Think about the last piece of content your business published.
It may have been a blog, a social post or even an email.
Now, ask yourself honestly, who did you write it for?
If the answer is something like ‘anyone who might be interested in what we do’, that’s a problem you need to address before you publish another word.
Many small businesses approach their marketing with the best of intentions but without a clear picture of who they’re trying to reach. The result is content that tries to speak to everyone and ends up resonating with no one.
Vague messaging. Blogs that don’t get read. Social posts that get lost in the scroll. Emails that don’t get opened. And, underneath all of it, a nagging sense that your marketing isn’t working as hard as it should be.
The fix isn’t producing more content. It’s understanding your audience well enough to make every piece of content count. And that starts with understanding your customers and creating proper buyer personas.
What are buyer personas?
A buyer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Not a vague demographic sketch, like ‘businesses in the Midlands with 10 to 50 employees’, but a fully realised picture of the person most likely to buy from you, make decisions about your product or service, and become a long-term client.
Done properly, a buyer persona should capture what your ideal customer is trying to achieve, what’s standing in their way, what keeps them up at night, and what they’d consider a win.
It should reflect how they look for information, which media channels they trust, what kind of content they respond to, and what objections they’ll raise before they commit to a purchase.
Some businesses find it useful to give their persona a name and a face, something that embodies the real patterns they see across their best customers. That might sound a little unusual, but there’s a good reason for it.
When you’re writing a blog post or putting together an email campaign, it’s much easier to write for a specific person than it is to write for the abstract idea of ‘our target market’.
Writing with someone specific in mind helps make your content sharper, more direct and far more likely to connect.
Why broad messaging almost always backfires
It’s understandable that small businesses are reluctant to narrow their focus. If you’ve worked hard to build something you’re proud of, the idea of deliberately excluding potential customers can feel counterintuitive, even risky. But the logic of keeping the net as wide as possible tends to produce the opposite of what you’re hoping for.
When your messaging tries to speak to everyone, it ends up being specific to no one. You can’t address a real problem if you don’t know what problem your reader is facing. You can’t offer a genuine solution if you’re hedging your bets by keeping things deliberately vague. And you can’t build the kind of trust that converts browsers into buyers if your content reads like it could have been written for anyone.
Compare that to marketing that speaks directly to someone’s situation. An IT company targeting finance directors at small professional services firms knows exactly what that audience worries about. It’s probably compliance, data security, downtime and the cost of getting any of those things wrong. A message that speaks to those specific concerns will always outperform a generic message about ‘reliable IT support for businesses of all sizes’. Every time.
The businesses that commit to a clear, specific audience consistently produce better marketing and win better clients. The ones that try to be all things to everyone tend to struggle to stand out at all.
Who are you really talking to?
There’s a piece of marketing wisdom that’s worth keeping in mind when you’re planning your next campaign: “You don’t have to appeal to everyone. But you must appeal to someone”.
It sounds simple, but the implications are significant.
Most small businesses sit somewhere in the middle ground between those two positions. They’re not trying to appeal to everyone. They know they’re not Amazon.
But they’re not being specific enough about who they’re trying to reach, either.
The result is marketing that drifts. It’s not quite broad enough to be entirely useless, but it’s not focused enough to be compelling to the people it’s supposedly aimed at.
Appealing to someone, really appealing to them, in a way that makes them feel understood, requires you to know things about them that go beyond the surface.
It means understanding the specific frustrations that drive them to search for a solution in the first place. It means knowing what a good outcome looks like from their perspective, not yours.
It means speaking their language, addressing their hesitations and meeting them on the channels where they spend most of their time when they’re online.
A well-defined buyer persona gives you that specific ‘someone’ to appeal to. It creates a clear, vivid picture of the person your business is best placed to help, built from real insight into what they need and how they think.
When you write with that kind of clarity, your content stops feeling like it’s trying to cover all bases and starts feeling like it’s written specifically for the reader. It can be the difference between content that gets skimmed and content that gets acted upon.
