Marketers of the Universe: A digital marketing podcast

The death of B2B personas? Not so fast

• Brew Digital • Season 1 • Episode 42

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Following a provocative article from LinkedIn's B2B Institute that declared the "death of personas," the Brew Digital team sits down to debate their true value in modern marketing.
Listen in as we explore the fundamental flaws of traditional, assumption-led personas. Our head of digital marketing, Rich Harper, unpacks the notorious "C-level trap" and explains how a narrow focus on executive decision-makers can cause marketing campaigns to miss the mark entirely.
But is it time to abandon them completely? Our paid media manager, Nasya Nasseira, makes a compelling case for their evolution. She shares how a strong persona narrative—"imagine Jessica, building HR processes from scratch"—can be the key to bridging the gap between raw data and compelling creative.
In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Why most traditional B2B personas are built on dangerous assumptions.
  • How to use persona storytelling to brief creative teams more effectively.
  • Practical, data-driven marketing tactics for businesses of any size.
  • The shift from static demographic profiles to dynamic, problem-focused personas.

Our conclusion is clear: personas aren't dead, but they must evolve from a tick-box exercise into a dynamic tool that genuinely reflects customer behaviour.

Listen to the full episode now to rethink your approach to understanding your audience.

Marketers of the Universe is brought to you by the clever folks at Brew Digital. We’re not your typical digital marketing agency; using an innovative approach to decision-making and collaboration, we help you create an impactful digital strategy that actually delivers results for your business.

See what we can do for you at brewdigital.com


Rich Harper:

I love my bin man. Every time I go out in the morning he's like morning, tuesday mornings. I purposely sit out in my front garden just to see the bin ball.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Marketers of the Universe podcast. We are here with the Brew Digital team to discuss everything that's being talked about in digital marketing right now. Our big focus today is going to be around personas and, in particular, death of personas. So LinkedIn B2B Institute this year released an article talking about death of personas. You know personas is dead, long-lived personas. We know that's a marketing thing that happens, and we are going to talk about it With me. To talk about it, I have our head of digital marketing, rich Harper. I have one of our paid media managers, nashin Asera, and, of course, my wonderful co-host, tom Innes, who is a content marketing manager at Brew. I, of course, am Hayden Woods-Williams digital marketing team lead at Brew and you don't need to know that stuff. So let's crack on and get on with the podcast over to tom to kick off this conversation great, thank you.

Tom Inniss:

So let's start with definitions, and I'm going to open this up to the floor. How would you define a traditional b2b persona, and when have you seen them used?

Rich Harper:

from a persona perspective. Traditionally, every week, we kind of group audiences or we group segments of people by identity, so things like age, you know, job title, interests, um, those sort of common traits. So from I don't think this is just b2b, maybe it's b2c as well. We, we. We therefore kind of think, hey, generation X is going to be more receptive to this type of messaging and expecting that an entire group of people that are essentially grouped together on physical attributes therefore buy in the same way, engage in the same way, in the same way, go on the same platforms. So I think it's. I think it's outdated, but something we talk about it being outdated, but it's something that's still very much used in all marketing businesses to this day.

Tom Inniss:

Yeah, so we just. Shall we just dive straight into this the flaws that you obviously perceive in, uh, b2b personas. So the linkedin article said that there was a lot of guesswork around building personas out um, do you feel that that rings true or is there like a data element driving persona building as well?

Rich Harper:

I hope that there is a data element driving personas. I think in reality, as marketers, we do a lot of work on assumption. I think we are also very guilty of talking about being customer centric but then thinking about how we market our businesses in our own shoes, in our own perspective. We make judgments on how we would potentially buy from that product, but we never actually put ourselves in a position of being the customer, and nine times out of 10, where we're working and what we're selling is not targeted to us as individuals. So we're not the right people to be making those assumptions or making those decisions on guesswork.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

There's an additional bit to that that I think is interesting too, where, yes, we don't put ourselves in the customer's shoes, but there's so many times when I hear from marketers who are speaking to to c-level, um, and they may be getting pressure from a ceo saying you know target c-level, you know we need to be talking to c-level as an example, but they're not actually stopping to go oh would, are you a decision maker? Are you the person that should be seeing all this content in this business? Because a lot of time it's no, and I think the c-level trap when it comes to personas is is the biggest one for me yeah, the c-level is always the trap.

