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In-Ear Insights: The Problem with Buyer Personas
In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the problem with buyer personas and how to master B2B marketing with smarter audience targeting. You’ll learn the critical differences between ideal customer profiles and buyer personas—and why using both transforms your strategy. You’ll discover how to ethically leverage AI and data to identify hidden pain points before prospects even recognize them. You’ll explore practical frameworks to align your content with every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to retention. You’ll gain actionable tactics to avoid common pitfalls and turn casual viewers into loyal buyers. Watch now to revolutionize how you connect with your audience!
Watch the video here:
Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.
Listen to the audio here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-problem-with-buyer-personas.mp3
Download the MP3 audio here.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, let’s talk about buyer personas in B2B marketing—how AI is affecting them and why.
Actually, I want to dig into this, Katie, and I want your take. What’s the difference to you between an ideal customer profile and a buyer persona? A lot of people use those terms interchangeably, but they may or may not mean the same thing. What’s your take?
Katie Robbert – 00:28
I can understand why people use them interchangeably because there’s this notion that it’s some kind of representation of somebody who would eventually purchase something from you. In that sense, they are the same. The nuance—at least the way I break them out—is an ideal customer profile covers awareness and consideration, whereas a buyer persona covers purchase and the stages beyond that.
The challenge I see in B2B marketing is many people create buyer personas, which is great, but there are assumptions baked in that this person already fully understands the problem and that you can solve it for them.
If you’re using your buyer persona to do a content strategy—to create content or evaluate your marketing—you’ve already skipped over awareness and consideration. You’re at the buying stage now.
When we beta-tested our ideal customer profile service, our friend Brooke Sellis from B Squared gave us her buyer persona playbook to compare against the ICP we built. That’s where we saw the disconnect—her playbook assumed everyone was already in the pipeline and knew the problem.
Our ICP analysis is meant to help marketers approach people who may not even know there’s a problem yet. You create content that resonates so when they *do* identify the problem, they enter your buyer’s journey. The ICP gets to them before that.
The challenge with buyer personas is they focus too much on someone already knowing what’s wrong and looking for a solution. In marketing, 99% of the time, they don’t know there’s a problem—or the
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By Trust Insights
5
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In this episode of In-Ear Insights, the Trust Insights podcast, Katie and Chris discuss the problem with buyer personas and how to master B2B marketing with smarter audience targeting. You’ll learn the critical differences between ideal customer profiles and buyer personas—and why using both transforms your strategy. You’ll discover how to ethically leverage AI and data to identify hidden pain points before prospects even recognize them. You’ll explore practical frameworks to align your content with every stage of the customer journey, from awareness to retention. You’ll gain actionable tactics to avoid common pitfalls and turn casual viewers into loyal buyers. Watch now to revolutionize how you connect with your audience!
Watch the video here:
Can’t see anything? Watch it on YouTube here.
Listen to the audio here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/inearinsights/tipodcast-problem-with-buyer-personas.mp3
Download the MP3 audio here.
[podcastsponsor]
Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for listening to the episode.
Christopher S. Penn – 00:00
In this week’s In-Ear Insights, let’s talk about buyer personas in B2B marketing—how AI is affecting them and why.
Actually, I want to dig into this, Katie, and I want your take. What’s the difference to you between an ideal customer profile and a buyer persona? A lot of people use those terms interchangeably, but they may or may not mean the same thing. What’s your take?
Katie Robbert – 00:28
I can understand why people use them interchangeably because there’s this notion that it’s some kind of representation of somebody who would eventually purchase something from you. In that sense, they are the same. The nuance—at least the way I break them out—is an ideal customer profile covers awareness and consideration, whereas a buyer persona covers purchase and the stages beyond that.
The challenge I see in B2B marketing is many people create buyer personas, which is great, but there are assumptions baked in that this person already fully understands the problem and that you can solve it for them.
If you’re using your buyer persona to do a content strategy—to create content or evaluate your marketing—you’ve already skipped over awareness and consideration. You’re at the buying stage now.
When we beta-tested our ideal customer profile service, our friend Brooke Sellis from B Squared gave us her buyer persona playbook to compare against the ICP we built. That’s where we saw the disconnect—her playbook assumed everyone was already in the pipeline and knew the problem.
Our ICP analysis is meant to help marketers approach people who may not even know there’s a problem yet. You create content that resonates so when they *do* identify the problem, they enter your buyer’s journey. The ICP gets to them before that.
The challenge with buyer personas is they focus too much on someone already knowing what’s wrong and looking for a solution. In marketing, 99% of the time, they don’t know there’s a problem—or the
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