Show Notes
- Personas are fictional representations of segments of your buyers. This allows you to understand who they are, what they are trying to accomplish and what influences their buying decisions.
- For a detailed description of what personas are and how they can help you, listen to Episode 3 or read the blog, Personas: The Great Brand Unifier.
- Personas are usually separated as B2B or B2C. Download our free B2B or B2C template as a reference.
- Personas create a shared vocabulary in the organization and targets your media and content.
Information for personas is pulled from a lot of different places. (For reference, read 9 Research Ideas for Creating Data-Driven Personas, 8 Underexplored Areas of LinkedIn For Persona Research and How To Use Facebook To Research Buyer Personas.)
8 sources for buyer persona research:
- Institutional knowledge – sales & customer service teams, or anyone who interacts with customers.
- Social media profiles – LinkedIn is one of the strongest tools to use for B2B persona research. Twitter is effective for both B2B and B2C. Facebook has a greater B2C focus.
- Trade publications & business media – Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Inc., etc. articles related to the persona’s pain points, aspirations, “day in the life,” frustrations and trending topics.
- Web & social analytics – dig dipper into Google Analytics and Facebook analytics to learn more about your segmented audiences.
- Social communities – places like Quora and Reddit help you search or pose questions to get first-hand feedback from your target.
- Social listening – tools that help aggregate information across social networks. For reference, check out the Marketing Smarts podcast on social listening.
- Secondary Research – reference studies, reports and databases put out by government industries, commercial groups, agencies etc. These reports provide first-hand research and require no investment.
- Primary Research – if secondary research is not available, invest in a survey or study.
Keys to Success:
• Understand bias and the source of information
• Have a diversity of research sources
• Know that you won’t have all the answers
Steps of Persona Research
- Conduct preliminary research before meeting with internal teams to make sure you have enough information to facilitate that group conversation.
- Have discovery meeting with internal teams to discuss personas.
- With buy-in from internal teams, begin thorough persona research with tools.
- Once research is done, do analysis of your research to recognize patterns and identify if any personas need to be split into two.
- Create draft persona with a name and picture. Call internal teams together to refine the draft.
Make any tweaks from refinement meeting and publish and share final persona – but keep in mind it’s a living document. The more you use it, the more you may find out it’s wrong. Have process in place to continuously improve the persona.
Charity of the Week:
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello, Iterative Marketers! Welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast, where each week, we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now, let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone, and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson, and with me, as always, is the sincere and genuine Elizabeth Earin. How are you doing today, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I am good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Robinson: Very, very well. We are getting into summer and getting into projects around the house. Have you done anything around your house lately?
Elizabeth Earin: We are getting ready to put in a new fence.
Steve Robinson: Oooh! Are you doing it yourself or you are hiring it out?
Elizabeth Earin: The neighbor that we share a fence line works for a fence company. So kind of a combination of both.
Steve Robinson: That’s kind of convenient.
Elizabeth Earin: It’s very convenient, actually. What about you?
Steve Robinson: We are doing some landscaping. And we bought this house this last year and the front porch was really, really shoddily repaired. It’s brick and we are trying to find a mason to come help us fix it. And it’s funny, you can’t get a mason to return your phone calls apparently, at least not here in Milwaukee right now, because they are all busy with bigger projects, so it’s been a challenge.
Elizabeth Earin: Interesting. So are you going to be taking this on yourself?
Steve Robinson: No, no. I consider myself more handy than I should, but I think there’s a line, and masonry may be about that line. So what are we talking about today?
Elizabeth Earin: Today, we are talking about persona research.
Steve Robinson: Wonderful. Wonderful. I think, probably before we get into persona research, we should do a quick recap on what a persona is, although I would encourage everyone listening, if you haven’t heard episode 3, to pop back and listen to episode 3 because we go into great detail about what personas are and how they can help you. If you are all old hat at personas and you are just looking to brush up on how to research them, then this quick synopsis should be more than enough.
Elizabeth Earin: So just to recap, buyer personas are fictional representations of segments of your buyers which give you the opportunity to understand who they are, what they are trying to accomplish and what’s influencing their buying decision. And that’s going to give you the ability to see the world through their eyes and give you the opportunity to empathize with them, which is going to help set you apart from your competitors.