Rich Harper:

Um, the let's aim our messaging at the specific person that we work with on a day-to-day basis. You know, from a b2b perspective, there is a buying committee. It's not one individual making a decision to operate or work with a company that are selling those services. And I think so often we go straight to the person, the end user. Let's market to the end user. You know, a lot of the time that end user may well be in the buying committee, may well have an influence, but also may not have any influence over the decision making process because it's being taken care of by.

Rich Harper:

I know that potentially a c-level person is making the final decision but certainly not doing the research. So why are we targeting them at that basis, probably even at a conversion point? Are they on platforms, looking for a platform or sass or software or product or service and they're the ones putting in the inquiry? Unless they're a small business, I doubt it. Um, I think the the influence happens from within in a company. So targeting C-level, I think often one draws up cost and is more expensive, and two, I don't think is always the right tactic.

Tom Inniss:

I have some articles and we did a webinar recently where the stat was thrown around that 85% of decision makers will already shortlist vendors that they've heard of. So you can't just target that end decision maker. You do need to target a broad range of people within an organization or within industry to ensure that you are capturing that mind space beforehand. Is mind space a term? I don't think that's a marketing term. I like. Mind space a term.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I don't think that's a marketing term. I like. I like mind space rich. Do you have an example of when actually putting a persona together has made a difference to marketing work for a client or for a business you've worked with? Wow, uh, put me on the spot.

Rich Harper:

I know I'm asking this because I don't know if anyone's ever actually done the right research no, I think if I, if I'm completely truthful, I'm guilty of exactly what I said at the beginning of this question, that we skip this part or use it as a tick box exercise. We need to know who the audience are. It's broadly this great, let's move on. We've identified the audience, let's, let's move forward. Or you know we do icp work and we target oh okay, well, is this a specific industry and you know it's it managers or anyone within that kind of it field, from mid, mid level up to c level, and that's our targeting. Okay, cool, let's move on.

Rich Harper:

And I think the reason behind that is we, as marketers, are under a huge amount of pressure. I'm not making excuses, but from the board, we are often asked to showcase our worth and our value. And the board, because the board I don't know if all of the board talk in marketing language, and that's evident in the fact that cmos can't remember the detail, but there's very few cmos that actually sit at board level, so we're not talking the same language, um, as the board. So therefore, we're being measured on things like leads, um predominantly things like that you know, vanity type metrics, or we are measuring ourselves on vanity type metrics and pushing that back to the board. Should I say yeah, and the people are like so what? What does this mean? How is it driving business? How are you connecting the dots between what you're doing and what is happening to our bottom line, for example? And therefore we skip that really important part. We could have much more influence in the boardroom if we were able to purposely map the audience that we're targeting to is real business results?

Tom Inniss:

yeah, shall we have a look at a real world example of where you can map action to result in paid media and bring nasha into the conversation? Um, so in paid media, we rely heavily on targeting um nasha. Our persona is the foundation of this work, or do you find that they're now too simplistic for what you're trying to achieve?

Nasya Nasseira:

to be. To be honest, I actually like personas, but to a certain extent so well. For me, personas used to be the best we had. It's like um, comparing like personas to maybe like a compass and then like real paid media targeting like a gps, like you know where you're going, you know where your destination is, um. And now we have so many tools, so many deep targeting tools, and there's like hundreds of different tools and features out there that you could form your data with and for personas.

Nasya Nasseira:

I still feel like it does play a small role or like a supporting role in b2b, for example, if we're using personas to guide creative tone, messaging and giving some kind of direction, especially for team alignment, because not everybody speaks the way SEO marketers do or paid media marketers do the technical aspects of it. So I I like to use personas when I want to simplify what I'm doing for that specific paid media campaign. Um. So, like that being said, like personas. For me, um personally still have a place in early stages of campaign planning, but once we move to paid execution, we should definitely lean on more audience signals and historical data.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I mean, that's my take, yeah I'm a real sucker for um, a, a kind of walking, a map, compass, outdoors, adventure, um analogy there. So you, you know, if you're putting a persona together on me, then make sure you include that in there. That said, I kind of disagree with you a little bit. I I think they are great, but do you think, nashia, that actually the data that's pulled together into a persona maybe not if it's done by you, but if it's done by a client or a generalist marketer when you actually get it to the point of, okay, let's use this persona to help choose our targeting as an example, most of it's totally useless.

