Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer's Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

7Determine How Many Buyer Personas You Need

It is likely that one of your first thoughts about buyer personas included an estimate of how many you need to build. In fact, we wouldn't be surprised if you skipped right to this section. So first the good news: You need far fewer buyer personas than you may think. The bad news: You'll need to interview your buyers and follow the guidance in these next few pages to determine the answer.

There is a lot of tension around this question and for good reason. As you begin to build buyer personas that represent real people, you will inevitably be tempted to “humanize” your persona with a wide array of interesting details. This often begins when you decide to include the fact that your chief executive officer (CEO) buyer persona is male, married, and extroverted. Although this might not seem like a problem at first, eventually someone will note that many CEOs are female, single, and introverted. Someone else will point to the female CEOs who are married with children.

The apparently harmless decision to add attributes to your buyer persona can thus spark debate about its credibility. Worse yet, because each of the attributes you include could potentially be used to differentiate one group of buyers from another, you may feel compelled to create another persona.

Things were so much easier when marketers didn't need to tell a different version of their story to different types of buyers. Before the Internet made information so easy to access, ...