Steve Robinson: And we have a great blog post out on iterativemarketing.net that goes through personas in detail as well. And we have a template that you can download that would actually be really helpful in executing this process as we are going to outline it today. When we talk about personas, usually we’ll split up B2C and B2B personas. And the research methods we talk about today apply to both, although some of them apply really more exclusively to B2B more than they would B2C.
Elizabeth Earin: I think that’s a great point to make. Do we want to get in and recap any of the benefits of personas before we jump into some of the different sources of information and how to use them?
Steve Robinson: I think so, because as you are going through that research, I think it’s always good to kind of have your eye on the price and why are we doing this. What are the benefits? What would you say is the biggest benefit, in your experience, as we have done personas for our clients?
Elizabeth Earin: Honestly, I think – it’s hard to pick just one, but the first one that pops up in my head is the shared vocabulary. I know it makes the conversation a heck of a lot easier when I can just say, hey, we are targeting Billy and everybody on the team knows exactly who Billy is, what his interests are, what his fears are and how we can best connect with him.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. I would agree it’s that, or maybe the focus that personas give you, because if you are doing it well, you are now structuring everything around these personas, so every bit of collateral, every ad, every blog post, it has a target persona in mind which makes it written with the intent of somebody consuming it, and then you can do the same thing with the media and really laser focus on how you are reaching a given audience. Once you understand who that is, then you can build all of that around that shared vocabulary of personas.
Elizabeth Earin: I think that just leads into, I mentioned it earlier, but understanding who they are gives you the ability to empathize with them, but then it also helps you to set up some of your other marketing efforts, the personalization and the automation that so many of us have incorporated into a marketing strategy.
Steve Robinson: Well, you and I touched base before the podcast and I think we came up with seven or eight –
Elizabeth Earin: I think eight.
Steve Robinson: — eight or so different sources that we use when we pull together our personas. I think we’ll just rattle these off one at a time here and kind of get into how we use these different sources, some things to watch out for and the pros and cons, because at the end of the day, you are going to have to pull information from a lot of different places in order to create that entire picture that is not only accurate enough but also broad enough that you can really feel like you can get inside that persona’s head and really empathize with them.
Elizabeth Earin: And to your point earlier, some of these are going to apply more to B2B than B2C, but as you are going through, you are going to kind of get a feel for which ones feel right and are going to help you accomplish your goals. We do have a great blog post about this that summarizes all of these different research methods and then goes into a little bit more extensive detail and some of the social media ones, and so we will definitely link to that in the show notes.
Steve Robinson: So the first and most important source in my mind is institutional knowledge. And when we say institutional, we mean your sales, your customer service team, anybody who’s on the front lines interacting with your customers. Why is that most important? And I think it’s probably from two reasons. One, that group is the group that you want to be using these personas as their vernacular moving forward. It really eases the communications between marketing and sales, marketing and customer service and even customer service and sales if you are able to say that, oh yeah, we were talking to a Jenny the other day and such and such, right? And so getting them involved in the process early really helps getting their buy-in in the process and gives them a sense of ownership over these personas that, then, increases the probability that they get adopted by the entire organization and don’t just stay stuck in the silo of marketing.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think I can’t imagine doing persona research and not relying on institutional knowledge; to me, it’s really where you start. It’s definitely the starting point and getting this process going and making sure that you are on the right path. Unfortunately, there are companies out there that, when they go into persona development, they don’t include their sales team or they don’t include their frontline team members and I think that’s where you really make a big mistake and run into having some major issues in the future by not getting them involved.
Steve Robinson: This stuff isn’t going to be written down anywhere, at least it hasn’t been in any organization I worked with, and so it’s really a matter of getting these folks around the table and picking their brain and finding out what they know. And we’ll talk more about that process later in the podcast, but the key is to get those folks in the front line as one of your primary resources of information as you pull together your personas.
