Most B2B marketing teams have buyer personas. Most of those personas are useless.
Not because the format is wrong. Not because the concept is flawed. Because the work required to make them useful was never done. Someone got in a room with the marketing team, made some assumptions, filled in a template, and called it research.
Ardath Albee, B2B marketing strategist and author of Digital Relevance, has seen this pattern hundreds of times. She's opened persona documents with Latin filler text still in the template. Demographic details that would embarrass a consumer brand. Married, two kids, drives a Volvo. "Who the heck cares?" she told Paxton Gray on The Campaign. In B2B, none of that tells you anything you can actually use.
The cost of bad personas used to be wasted effort. Now it's something bigger.
Buyers have always done most of their research without talking to vendors. Research from Kerry Cunningham at Sixth Sense puts the average B2B buying journey at ten months after the trigger hits, with buyers completing roughly 70% of the process before engaging a sales team. That's not new. What's new is where that research is happening.
Buyers used to type four-word queries into Google. Now they type 23-word prompts into AI systems. Those prompts are full of context: their industry, their problem, their situation, the specific thing they're trying to figure out. Whether your content surfaces as part of the answer depends entirely on whether you understand the words your buyers use and the questions they're actually asking.
If your personas were built on assumptions and demographic guesses, you don't know that. And increasingly, that means you don't exist.
The irony is that AI has made some teams even lazier about this. Instead of doing the customer interviews they were already avoiding, they're now asking AI to describe their buyers for them. Albee's response to that: "Those buyers are your buyers. From what? Based on what?"
The foundation of a good persona is customer interviews. Not a workshop. Not a survey. Actual conversations with actual buyers about what they went through when they were solving the problem you solve.
From those conversations, four things matter:
The role, not the title. Titles vary wildly across companies. What doesn't vary is what someone is responsible for and what keeps them up at night. A persona built around a job title will miss half the people it should reach. A persona built around a role will hit them all. One of Albee's clients arrived with 52 personas. She consolidated them to 10 or 12. Most of the extras were in the same role wearing different title hats.
A first-person day-in-the-life story. Not bullet points. A narrative, written as if the persona is speaking: what they care about, what they're trying to achieve, what problem they're trying to solve. This does something practical. When you pick up a persona six months later, you can read that story and step immediately into that buyer's context. Bullet points don't do that.
Priorities, objectives, and challenges. What are they accountable for? What's blocking them? What does success look like in their role?
The questions they need answered, in order. This is the most underused piece. Every buyer goes through a progression of understanding. They can't ask question B before they've answered question A, because without A, they'd never think to ask B. Mapping those questions and sequencing them gives you something more valuable than a persona. It gives you a content strategy.
The funnel metaphor has done a lot of damage to B2B marketing. It implies compression: more in the top, some falls out, a few convert at the bottom. It implies speed. It implies a linear path with predictable stages.
None of that reflects how complex B2B purchases actually happen. Ten-month journeys don't fit in a funnel. Neither do four-year ones, which some of Albee's clients are navigating. What they require is a narrative, a connected thread of content that helps a buyer move from "I think we might have a problem" to "I'm confident we made the right choice."
Albee calls this the continuum. The idea is simple: every piece of content should build on what came before and open up what comes next. Like a conversation.
That progression moves through distinct phases. Before the trigger, the goal is to help buyers recognize a problem they may not have named yet. At the trigger, the content shifts to why this matters now, what's at stake, and what doing nothing will cost. During vendor evaluation, the question becomes why you specifically. During risk assessment, which is where most vendors fail completely, the content needs to address implementation honestly. Buyers tell Albee constantly that they wish vendors had warned them about what was hard before they bought, not after. A case study that reads like magic, problem appeared, vendor arrived, all was solved, doesn't build trust. It breeds skepticism.
The continuum also doesn't end at the sale. Once a buyer becomes a customer, new problems surface and new stakeholders get involved. The content needs to shift with them.
One of the most common persona mistakes is building content for a single person and ignoring everyone else involved in the decision.
In most complex B2B purchases, the person you're marketing to has to convince a buying committee. Finance has concerns the champion doesn't share. IT has objections the VP of Marketing never anticipated. Everyone needs to get aligned before anything moves forward.
Most content strategies ignore this entirely. They build one track for one persona and leave that person to figure out how to bring everyone else along. That's the wrong job to give your buyer.
The better approach is content that helps different personas talk to each other. Content your VP of Marketing champion can share with their CFO that explains the business case in financial terms. Content your IT Director can use to address security objections internally. The goal isn't just to educate your buyer. It's to make them look smart when they're selling the decision internally without you in the room.
When content does that, it moves. When it doesn't, it stops with the first person who reads it.
The Homepage Nobody Has Solved
Here's a real problem: you have five personas. They all land on your homepage. How do you speak to all of them without saying nothing to any of them?