Nasya Nasseira:

I agree with that. So, like as a marketer, like a general rule of thumb, you need to get into the habit of asking questions, even if it's stupid questions, questions because you don't know the product, you don't know the client, yet let's say you have like a fresh brief that just came in. I feel like, as a marketer, you need to be curious always and you need to get into the habit of asking questions, even if the brief isn't detailed enough. So if you know that you can't go based off just a vague backstory persona, then the client hires for a reason. So we need to be asking the right questions to them and get as many detailed answers as we can.

Tom Inniss:

So, rich. Coming back to you, the LinkedIn article championed a move towards this more data-driven, individualistic marketing approach, and they sort of unfairly cited Netflix as the example. You know the company that harvests up so much data about you. They could almost be a Meta or a Google in that regard. How can a B2B company that doesn't have that same volume of data and, let's be honest, honest is unlikely to ever be able to gather that much data start to move towards a more data-driven direction?

Rich Harper:

I mean it's interesting using. I think sometimes using companies like Netflix is great from a you know, this is the pinnacle perspective, but it's not always particularly helpful for smaller businesses. However, most businesses do have let's face it a fair amount of data points. You know we should hopefully have things like website analytics in place. We should have CRM data, he says when most of the customers we speak to work off of Google Sheets. But you know there are data points. There's things like, hopefully, if you're sending emails, you've got data points there. So it's about utilizing the data points that you do have. You know there are tracking pixels. There's things like that that we can be utilizing. That will give us some insight into users' behavior, shall we say so, rather than just thinking about demographics and thinking about grouping people by identity, we can start to see how people behave on our website. We can use eye-tracking software, heat mapping, scroll mapping, all sorts of different things to see the way people integrate with our website, and we can use that data to create more personalized experiences, which, at the end of the day, is what Netflix is doing. You know, the reality is no two people are seeing the same home screen, are they? It's shaped based on our behaviors, what we viewed in the past, what it assumes that we like. We can pull some of that data from website analytics that we already have. We can use things, uh, like dynamic pages we can use. There are software, um tools out there that can create overlaps based on certain ips that are visiting your site so you can shape the home page to be different for different users and create different journeys for different buying groups.

Rich Harper:

But also, I think, utilize things outside of your own first party data. Utilize things like let's bring it back to search, um. You've got things like search console. That's giving us a bunch of information. You've got, if we move away from traditional search to more ai-based search, we've got people that are now prompting or asking very specific queries, questions, rather than the traditional method of keywords and looking for keywords, and that's how Google is indexing. It's now citing sources.

Rich Harper:

So I'll use an example, a football example. Chelsea won the World Cup in the summer, which you know, whatever anyone wants to say, I'm a Chelsea fan we're going to call ourselves world champions for the next four years. So maybe not a great title, but we'll have it. But within that Chelsea fan base, for example, they're in America. They've just won. There is a huge volume of people there that may be looking to go out and celebrate.

Rich Harper:

Now, if we were to just focus on demographics, where would you start? There's going to be teenagers that follow the football club, there's going to be middle-aged men, there's going to be females, there's going to be retired people. If we just focus on identities and demographics in that way, how are we segmenting that data? How are we messaging them when, ultimately, what they might be looking for is places to party in new york because the final was held there? But all of these people are therefore grouped together based on uh, context and that situational element, and I think there's massive masses of opportunity if people can tap into things like that and start to think about context rather than demographics as a way. Which is what really what? What netflix are doing? They focus on the context of the individual, uh, and they create a personalized experience from that, and I think that's what we could be doing as marketers do you think that holds true in a b2b context, um, or would the football example be more b2c?

Rich Harper:

I think, again, we get very hung up on creating boxes. Hey, we're b2b, we're b2c, we're this, we're that, we're not. At the end of the day, we're all marking to an individual, we're all marking to people that are potentially going to buy a product from us, whether that's a consumer brand selling an item of clothing or a B2B software provider selling a license. At the end of the day, companies are invisible. They don't buy anything. People buy stuff. I think we need to get out of the habit of putting things in boxes as marketers which we're very good at at and just get back to the fact that it's not b2b or b2c. It is us marketing to individuals, and I'm not going to use now that weird acronym, a we wanted you to say beta humans so bad oh no, you did and you know you did.

