Personas: Building Block #1

Everything that you do will be fundamentally flawed if you do not know the audience for which you are producing content.

What is a Persona?

A detailed description of a fictional person who would buy your product or use your service. They are meant to put human attributes to an abstract marketing description or goal.

Why Should I Care About Personas?

• Helps you understand if your content is appropriate

Why Should I Care About Personas?

Creating content for “someone in particular”(more difficult)

NOT

“every possibly buyer I can imagine” (easy’ish)

What Should My Personas Include?

Demographics• Age• Level of education• Title/where they sit on the org chart

What Should My Personas Include?Behavior• Most important daily responsibilities• Office routine• Daily obstacles at work• What they read• What would make their life easier

How do they interact with my company?

• How would your product solve any of their problems?

• How do they interact with your company?• Why do they come to your company in the first

place?• What type of content is the person looking for?

How are B2B and B2C different?

Work life likelymore important

Region/Personal life likely more important

How Do You Figure All That Out?

Talk to customers!• Start with 10… then iterate and collect more

data as needed.• How do you talk to customers/prospects

about this?

How Do You Figure All That Out?

Questions to Ask or Consider:

• Tell me about yourself…how did you end up in this role?

• What does your typical day look like?• What do you like/not like about your job?

How Do You Figure All That Out?

• Take results and build initial personas then review and put yourself in their shoes

• Take revised data and rethink the characters you’ve created

• Test, test and then test again

A Practical Example – BillPersona Two (Bill) – Product Support Specialist:Bill is a 25 year old product support specialist at a 100-500 employee software company. Bill majored in computer science as an undergraduate and since then has done a few online trainings to refine his skills to be the best he can at his job. Bill reports to a product support manager (Cindy) who monitors his performance and also helps him grow his professional skill set.

Bill’s day starts by coming in to the office around 8AM and reviewing last nights submitted cases that were assigned to him. He figures out if any of them are high priority and tackles those first then works through the rest of the cases he has in his queue. Bill interacts throughout the day with account managers for clients to understand the cases better as well as more technical resources if the case is above their knowledge level. He also attends a few meetings throughout the week with his team to learn new things about their product and team checkups. Most of Bill’s obstacles to being more successful at his job revolve around a lack of communication, whether that be between Bill and account managers, the customer, or someone else, not having everything communicated clearly can really hurt Bill’s performance. In his spare time he reads general tech articles on sites like Techcrunch and Mashable as well as industry related articles.

A Practical Example – BillPersona Two (Bill) – Product Support Specialist:Bill interacts with our company by looking to us for best practices on communicating with clients, building interoffice communication, and task management. They came to our company first to learn more about to be better at their job, and value us as a resource in that regard. This person is looking for blog posts, how-to’s, and other tactical advice on how to do their job better and hopefully advance in their career to the next level.

Summary

• Personas are fundamental building blocks to an effective marketing strategy

• Building personas is easy to skip but costly to remedy

Questions?