Jul 11, 20217:26 AM - edited Aug 12, 20219:14 AM
HubSpot Employee
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
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But like all data, even information you gather on your audience (your personas) can go out of date.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?
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
I believe that developing a buyer persona should be customized to suit the specific needs and dynamics of your company. For instance, if your organization is experiencing shifts in the economy or undergoing changes internally, it presents an opportune moment to create or update your buyer persona. In my perspective, conducting a buyer persona audit ideally falls within the range of eight to six months, or whenever significant changes occur within the company or the market landscape, as mentioned earlier.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
Change is inevitable and constant and this phrase affects humans and directly should affect marketing activities. Due to this auditing and updating buyer persona should be an ongoing process. However, the frequency of these audits may vary depending on factors such as changes in market trends, shifts in customer behavior, or updates to product or service offerings. Also, it's essential to revisit and adjust personas whenever significant changes happen in your target audience or business landscape.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
Hello Ksydnor,
Auditing your company's persona's every 6-8 monts, if you have the time, personnel and budet to do it, will put you ahead of other businesses who audit annually.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
If possible (based on resource availability, cost and implied value of the persona), updates should be a real-time continuous improvement process, where information gathered from surveys with recent customers should be updated into the persona.
By following a continuous improvement method with the persona's, it will help keep the buyer persona intelligence relevant, and accurate with your ideal customer profile. As we all know these personas are not only critical to marketing, but all the other revenue generating departments such as sales, customer success and support teams. The persona gives an idea on the challenges that your customer is facing and the reasons for evaluating and considering your solutions as the final choice.
Each time you gather some new intelligence from a recent win, adding that information to the persona can help both sales and marketing to take the insights and focus on the channels, messaging and sales actions that work well.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
At least, buyer personas should be audited every year to keep up with ever evolving audiences. Also, cultural and societal events such as COVID-19, social issues, and key climate change updates are great times to keep up with any sudden audience shifts.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
While there's no single perfect timeframe for reevaluating buyer personas, it depends on several factors. Significant market shifts, like the COVID-19 pandemic, may necessitate an immediate update. In general, I recommend reviewing buyer personas at least annually to ensure they align with current customer needs and behaviors.
Additionally, industries with rapid changes in trends or technology might require more frequent reviews. Take the tourism industry as an example. A ski resort experiencing an unusual lack of snow would likely trigger an earlier buyer persona assessment, as they'd need to understand potential shifts in customer motivations and expectations.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
I agree with you. An annual review of buying personas ensures your demographic based has not changed significantly in ways that you may not be aware of, such as a new subdivision being developed.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
Best practice would be to review yearly to ensure that the persona allign with the next fiscal years objectives. Aligned personas will help move marketing and sales goals along.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
Given our long buying cycles for capital equipment and systems purchases, I believe once in 12 months to coordinate with your annual planning cycles is a minimum periodic update that we should do.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
In the business of attracting new patients to a dental practice, I would update the buyer personas annually as people move away, new people move into the neighbourhood, people have children, adults step up the care of their parents, people get new jobs and new insurance coverage or lose jobs and coverage, and people's dental priorities can change.
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
Good question! We use a standard period and re-evaluate every 6 to 12 months. Several factors might change during that time (product line, trends, age and interests of the user etc) so you want to prevent misalignment between personas and your business (campaigns).
How often should you audit and update your buyer personas?
I believe that in a professional environment, it is recommended to audit and update customer characteristics every six months to a year. This ensures that your marketing strategies will be consistent with changes in the behavior and needs of your target audience. Regular updates help you adapt to changes in the industry, market trends and other factors, keeping accurate and up-to-date information about your customers.