Rich Harper:

I don't want again. It's shit. I hate marketers that that keep coining new phrases. It's like the seo word now is oh, it's now aio. What it's not, it's we're still, it's still seo. You can change the name of it 100 million times. You call it geo, seo, aio, it's all the same bloody thing. Stop putting new terminology on something that already exists and start actually doing some measurable activity yeah, yeah, I think.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think that's interesting and I think the chelsea, the chelsea story, is a good one to even look at from a, b, from a b2b perspective, because actually the way to kind of collect those people is is the, the community of chelsea fans, right? I think you can think similarly in b2b and think about the community of developers, the community of marketers, the community of whoever it is that you're targeting, and then, as you said with the chelsea example, what is the problem that they've got? The problem is, or the thing that they need an answer to, is they want something to party, to celebrate. So, if you take that and you look at it from a tech perspective, what is that problem you're trying to solve? And one of the big things on paid media I'm going to throw this over to nash in a second is actually google, meta, microsoft, linkedin, tiktok. The options available to segments, the options available to choose how you target, are being slowly eroded and taken away from us, so we need to find how to connect to those communities.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Nasha, what is it? Is it content? Is it? Yeah, is it content Is?

Haydn Woods-Williams:

it yeah, is it more tools? What do you think?

Nasya Nasseira:

In terms of targeting.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I think in general, like when we've got a community of people and we've got reduced ways of targeting them and we said before that the persona isn't necessarily allowing us to get enough information about how to segment how do we stand out to the?

Nasya Nasseira:

people that we want to reach. I would say definitely put yourself in their shoes because, like for me, because sometimes you get too engrossed and just and hung up in our own ads, our own ad copy, our own messaging, creative, so what? It's good to just put yourself in your shoes because sometimes when you think that your strategy is the best, based off the guesswork that you have planned initially but for me, um, it's always good to put yourself in your shoes and, um, let's say you're, you want to promote an ad, you have the ad copy done, you have the creative done. But take a step back and look at your creative and ad copy and see if it's something that probably you would scroll past. Definitely you need to revisit again and always get a second opinion even if it's not marketers, just different teams from other departments or departments from the kind of people that you're targeting to and just get their opinion on whether this is the best creative or asset to show to people yeah, yeah, I think that is.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

That is one of the big things that people forget in all of these persona conversations and audience targeting and buyer groups is actually, if you focus too much time here, you're forgetting that you can target all of these people, the perfect audience. If you've got crap content, they're just going to scroll past it, regardless if they're the right person.

Rich Harper:

I think it comes back to. You mentioned it, aiden. It's not so much about having personas. It's about identifying that problem statement and how you solve that problem statement. And that problem statement could ring true regardless of what your persona is. The problem could be relevant for someone starting out in business. It could be relevant to a c-level person in their 50s. We would probably group them completely differently and we'd probably talk to them very differently, but yet they're both looking for a solution for the same problem uh, yeah go ahead, nasha no, I know rich mentioned, uh job titles.

Nasya Nasseira:

I still love targeting people by job titles, but make sure the layering well, from a paid media perspective, make sure put in as much layering as you can Be in as niche as possible because you can always expand later on on.

Nasya Nasseira:

So, like for me, I would target job titles but at the same time layer with industry, seniority, company size, member trades, like skills, interests, whatever you could uh get from um your stakeholders or clients.

Nasya Nasseira:

So, for example, if, like um trying to think of a good example, um, let's say you're running um a campaign for a sass platform targeting hr leaders, I'm I'm not thinking about just just about anyone working in hr, let's say hr jessica, with a big, with a big backstory.

Nasya Nasseira:

I'm thinking like we need to reach, you know, like heads of people or talent acquisition in companies between like 200 to 1,000 employees, ideally within like the tech or finance sectors who interacted with our L&D content recently. But again, coming to my point earlier that personas do help when it comes to briefing creative teams, like if I tell the designer or copywriter oh, we're going after like mid-level HR managers in like growth stage 20, 30% tech startups that might not mean much to them. But if I say, imagine someone like Jessica, she's building HR processes from scratch, she's overwhelmed by like hiring targets and probably she doesn't have a full tech stack yet. So it can definitely help and guide the tone or messaging, depending on who you're speaking to, but in terms of like execution work, definitely focus on real attributes and always layer, layer and test of your campaigns.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I really, really like that. I really like that, Like you're, you're turning the persona almost into a story and we talk a lot about data storytelling, um, and I think that's really really powerful. Um, I don't. I don't know whether we can top that, tom, so should we? Should we wrap this up?

Tom Inniss:

Now I did want to have asked one sort of technical question around that. So you're talking about, like, when you're building an ad campaign, you talk about layering and targeting these people at this stage, etc. From a cost perspective, is it more expensive and more effective to do that layering and do that very honed targeting, or is it better to have a slightly broader net to reach a wider range of people? In terms of cost uh, in terms of cost and then, I suppose, effectiveness, like how do you balance the two?

