How do your marketing and product teams use personas today to make more effective marketing / product experiences?

Understanding personas and ideal customer profiles is, in many ways, the foundation for all that we do. If we don’t understand our users’ and customers’ pain points, then there’s very little chance that we’ll build, market, sell, and support the right solutions to meet their needs.

At my company, at a strategic level, we have done a rigorous analysis of our market, of our personas (broken down by users, influencers, buyers, and more), and we regularly reevaluate what we believe to be true about each of them.

On a more tactical level, when we build positioning and messaging, campaigns, sales collateral, etc, we start by identifying the relevant personas. For example, at my company, Product Marketing has led the development of company-wide sales plays, and we built out a rigorous analysis of both user/practitioner messaging and buyer/exec messaging, identifying the following:

1. The relevant personas

2. What their pain points were

3. What their goals were

4. What messages would resonate the most with them (among other things).

By capturing these items, formally in a 1-pager, we were able to align the entire org, from Product, to Marketing, to Sales, which drove clarity for everyone involved.