Millennial Alex doesn't want to buy your product
You’ve launched your product, but people on your waiting list just aren’t converting.
(Despite you offering a branded t-shirt AND 10% off their first month. Say, whaaaaaat?!)
Brian in engineering thinks it’s because the marketing channel doesn’t work (even though you’ve only used it for 6 days).
Karen from finance (not to be mistaken with the drag queen*) thinks it’s because you’re not on social media - well, that’s what her mate who also works in marketing told her to say.
And somewhere in a spreadsheet, there's a persona called "Millennial Alex" who supposedly represents your ideal customer.
But here’s the thing…
Alex is 23, lives in Cardiff, works as a legal assistant, owns two dogs, and watches RuPaul's Drag Race.
All these descriptors are great for targeting, but if you’re launching a new product or service, you’re making a big buyer persona mistake.
That’s because this shopping list of attributes doesn’t answer this one question:
Why would Alex buy your product in the first place?
Specifically, why would Alex stop using the product they’ve been using for years and take a risk with your offer?
(*I see you Googling her.)
Buyer persona mistake: missing out on the gap between what you sell and why people buy
Peter Drucker put it best: "People rarely buy what your company thinks it's selling." Emphasis on the thinks.
As business owners, as marketers, and as startups we think people are obsessed with our products.
We think people live and breathe our brands. But that’s rarely the case.
We overlook talking to customers, understanding what problem they are looking to solve.
And so, what happens is we create sales and marketing from our perspective - supply, and not from a customer’s - also known as demand.
It’s this approach that leads to guesswork and an instance obsession with features. Not to mention the over-reliance on describing your ideal customer as a something as general as “millennials that work in sales”.
Effective messaging and website proposition, especially when launching new stuff to the market, should focus on desired outcomes or, on a better world.
Or, put simply, why someone should switch from their old way of doing things to this new way.
Think about it.
Salesforce doesn’t sell CRM software. It sells a fast track route to becoming a marketing director. (Its features help to create this outcome).
Headspace doesn’t just sell a meditation app. It sells a way to strike a work-life balance to help you be a better parent, guardian, or manager.
When you strip out all the feature talk and you really boil it down to the problem you’re solving, a buyer persona aint going to cut it when you’re given a lovely advertising budget to spend. (Spend = hand straight over to Google or Meta.)
The framework that helps build a more holistic buyer persona
Jobs to be Done (JTBD) is a framework that uncovers the progress your customers are trying to make in their specific circumstances. It was created by Bob Moesta and Clayton Christensen, and makes for some super nerdy reading if you’re into boiling marketing down into steps.
Check out how to connect it with customer interviews or if you’ll allow me, read my case study on applying JTBD to marketing.
Anywho - back to Jobs - it's not about what they look like or where they live. It's about what they're struggling with and what success looks like to them. This is the info you need to really create a well-rounded buyer persona.
A Job has three components, all of which you can use to describe this ideal customer of yours.
Social, emotional, and functional dimensions - How your customers feel, what they do, how others see them
The buying timeline - From first thought to satisfaction
The four forces of progress - What pushes them toward change and what holds them back from buying something?
That last point matters more than most people realise.
That’s because when you are marketing and selling a product to a new customer, you’re competing against two things: the push of their current frustrating situation and their anxiety about trying something new.
Read more about the Jobs to be Done theory over at the Re-Wired Group.
An example: Applying JTBD to increase sign up rates
Back when I was working inhouse, I worked on an edtech platform that had a pretty low free trial conversion rate. Churn, overall, was high, and monthly recurring revenue was flat lining.
I regularly relied on a buyer person that used the following characteristics to describe them:
Female, went to uni, aged 19-25, low confidence, lives in the UK, employed.
You can see it’s a superficial way to describe someone. If I was to hand this over to an ad agency and say “advertise and find me 1000 of these” - how many do you think would actually be relevant for our product?
We needed to go deeper.
That’s when we started to really lean into customer discovery interviews, and spoke with a group of paying customers. Not the vocal free users or the biggest fans, but people who'd opened their wallets in the last 30 days.
Here's what we discovered:
The competition was different than we expected. While we were building features to compete with obvious rivals, customers were choosing between their product and completely different solutions… or doing nothing at all.
Customer awareness levels varied dramatically. Some didn't know they had a problem. Others were deep into comparison mode. Our one-size-fits-all messaging was missing most of these people.
The words we were using in our messaging were reflective of how we spoke, not the users. They weren’t bought into our fancy language. If anything, it was putting them off.
How to avoid buyer persona mistakes: a checklist
You may be reading this, thinking, “oh wowzers - I’d never make these mistakes or have this level of bias”.
And you might not, but if any of the following sounds familiar, I’d suggest you may need to dig Millennial Alex out of your slide deck and give him some love and attention.
You focus on demographics instead of circumstances. Age and location matter less than urgency and ability to solve the problem.
You’re confusing features with progress. Customers don't want your features; they want to make progress in their situation. If “ai-enabled” is part of your vocab, it’s time to sense-check.
You think you can get by with one-size-fits-all messaging. Different customers at different awareness levels need different approaches. Read more about b2b content strategy, including how to make the distinction between awareness levels and the type of content to create.
You research fans instead of buyers. These are the people who love talking about your product aren't always the ones paying for it. The ones you give mates’ rates too.
Need help uncovering why your customers buy? This is the foundation of everything we do at Oh Blimey. We dig it out, you look like the clever person. Look at our marketing services.
