Buyer personas can be created through research, surveys, and interviews — all with a mix of customers, prospects, and those outside your contacts database who might align with your target audience.
But like all data, even information you gather on your audience (your personas) can go out of date. After all, business models change, companies merge or shift direction, and your audience can (and likely will) evolve. In your professional opinion, how often should you audit and even update your buyer personas?
At a first glance I'd say 6-12 months. To have enough time to test through tactics how the actual buyer personas perform and keep in mind the industry shiftings.
I would say regular audits should occur quarterly with updates as needed post audit. I would be careful with making drastic changes if there are projects underway that could be affected by a shift in direction. Would have to be certain that a change is necessary. I also think after a large project has finished you could also do an audit and update to see how the project may have changed the personas you had at the start of the project.
I'd weigh several factors, depending on your industry, but perhaps every 6-12 months. It's important to stay flexible and if your industry has experienced change recently. Certainly annually, with a comparison of how your personas performed based on the prior year's evaluation.
Definitely audit personas on a full-scale every year, but there could be insights to be gained from smaller, targeted audits every quarter to ensure your efforts are on track. Monthly may be too granular and clog up your process and efforts with too much changing and rehashing
I believe we should always keep track of all the interactions with the customers, and if we identify something is not working anymore then it's time to re-evaluate our current personas!
We are just starting to look at developing persona's for our organization. Once we get them up and running, I think we will need a least 6 months to a year before we have enough experience using them to before we audit and update.
Quarterly, by editing the existing personas with any more information than I've known with time and interactions, and creating new personas for any new segment that might come up as a new prospect to do business with that have different goals than the ones I already have.
As a non-profit, I'd like to audit yearly or as we have the need to expand or add a new program. And then update as we're seening trends change in the type of client we're serving.