How to build your buyer personas
The best buyer personas are built from evidence rather than guesswork. So, before you start setting anything down on paper, it’s worth taking stock of what you already know.
Look at your existing client base.
Who are your best customers? Not just the most profitable ones, but the ones who understand the value of what you do, who are easy to work with, and who are most likely to refer you to others. What do they have in common? What problems were they trying to solve when they first came to you? What had they already tried that hadn’t worked?
If you can, have conversations with those clients. Ask them what prompted them to look for help, what their decision-making process looked like, and why they chose to work with you. Once you’ve gathered that insight, you can start to build something useful.
A strong persona should address questions like:
- What does a typical day look like for this person, and where does the problem you solve fit into it?
- What are they being judged on?
- What does success look like for them?
- Where do they go when they’re looking for advice or solutions? Google, LinkedIn, trade publications, word of mouth?
- Who else is involved in the buying decision, and what do those people care about?
- What would they need to see or hear before they’d trust you enough to get in touch?
Answering those questions honestly and specifically will help you create buyer personas that can meaningfully shape your marketing.
How buyer personas can change the way you create content
Once you have your persona(s) in place, what you write about, what tone to strike, which channels to prioritise and how long each piece of content should be will start to become clearer.
For example, if one of your personas is a managing director at a small manufacturing business who consumes most of their content on LinkedIn on their phone during a 10-minute lunchbreak, that tells you a lot.
It tells you that long-form, technical blog posts probably aren’t the first thing to optimise for.
It tells you that short, punchy content that gets to the point quickly is likely to perform better.
It tells you that the tone should be practical and direct, not academic or full of marketing jargon they didn’t ask for.
Every piece of content you produce should be written with your persona in mind. Before you write a single word, you should be able to answer why this specific person would care about what you’re writing. If you can’t answer that, it’s worth questioning whether you should be creating that piece of content at all.
Why your personas need to keep pace with your audience
So, you’ve created your buyer personas.
You’ve been using them to shape all your content for the past couple of years.
Meanwhile, your audience has moved on. The channels your ideal customers use today might not be the same ones they relied on three years ago. The questions they’re asking (and, thanks to AI, the way they ask them) are shifting as new technology, economic pressures, and industry changes reshape their priorities. The objections they raise before buying might have changed, too.
If your personas haven’t kept pace with any of that, your content will gradually become less relevant, even if it’s still technically well-written.
Reviewing your personas is something that should happen at least once a year, and more frequently if your market moves quickly. When you review them, pay attention to signals from the real world. What questions are your sales team fielding?
What conversations are happening in your clients’ industries?
How has your best-performing content shifted over time?
Those signals will tell you if, and where, your buyer personas need to change before the gap between your marketing and your audience becomes too wide to bridge.
How can QBD help?
Creating accurate buyer personas takes time and the right kind of questioning. If you run a small business without a dedicated marketing team, it’s the sort of thing that tends to get pushed down your priority list.
At QBD, we help businesses get clear on who their ideal customers are, what they care about, and how to reach them through the right content on the right channels.
When you join QBD Pulse, our structured monthly digital marketing programme, the first thing we do is sit down with you and take a proper deep dive into who your customers are.
We explore their pain points, the pressures they’re under, the frustrations they carry, and the things that keep them searching for a better solution. We also look at the channels they use to find information and the kind of content they engage with.
It’s the foundation everything else is built on, because until we have a clear, honest picture of your ideal customers, we can’t build a marketing plan that delivers the results you’re looking for.
Only once that picture is complete do we put your plan together. And when we do, every piece of content within it has your ideal buyers at the centre of it.
So, if you’re ready to build a marketing plan that speaks directly to the customers who matter most to your business, we’d love to talk. Get in touch today to learn more about QBD Pulse.
About the Author
Samuel Dyer
Samuel is Head of Marketing at QBD, bringing specialist expertise across video production, email marketing and marketing technology. He leads the agency’s marketing strategy with a data-driven approach, backed by a CIM qualification and a passion for measurable results.