Creating, implementing, and learning from buyer personas is one of the most if not the most important cornerstones in the inbound methodology—and it is one of the most commonly overlooked or ignored for a majority of companies.

We have seen this to be true in our own experience where a majority of the new clients we bring on who have gone down the inbound marketing path completely skipped the step of creating and integrating personas.

One of the major reasons for this oversight is because traditionally the idea of developing buyer personas has revolved around conducting comprehensive research on your audience, holding interviews with existing, past, and prospective customers, creating backstories, analyzing psychographic and demographic information, etc. And then of course there is the inevitable internal debate and discussion around this that can lead to additional research, interviews, and iterations of your personas. After that there is the actual implementation of them into your marketing system and processes.

All of this coupled together leads to a daunting, multi-month process that in many marketers’ minds ultimately ends in indecision and moving on from the idea all together.

We feel that this is an extremely outdated and unnecessary approach, and that is why companies just getting started should follow the minimum viable persona approach.

Have personas and leads already? Now learn who your best leads are with the Lead Evaluation Rubric

What is a Minimum Viable Persona?

The reality is, any company worth their salt should know with 90% certainty who their target/best customers are. Minimum viable personas are essentially the documentation of your best assumptions or hypotheses about your ideal customer segments.

Narrowing that documentation down to 3-7 unique segments will lead to your minimum viable personas. The final step is to simply name each segment and then create the qualifying question, or single sentence that each persona would identify with.

Progressing and Evolving Your MVPs

The key point is that you don’t stop there—you let the data propagate, allow leads to self-identify as your personas, and then analyze and prioritize research accordingly. Let the data guide the evolution of your personas.

So if persona X converts at twice the rate of persona Y, perhaps it is time to focus more marketing efforts on that persona. Or perhaps you conduct research and interviews on persona Y to determine how your online efforts can better serve them. 

Tips for Identifying Your MVPs

Some companies buy into the idea of minimum viable personas, but can still struggle with how to identify and narrow down their segments. Here are some tips to help break through these roadblocks:

• Simply get your team together and whiteboard it out:
  • Gather your full team or at least representatives from each area of your organization and whiteboard out a complete list of customer types for your business. At the beginning stage there are no bad answers and duplicates/crossover are inevitable. Once you have scrubbed out duplicates and combined like segments, go through the remaining options and order them from most prevalent to least. After a bit of refining you will have your minimum viable personas.
    
    
• Segment your revenue by customer type:
  • Another way to approach this exercise is imagining your CEO has tasked you with providing him a pie chart of your revenue broken up by customer segments. So for instance, at NR Media Group we know that roughly 60% of our revenue comes from existing HubSpot users, 30% comes from new HubSpot users, and 10% of our revenue comes from speaking engagements and educational workshops—and these became the basis for our three primary buyer personas.

The Bottom Line 

The concept of minimum viable personas really follows the scientific method and lean or agile approach to marketing and product development. Instead of putting a tremendous amount of work up front, come up with your hypothesis, get something out there, test, analyze, improve, and repeat.

So unless you are an enterprise-level corporation with deep pockets and complex customer segmentation data needs, if a marketing firm approaches you with an expensive proposal for persona research and development, don’t waste your money! Follow the MVP approach to save time and resources and ultimately achieve better results.