Buyer personas have long helped businesses visualise their ideal customers and shape marketing strategies. However, some brands are stuck using these old versions of buyer personas that should've kept up with the way marketing has changed through the years. We call this a traditional buyer persona, and these personas often rely on assumptions, anecdotal data, or outdated insights.
While useful during its time, these personas can sometimes fall short when it comes to capturing the real, dynamic behaviours of consumers in today’s fast-changing market.
In this article, we’ll explore how traditional buyer personas fall short and introduce a more effective, data-driven approach to understanding your consumers and their motivations.
What is a buyer persona?
A buyer persona is a representation of your target customer, built to help brands understand their needs, motivations, and behaviours. However, traditional personas often rely on assumptions rather than data, leading to misaligned strategies.
Brands often rely on assumptions due to their lack of physical tools and data that they need to acquire reliable details about their consumers. This is a big opportunity cost to brands because the time and resources that they contribute to create these traditional personas can cause brands to miss out on key opportunities to connect with their actual audience.
What are data-driven personas?
Data-driven personas are buyer personas that are built using data-backed insights that involve consumer-related data which could be derived in the form of web analytics, social media trends, purchase history, and even search behaviour.
These are personas backed by actual reliable, observable data—the type of data that brands need outside of simply assuming what their consumers are typically like. This encourages confident decision-making and enhanced consumer understanding.
Why use data for your buyer personas?
Data remains essential no matter where you go. Brands won't be able to directly connect with customers on a physical level that would've enabled them to understand consumer preferences on a day-to-day basis. Data, however, offers valuable insights into consumer behaviour without brands needing to build overtly personal relationships.
Thanks to data, you can read what your consumers are up to for a specific period, distinguish what their wants are and consider what else they are expecting from your brand, and maybe even forecast what they are thinking of purchasing in the future to come.
With data-driven personas, brands can quickly adapt to shifting consumer trends, making informed decisions in real-time that keep them one step ahead of competitors. Consumers change their preferences and needs every time and so does data. Because consumers’ wants and needs change, so shall brands who want to assess consumer preferences and adjust to their needs.
Moving beyond just demographics
To truly understand consumer behaviour, pairing data-driven personas with the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework offers a more holistic view. Jobs to be Done goes beyond surface demographics to reveal the deeper motivations behind why consumers engage with your brand.
JTBD helps answer critical questions like:
- What are the real motivations behind a consumer’s purchase decision?
- What problem is the consumer trying to solve?
- What job are they hiring your product or service to accomplish?
You create a more holistic view of your customer when you integrate Jobs to Be Done theory in creating data-driven personas. Instead of just knowing who they are and what they do, you also understand why they do it. This shift allows brands to build personas that are not only based on observable data but also grounded in real consumer needs and motivations.
For example, a consumer may purchase a fitness tracker not just because they are interested in fitness, but because they have a specific job to accomplish—like improving their health through personalised insights or making their daily exercise routine more efficient. Understanding this job helps brands tailor their messaging, product features, and services to meet these deeper needs.
How to create a data-driven buyer persona?
Creating data-driven buyer personas will require concrete, real-time data to understand your customers on a deeper level. One key steps in building an accurate, data-driven buyer persona is to ask the right questions. These questions will guide your research, helping you uncover the trends, preferences, and behaviours that define your target audience.
These questions are vital for your brand in order to picture out the type of personas you are looking for. It will serve as a guide to determine where you need to look at, what type of data you need to find, and where you will have to acquire the data to answer the questions that you have about your consumers.
What questions to answer when conducting a data-driven buyer persona?
Starting to divert from assumptions to research-backed buyer personas is easy with the right questions to ask. You can create a good set of customer persona questions when you contextualise it to your brand'that you can ask yourself to get started.
What trends are driving consumer demand? What are the top emerging trends in consumer behaviour, based on real-time data? How are these trends influencing their preferences and purchasing decisions?
How does consumer demand compare to competition? How does the demand for your product or service stack up against competitors? Are consumers gravitating toward your brand or opting for competitor brands?
What products are consumers currently interested in? Which specific products within your category are trending the most? Are these preferences seasonal, or do they show long-term potential?
What is the price sensitivity of your target consumer? Are consumers price-sensitive in your category, or are they willing to pay a premium for certain products? How does pricing affect their purchasing decisions?
Which social media platforms or trends are shaping consumer behaviour? Which social media platforms are influencing your consumers’ purchasing habits? What content or influencers are shaping their opinions and driving engagement?
What keywords are consumers searching for related to your product? Which search terms are consumers using when looking for products in your industry? Are there any seasonal changes or trends in the keywords being searched?
What opportunities exist in the market? Are there gaps or unmet needs in the market that your brand can capitalise on? What consumer desires are not currently being met by your competitors?
What drives changes in consumer behaviour?
It’s not simple to decipher why specific consumer behaviours change, but think of consumers as yourself, who live a different life through the seasons.
To keep things simple, here are a few factors that influences consumers behaviour changes:
- Seasons/weather change
- Economic trends and standing
- Entertainment preferences
- Change in taste/age factors
- Technological advancements
- Social media and influencer impact
- Cultural and societal shifts
- Personal life events (e.g., marriage, parenthood)
- Availability of new products or innovations
- Environmental concerns and sustainability
- Political climate and policies
- Health and wellness trends
Constant changing behaviour is hard to track unless brands like yours conduct routinely consumer surveys to track consumer behaviour at all times. But with data-driven insights to supplement buyer personas, brands don’t need to constantly conduct hefty surveys and research for the sake of better-understanding consumers.
