
These facts alone might be helpful to include in the narrative. But if a marketing team doesn’t know how being visually impaired, an Afro-Latina, or speaking English with a Spanish preference potentially influences Carmen, that information isn’t useful.
Marketers need to understand how identity factors impact these three versions of Creator Carmen’s decision-making process and buyer journey.
My recommendation is to infuse more nuanced information into your personas like this:
Then, supplement your identity-related challenges, frustrations, and wishes with supporting documentation. The extra information serves as a guidebook of what’s different about Creator Carmen’s experiences because of her disability versus a Creator Carmen who doesn’t have one. You can then show up well for the various versions of Creator Carmen you want to reach.
Customer interviews, focus groups, social listening, and other secondary sources can help you gain the cultural intelligence you need about identity.
2. Build identity-specific personas.
You might find that there are times when having a buyer persona specific to certain identities is helpful. However, the success of a persona depends on what your suite of buyer personas looks like or how they’re categorized.
This works well in the instances where it’s necessary to create specific products, features, communications, experiences, and even core messaging.
For instance, let’s say one of your product offers includes a customer segment of children under the age of 18. The needs, experiences, expectations, and ethics associated with how a brand communicates with them would be sufficiently different. With these constraints, it could be harder to make personas with identity-specific layers.
Here’s another example for you. In this video, email marketing strategist Eman Ismail explains how her Muslim faith identity has impacted her experiences at business events. Brands that host any kind of event and want to create a space where Muslim attendees feel seen, supported, and like they belong could benefit from creating a separate identity-specific persona.
You can listen to my entire conversation with Eman here on this episode of the Inclusion & Marketing podcast.
It’s time to make your personas more effective.
Buyer personas are powerful, but only when you create them to operate at their full potential. Move beyond traditional buyer personas to incorporate important elements of identity that your ideal customers are using to make buying decisions.
The payoff: more authentic campaigns, more conversions, and greater impact.
