There’s a reason the business world regards buyer personas as game changers—71% of companies that use them surpass their revenue targets, and 93% of companies that surpass both revenue and lead goals have integrated their buyer personas into segmented customer databases.
Those results speak volumes about integrating and formalizing personas—including the negative buyer persona model.
While standard buyer personas capture your ideal customer base, negative models help you weed out prospects that waste time and resources without converting into valued customers.
What is a negative buyer persona?
So, what exactly is a negative buyer persona? Its creation is similar to creating a traditional buyer persona. It also requires dedicated research, customer data analysis, and pattern identification, which lead to a fictionalized individual profile that reflects the traits and/or behaviors of a subset of your apparent potential market.
While a standard buyer persona helps businesses understand and appeal to the right audiences with personalized content and hyper-targeting, its opposite—the negative, or exclusionary persona—helps businesses save valuable time and resources they would otherwise waste on non-buyers who show up within lead or prospect pools.
Negative buyer personas often reflect apparent prospects who either engage with your content or appear on the surface to fit your target market but don’t convert as desired. These individuals may:
- Be located outside of your geographic or jurisdictional range
- Lack both authority and influence over buying decisions
- Be unable to afford your products or services
- Have an acquisition cost that’s too high in relation to their buying potential
- Be above or below the expertise range that your products serve
- Not respond to digital marketing channels or campaigns
Why negative buyer personas are crucial for your marketing strategy
Negative buyer personas primarily help sales and marketing departments save time and money—along with similar benefits for product development and strategic planning leadership. They reflect ‘red flags’ exhibited by particular subsegments of your market, representing any combination of traits and behaviors unlikely to convert to a meaningful customer relationship.
For example, someone who consistently follows your social media and pursues lead-generation content could be a:
- Penny-pincher who absorbs your information but always opts for a cheaper alternative
- Marketer employed by a competitor
- Blogger aligned with your industry
For marketing, negative buyer personas help with strategic planning by acting as suppressive filters before building plans, campaigns, tactics, and schedules that only reach prospective customers with true potential.
What is a negative buyer persona worth to your marketing team? At a KPI (key performance indicator) level, they can help:
- Boost digital advertising and web traffic stats through improved targeting.
- Save money on direct mail by identifying sublists to suppress.
- Improve email engagement stats with more refined lists.
How to identify your negative buyer personas
Identifying the traits and behaviors of negative buyer personas primarily comes from two key methods. These are:
- Data-driven approaches – Analyze engagement metrics, churn rates, and customer feedback.
- Qualitative methods – Employ surveys, interviews, and demographic studies to identify unfit customer profiles. Consider including information-gathering as part of a standard exit process.
Look for any identifiable patterns within those who exit the buying journey, analyze any contributing factors, and determine how to recognize them sooner in the future.
Integrating negative personas into marketing campaigns
In addition to identifying a submarket to ignore or suppress to save resources and improve stats, digital marketing teams can craft messaging and materials that are designed to actively repel time-wasters.
Negative personas also help:
- Inform content strategies
- Adjust media buying
- Make data-driven decisions about CX (customer experience) strategies
Knowing which prospects remain non-buyers is critical to a successful marketing campaign. For instance, when Lois Ko, owner of Seattle’s Sweet Alchemy Ice Creamery, added home delivery to her business, she skipped platforms that provided her with long-distance followers. Instead, she focused on Nextdoor, where her first hyper-local post resulted in 500 orders.
The right targeting and the right platform for businesses
Just as a buyer persona helps you connect with and attract your ideal customer base, a negative persona or exclusionary persona identifies prospects who are unlikely to lead to a viable customer relationship. Understanding how to identify and weed out these personas can reduce wasted resources, boost sales and marketing ROI, and clarify optimal tactics—including platform or network selection.
With Nextdoor, you can connect to your current customers by targeting demographics and traits that mirror your ideal buyer persona. Or, you can engage in exclusionary targeting by excluding audiences or locations that don’t align with your business.
Start with a Nextdoor Business Page. Then, use business posts to connect, recommendations to build trust, and Nextdoor Ads Manager to serve curated messages and special offers to your ideal audience.
Maximize your reach with Nextdoor Business today.
Sources:
- Delve AI. 50+ Buyer Persona Statistics That Showcase Their Effectiveness. https://www.delve.ai/blog/buyer-persona-statistics
- Protocol 80. 12 Buyer Persona Statistics That Prove Their ROI. https://www.protocol80.com/blog/buyer-persona-statistics