How to get data-driven insights
Brands can acquire data-driven insights for the consumer buyer personas through the following channels:
- Monitor Social Media Trends
Utilise social media analytics tools (e.g., Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics) to gauge engagement, sentiment, and trending topics. This data helps identify what resonates with your audience and how they interact with your brand online.
- Leverage Web Analytics
Use tools like Google Analytics to track user behaviour on your website. Analyse metrics such as page views, bounce rates, and user flow to understand what content and products attract and engage your audience.
- Purchase history
Brands have access to their customers’ purchasing history and can analyse the types of purchases that they incur. There will be patterns and certain habits that your customers are bound to do in your shop which can help you determine your next buyer persona.
- Track search behaviour
Using search engine analytics and tools like Google Trends and &facts to understand what your audience is searching for during the season can reveal insights into evolving consumer preferences.
- Collect customer feedback
Implement surveys, feedback forms, and reviews to gather direct input from your customers. Analyse this feedback to identify common pain points, preferences, and areas for improvement.
These channels are great for gathering initial data for your consumers. The problem lies in how to ensure that your buyer personas remain relevant as consumer behaviours evolve. The digital world moves fast and can quickly render traditional personas outdated.
Without continuously updated personas, brands risk misaligning their marketing strategies with actual consumer needs, leading to missed opportunities.
Why we don’t recommend buyer personas anymore
While traditional buyer personas offer a starting point, they often create subconscious biases which could risk segmenting consumers into harmful stereotypes that not only harms the consumers it lables, but also the brand. Doing so limits could limit brands' ability to connect with evolving customer needs which is a big no-no especially if brands like yours is continuously trying to make your consumers happy.
Buyer personas often focus on who customers are—demographics, behaviours, and interests. This approach has become outdated and the marketing world has long focused on the new thorough and scientific based of understanding its consumers. Although data through consumer profiling do provide insights into who is consuming your products and their surface-level interests, personas rarely dig into the why behind consumer choices. They might help brands begin to understand their audience but fail to uncover what consumers truly want and desire from their chosen brands.
Simply focusing on the basic attributes of your consumers like age, gender, or location, buyer personas offer only surface-level insights and do not address the deeper motivations behind purchase decisions and could neglect what consumers are thinking about behind the scenes. This creates ambiguity in the brand selection process, often leading to strategies that miss the core reasons driving consumer behaviour. In the dynamic world of consumer choices, this approach can lead to missed opportunities.
In today's fast-paced and evolving market, consumer behaviour is influenced by a myriad of factors. When brands pigeonhole consumers into static profiles, they risk missing out on the fluid shifts in consumer motivations and preferences. This rigidity hampers adaptability and relevance.
Why use Jobs-to-Be-Done Framework?
JTBD theory centres around the idea that customers “hire” products to solve specific problems or accomplish certain goals in their lives. Instead of thinking about who your customer is, the Jobs to Be Done framework asks, "What job is the customer trying to get done?"
This shift is crucial in a fast-changing market where consumer preferences can be unpredictable, but their core motivations often remain consistent. For example, two customers from different demographics might buy the same product for completely different reasons—but JTBD helps you uncover those reasons, making it a far more dynamic and actionable framework than personas.
Even with data-driven personas, there is a risk of relying too heavily on assumptions or generalisations. A persona built on past data might suggest that a consumer prefers a certain product because of their age or lifestyle, but JTBD digs deeper into the underlying problem they are trying to solve. The framework focuses more ont he context and the desired outcome and elimintes much of the guesswork associated with personas.
Unlike buyer personas, JTBD remains relevant because it focuses on long-term consumer goals rather than temporary preferences. A brand that understands the "job" consumers need to get done can adapt its products and message to evolving needs, regardless of shifts in demographics or market trends.
For instance, a consumer buying a fitness tracker might not just be interested in tracking steps but could be aiming to improve their overall health, manage their time better, or gain motivation through data. These "jobs" are far more telling and can lead to deeper brand loyalty than demographic-based personas ever could.
In short, brands that move beyond buyer personas and embrace the JTBD framework can gain a clearer, more actionable understanding of their audience—one rooted in solving real problems, rather than guessing based on data-driven personas.
Unlock consumer insights with real-time Buyer Persona and Jobs-to-Be-Done Research
Did you know that you can conduct both buyer personas and job-to-done on the &facts platform? &facts is optimised for brands like yours to remove the hassle of fully understanding your consumers through unneeded surveys and interviews when you research your target consumers, but you are also given a wider perspective on what your consumers are up to.
The platform helps you identify key demographic and behavioural data, such as age, location, purchase habits, and interests, allowing you to create detailed and accurate profiles, and at the same time, you also have the opportunity to dive into jobs-to-be-done research by analysing consumer behaviour and market trends to uncover unmet needs and motivations. This helps you understand not just who your consumers are, but also what they need your products to accomplish, enabling you to align your offerings more effectively and personalise your approach.
The platform leverages constantly updated data streams so that brands are delivered with real-time data for their buyer persona and jobs-to-done research. Thanks to real-time data, you can spot new trends and behaviours before they fully emerge, allowing you to update your personas and adapt your strategy in advance. Unlock real-time insights with &facts. Stay ahead of consumer trends, update your buyer personas, and make smarter business decisions. Sign up for free today and access the data your brand needs to thrive.
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