Nasya Nasseira:

I wouldn't say there's like a definite answer for this. So definitely, the more niche you go, the higher level you go is definitely going to be way more costly. So again, like I said um earlier just there, just just play around with the filters in whatever platform that you start. For me maybe other marketers don't agree, but sometimes they say that you know, like just focusing on like high decision makers, especially when it comes to b2B, it is more costly. But you'll be surprised to see sometimes when you're ad copy, when you're creative, when you're targeting, is hitting the right spot, the cost of it is not as high on certain campaigns. So I would definitely go. I would definitely lean more towards like just having your targeting as niche as possible as you can. From the brief you've gotten, and if you see the cost is high, play around and expand more.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

I would say just go niche first and then expand linkedin has a fantastic tool as well within its um campaign manager that looks at audience penetration and if you think about your audience, where you're targeting it, they consider I don't know the exact number but I think anything above 20 audience penetration so you're reaching 20 of the audience is considered good. So if you go too, you risk not actually reaching your audience with your ad spend and in B2B that I think is particularly important to make sure that you are being as efficient as possible with your spend, because LinkedIn ads can be a big black hole but you can throw a lot of money into if you're not careful.

Tom Inniss:

Pure fact, right? So shall we wrap this up then, rich? I'm going to start with you as head of marketing at Brew Digital. I want you to talk from your own perspective about whether or not other people should do as we say, and do you think B2B businesses should scrap the use of personas, or is there a way to evolve them and use them still?

Rich Harper:

No, I don't think we should scrap personas entirely. I think Nasher made a very solid case for why they shouldn't be scrapped. I think they should evolve from kind of static almost, like we said, a tick box exercise and we've created these groups into more dynamic, data-driven customer personas. I think we need to start us included actually acting out what we talk about. I think we need to stop being so theoretical with what we're doing and actually put it into action. I think if we say we're customer-ric, let's become truly customer centric. I think missing and skipping steps is not useful. I think market research is massively important and talking to our customers directly is massively important, which is, again, I think some companies miss that step or spend less time doing that.

Rich Harper:

If you're a head of marketing currently, do an audit. Audit what your current personas are, how much of it is based on assumptions, how much of it are you using actual customer data and start from there. So don't don't completely scrap them, but really ask yourself from an inward perspective are we really customer centric? Do we have the systems available to capture first party data that are going to help us shape our marketing messaging? Move away from hey. Once a year, we look at our customer personas, look at them on a intelligence basis. Have your analytics team analyze behaviors. Have your data teams provide you with those kind of up-to-date dashboards that help you create relevance and context rather than, you know, just blindly making assumptions and hoping for the best great.

Tom Inniss:

Thank you, nasha, congratulations. You managed to change rich's mind. That'll be in the performance review, no doubt. Pay her eyes on the horizon. And from your perspective, nasha, as a paid media manager, is there a practical change that people in your shoes can make to their targeting approach after this discussion?

Nasya Nasseira:

Targeting. Like I said, layer as much as you can um tests, even if it's just like guesswork you could. You could always test your campaigns. Um, there's no right or wrong way to do marketing, especially in paid ads. And coming back to like what rich mentioned, like yes, I do believe that we shouldn't scrap it. Just because it's outdated doesn't mean that we can't still use it. So I'd say it's not dead, it's just been reassigned. To put it in a simplified way, like personas are evolving into a more strategic or creative tool, so they're definitely helpful for, like storytelling tone and also internal alignment of your teams awesome, there we go.

Tom Inniss:

Personas aren't dead. They're just evolving, much like everything in marketing. Nothing ever truly dies. It just changes over time. Hayden, I'm gonna hand it over to you to wrap us up thank you very much.

Haydn Woods-Williams:

Content marketing manager tom, that's your persona now. That is all we have time for today. Thank you everyone for listening. We hope you found some useful snippets around personas and ideas on how you can use them to make your marketing better. We love that you've made it this far through your listen. We love making this content. Uh, I think it's actually turned the team from a bit of a grumpy goose this morning into a little bit happier. So clearly we do. If you could recommend the show to one friend, colleague, family that you think would enjoy listening, we would really appreciate that. Thank you, as always, to the Buditional team for their research and input into today's session. Make sure to go check out our past episodes, subscribe on whatever platform you use to listen to your podcasts and we will see you in the next one. I've been hayden and these are the marketers of the universe. Well done everyone.

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