The dropdown approach, where sites offer separate paths for Marketing, Sales, and IT, sounds logical but creates its own problem. Each path becomes a silo. There's no connection between them. The VP of Marketing clicks their path and gets their information, but nothing helps them understand how their priorities relate to what the CFO cares about. The buyer is still doing all the connecting themselves.
Albee's answer is to go up one level to the ICP, the ideal customer profile. What do all your personas have in common? What problem does every one of them share? Lead the homepage with that, show every visitor they've landed in the right place, and then offer pathways deeper for each persona below. The homepage isn't for personas. It's for the ICP. Personas live further down.
The marketing industry is obsessed with one-to-one personalization. AI-powered individual journeys. Dynamic content customized to each person's behavior and history.
It's largely a distraction.
True one-to-one personalization is what salespeople do. They build individual relationships, remember the details, ask about the kids. Marketing doesn't operate at that scale and shouldn't pretend to. What shows up instead is "Hi first name," which isn't personalization. It's a mail merge with a story attached to it.
What buyers actually want isn't for you to know their name. They want to know that you understand their situation. Their challenges. What they're trying to accomplish. Whether your content is actually helping them move forward or just filling a slot in an editorial calendar.
"I really don't care if you know my name," Albee said. "What I really care is, do you know what I care about? Where I'm at, what I'm trying to do? How are you gonna help me?"
That's what good personas enable. Not surveillance. Not creepy behavioral tracking. A genuine understanding of professional context that makes your content feel like it was written for the person reading it. That's more personal than any personalization technology on the market.
Albee uses AI every day. Research, semantic connection checks, parsing interview transcripts to pull out structure before she writes. She's also testing VizX.ai, a tool that analyzes blog content to identify which posts should link to each other, what anchor text to use, and how to build the kind of semantic depth that signals expertise to AI search systems.
That last piece matters more now. AI search evaluates depth of authority. Lots of surface-level content on a topic doesn't signal expertise. Deep, well-connected content that builds on itself does. The foundational work of building good personas and a content continuum is also, it turns out, the work that makes you findable in an AI-first search environment.
What she doesn't use AI for is generating thought leadership from scratch. "Marketers need to be the arbiters of taste in this whole thing and help ensure that our thought leadership delivers something that is original and unexpected and something that is contextually relevant to the buyer that it's aimed at." AI doesn't have an opinion. It doesn't understand context. It can't replace the critical thinking that good content requires.
Making personas useful long-term requires two things most teams skip: regular updates and cross-functional visibility.
Buyer perspectives shift fast, especially now. A persona built two years ago may be meaningfully wrong today. The fix isn't another big persona project. It's doing a couple of customer interviews every month, updating what you learn, and sharing it across the organization. Not as "here's the updated persona PDF," but as buyer insights: here's what we're hearing, here's what's changing, here's what we need to adjust.
That framing matters. When personas are positioned as a marketing tool, other departments ignore them. When they're positioned as customer intelligence, sales, product, and customer success all want in. And when everyone in the company is working from the same understanding of who the buyer is, the buyer experience stops being fragmented.
The other discipline is tying the work to results. In a ten-month buying cycle, leadership will ask every quarter what marketing has to show for it. The answer is incremental movement: higher engagement from persona-based content, faster pipeline velocity from a continuum approach. That evidence is what keeps the foundational work funded.
There's no version of this that doesn't require talking to customers. No AI shortcut. No assumption workshop. No persona template you can fill out in an afternoon and call done.
But the payoff is real. When you know your buyers well enough to answer the questions they haven't thought to ask yet, to help them look smart in front of their buying committee, to build content that moves through an organization because it says what they couldn't say themselves, you stop competing on volume and start winning on trust.
Your competitors are running three-touch campaigns into a ten-month journey. You're building the relationship that carries buyers all the way through.
That gap doesn't close with better tools. It closes with better work.
See Ardath’s work and writings here: https://marketinginteractions.com/
Find Ardath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ardathalbee/
Connect with Paxton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paxtongray/
Looking for an agency that'll be worth the investment? 97th Floor creates custom, audience-first campaigns that drive pipeline and conversions. Get started here: https://97thfloor.com/lets-talk/.
01:13 - How fiction writing skills translate to building buyer personas
03:00 - Why most personas fail (and how to spot a bad one)
11:29 - What actually belongs in a B2B persona
15:13 - The continuum framework: guiding year-long buying journeys
26:19 - Making personas useful instead of shelf-ware
38:47 - Personal vs. personalization: the difference that matters
Ardath Albee brings over 30 years of business management and marketing experience to help B2B companies with complex sales use digital marketing strategy and compelling content to turn prospects into buyers.
She’s a strategist, storyteller, speaker, blogger, teacher, and content geek who is obsessed with helping companies become so damn relevant that buyers can’t help but choose to become customers and, once a customer, making sure they’d never think of leaving.
Ardath has written two books about her obsession, Digital Relevance and eMarketing Strategies for the Complex Sale.
