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Establish personas in the company: How does it work?

More and more companies are using buyer personas, candidate personas, or personas to represent B2B contacts. How do you introduce them? We show you: for corporations as well as for small companies.

 

The trend toward working with data-based personas has a good reason, because:

  • Revenues from persona-based emails are 18x higher than those from broadcast emails.
  • 93% of companies that outperform their competition use personas for their database segmentation.
  • Using personas increases marketing-generated revenue by 171%.
  • Buyer personas increase organic traffic to websites by 55
  • Advertised positions are filled significantly faster when recruiting works with Candidate Personas.

And yet: "My company is too small for Personas, we don't need that". Some say. They say that companies have resources and data, but often have problems anchoring the personas equally in all areas of the company - in order to bring about a cultural change toward "customer centricity.

If you want to use personas successfully to guarantee a really good candidate or customer experience, you need to know two things: Whether the company is ready for personas and how to introduce personas.

It does not work without readiness

Just as one swallow does not make a summer, one persona-enthusiastic person in management is not enough to successfully take the step to personas with an entire company. For personas to lead to sustainable success in a company, the company must be ready for them, that is:

  • Top management is behind the project.
  • There is a basic knowledge of personas in the company and a willingness to extend them to all stakeholders.
  • There is sufficient and good enough data available or willingness to collect or purchase.
  • Financial resources are available for data collection/purchase as well as secondment of internal staff or outsourcing of persona creation and implementation.
  • There is a concrete plan for the use of the personas and a realistic goal to be achieved through it.

The Persona Readiness Scale (PRS) according to Jansen et al captures the factors mentioned. The PRS comprises various statements on the subject of personas in a company and can be answered with options ranging from "do not agree at all" (1) to "agree completely" (5). A company can achieve a maximum of 105 points on this scale, which can be interpreted as follows:

  • Low Persona Readiness: 22-46 points
  • Average Persona Readiness: 47-76 points
  • High Persona Readiness: 77-105 points

It makes sense to apply this scale before you tackle "enterprise personas" because the data-driven creation of personas is time-consuming and resource-intensive. Even if the readiness score is high, personas only make sense if the company has a large and diverse customer or applicant base.
Depending on the resources available within the company, the entire process can either be implemented in-house or outsourced to external experts.

Communication gets everyone on board

Anyone who wants to introduce personas that work must involve all stakeholders. A persona imposed by decree by an individual is hardly ever used. If you want to introduce personas in your company for the first time and have the support of top management or are part of it yourself, organize a kickoff event. Explain to all stakeholders the costs and benefits of personas, the amount of work involved, and the techniques and skills required. To get the stakeholders in a positive frame of mind, start by showing how personas are used in practice and cite best practice examples. Assure stakeholders of management's support and explain what form it will take.

It is very important that communication does not remain a one-off super event. Then there is a risk that the personas will quickly disappear again. Accompanying, long-term communication helps to mentally involve everyone in the process, even if they should not be operationally involved in the creation and introduction of the personas. Report on the state of affairs, successes, setbacks and anecdotes at regular, very brief events - a half-hour maximum is quite sufficient. Employees directly involved in the creation of personas can act as "persona mentors." They answer questions, talk to the staff, possibly collect good ideas and provide the management with ideas via the best communication channels within the company.

The right data

Large companies often have good know-how and a great deal of data. However, they are also complex entities, often organized in a decentralized manner and sometimes with different regulations, data formats, suppliers, procedures, and subcultures depending on the department or branch. All these factors must be reconciled for the successful use of personas. In addition, it's not enough to have lots of data. It has to be the right data. Data-driven personas where the data has been collected incorrectly are worthless, as are those that are considered unrealistic within the company.

Data experts talk about noise: A lot of data in one data set that is not relevant for the task at hand. To decide which is the right data, you need an interdisciplinary team that is familiar with data collection and analysis as well as with marketing or HR, and that brings psychological expertise to the table.

The right team

Small companies or those that either do not have the necessary know-how or cannot spare the relevant employees at their original posts, outsource the creation of the data-based personas and buy in personas. They then "only" need one main person responsible, who forms the interface to the "supplier", reports to the management and leads and organizes the above-mentioned process of "bringing along" the entire workforce.

If you want to create the personas in-house it is important that all stakeholders have access to the data sources and know how to interpret them. There should be a persona team and a responsible person to oversee data collection and input from the various departments. Since the success of persona creation depends primarily on data collection, cleansing and analysis, this needs to be a person with experience in data or market research. At the same time, the person in charge should be agile and open to new things. A "that-has-always-been-done-this-way" mentality will get you nowhere here. If the person in charge already knows the team, all the better.

If the persona creation involves not only existing data but also future surveys, bring in a person with market research expertise. This person oversees the questionnaire design, the selection of participants, and later, based on all data and results, the 100% data-based creation of the sedcard. For the persona to be authentic, even small details like the name have to be right: Neither is someone called "Peter Performer", nor will you be taken for a "Karl-Heinz" born in 1990 or an "Amelie" born in 1970.

Employee Persona Teams

When creating personas in-house, it also makes sense for employees to start at the operational level rather than working on a specific product (and its marketing) for a specific persona.Ideally, for example, a technically savvy SEO manager will take care of personas that prefer clear technical information, free of lurid slogans. Team members with storytelling expertise take care of the textual description of personas that are needed in marketing, for example, and so on. In this way, teams form around the respective customer or candidate groups that identify with the personas, have easy access to them, and inherently speak the same language. This results in true customer or candidate centricity.

Present personas work

For the personas to work, they must be present at ALL times in the company. Therefore, make your personas as lifelike and vivid as possible within the company: With your own blog on the company intranet, a social media profile, snapshot photos in lifelike surroundings (via mood board, at home or at work) and storytelling in the form of blog posts, you turn your personas into "real" colleagues, business partners or customers. When all departments can think of their actions from the persona's perspective, true Candidate or Customder Centricity emerges and the personas unfold their full potential.

Use Candidate Personas for the development, design, copywriting, and promotion of job ads and all other touchpoints of the Candidate Journey. Buyer personas do the same for marketing specific products, product lines, or brands. Tailor language style, popular content formats (posts, quizzes, videos, audio/podcasts, whitepapers, ....), imagery, color scheme, etc. to the persona's preferences and needs, and measure success against KPIs: Impressions, followers, likes, comments, shares, mentions or links, on social media channels, applicant numbers and quality of applicants or sales figures. The better all departments know the persona and therefore pull together, the better the personas work. If the result is not as desired, you need to find the screws that are sticking and adjust them.

Establish personas in small businesses

In small companies, the number of stakeholders is usually manageable, just like the company structure, the number of employees and the responsibilities. Unfortunately, so is often the data situation. Here, there are no persona teams and mentors and also no giant structure, but either "everyone has to do it" (especially in very small companies), or personas are purchased.
In both cases, a kick-off event is also needed, at which either information is provided about the imminent purchase or about the intention to develop personas together soon.
In both scenarios, the following applies again: The management must be behind it, everyone must be informed about the costs and benefits, and there must be a person with primary responsibility who coordinates everything and answers questions.

Establish personas in large corporations

Older, large companies have often been successful with a proven strategy for a very long time. This usually goes well until the market suddenly changes radically or a competitor appears with a groundbreaking new product. If you can't react quickly and adapt, you've lost.
But you can only adapt if you know your customers or candidates precisely - with personas. This is also the reason why personas are never finished: Just like real customers and candidates, they "live" and change their needs and lifestyles.

The biggest problem with large companies is entrenched structures, processes and often also the customer or candidate image. These conditions can lead to projects such as the introduction of personas being tackled, but then fizzling out again or remaining too static (according to the motto: "We have introduced personas, now they are finished and the project is over"). Breaking up the entrenched structures, bringing everyone along and convincing them requires very agile management and a great deal of perseverance on the one hand and responsiveness and good employee motivation on the other.

Ideally, the company can use the methods described above to develop a system that everyone is convinced of. In the process, a regular flow of data must be guaranteed to ensure that the personas always reflect current market realities.

Not too many and not too few personas

If a company has only a small product range, the creation of personas is usually straightforward. Of course, data collection and analysis must be implemented correctly. But it is relatively clear what the personas need to be created for and what requirements and expectations they must meet.

But when a company sells hundreds of products in different markets and wants to be customer-centric with each product and each market, it's a different story. You have to find a balance between two extremes: If you create one or even more personas per product and market, you'll soon be doing nothing else. Marketing and sales teams or, in the case of Candidate Personas, the HR department are then quickly hopelessly overwhelmed. If there are too many personas, soon no one knows what he or she is working on and for whom.

However, if you try to map too many products and customer groups into a single persona, you miss the point of the persona. It becomes too superficial to be useful, and the bottom line is that resources have been wasted on a tool that doesn't work. Every company must find a middle ground, with the help of outside experts if necessary, to slowly introduce its stakeholders to a persona-based corporate strategy. Once this has been found, the company can then react all the more quickly to market changes, competitor products or external factors such as pandemics or economic crises.

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