Elizabeth Earin: A few things to keep in mind when you are working with your internal teams, making sure that the information is current. Sometimes, we have had people that have been in organizations for a long time and they have got some out-of-date information or ideas about who customers may be. The other one is biases that they may have, and we have run into this a few times when you have got someone who, based on their role, or in terms of sales, based on their territory, may have a very small view of who this customer is, and it may not be taking other aspects and features into account. So those are a couple of biases that you want to be aware of when you are talking to your internal team members.
Steve Robinson: The second most frequent tool that we use is probably social media profiles. The way that you go about using these is ideally you have a pretty robust CRM system, right, that has a whole list of your existing customers and prospects. And ideally, you can start to segment that based on who would be in and who would be out of a given persona, and then you just start pulling up their social media profiles and taking a look at what they have completed for their background, how they describe themselves, what are they talking about, what are they responding to and see if you can get a an understanding of what’s really important in their world, at least digitally and online.
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, and we use LinkedIn on the B2B side is probably one of the strongest tools that we use, and I think the second place I go when I start doing persona research myself. Twitter kind of has a nice crossover between business-to-business and business-to-consumer audiences. And then Facebook has a tendency, from what I have seen, and I don’t know if you have a different experience, Steve, but that has more of a B2C focus.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, absolutely. You can certainly fill in some commonalities that you might have among an audience, but generally you are going to be looking at Facebook primarily when you are targeting B2C. Some of the issues that we have seen in using social media as one of our primary research means is that, particularly with B2B, you end up with a little bit of a bias around your more digitally-connected audience, because in certain segments, certain audiences, particularly with older personas, those non-digitally connected folks, either have a virtually blank LinkedIn profile or aren’t even on the social network and that can result in your research bending a little bit more towards the digitally-connected consumer. So, you have to be careful of that.
Elizabeth Earin: Another research method I use, and I have got to be careful here, because I really like personas and I really like persona research, so I think they are all my favorites, but I really like relying on trade publications and business media. These are publications like Fortune, Harvard Business Review, INC., and finding within these publications articles on trending topics, concerns, pain points, aspirations. These are all things that can be found, and it’s as simple, literally I have typed in ‘pain points of engineers’ before and the articles that come up provide a wealth of information to help me kind of complete some of these personas and put the research together. Another thing I really like about trade publications, a lot of times, when you are in — within specific industries, they will do individual profiles or spotlights on roles. So they may have, again referring to engineers, Engineer of the Month, or they may have awards. And so they are highlighting people within that field where a lot of time there’s insights into why they became an engineer, the things that are keeping them up at night, the things they love about their job, the things they don’t love about their job. And so this is kind of some unique perspective that you may not get from some of your other research.
Steve Robinson: This works really well, and obviously this is tailored more towards your B2B. You are not going to be able to find top pain points of stay-at-home moms — maybe, but a lot of your other audiences, you probably won’t be able to Google and get industry articles on if you are in a B2C target. And they are not always available either, but when they are and you have one of those interviews of somebody outlining the day in their life, it could be really helpful for filling in some gaps that would be otherwise very hard to figure out without doing a ton of interviewing or first-party research.
Elizabeth Earin: Some of the things I have run into is that it’s not consistent from industry to industry, or to your point, between B2B and B2C. And then also, there’s a tendency to have some herd bias, and that you are getting sort of — the publication has decided that this is a hot topic and so the readers have decided it’s a hot topic, when in reality, it’s not something they are necessarily dealing with in their day-to-day lives or their daily tasks. And so again, just another bias to be aware of as you are going through the data.
Steve Robinson: Next up, I think, is web and social analytics. It’s amazing when you start digging into Google analytics or into Facebook analytics and start looking at who your audience is and how they are made up, the number of little insights you can gleam. I know that we have noticed that there’s clusters, geographically, of people that we weren’t expecting. You can pretty well narrow the age range to decide exactly how old your persona should be. There’s a lot of advantages to being able to pull this out. Even some interests can be surfaced that you wouldn’t expect to be consistent among a given persona. The challenge here is that you have to be able to get at those analytics already segmented or grouped into the persona that you are targeting, right? So if you aren’t already segmenting your traffic in a way that you can narrow the focus so you are only looking at the demographics of that audience, then this method of research may or may not be all that helpful for you.
Elizabeth Earin: And also, I think it’s important to note this is another area where there could potentially be a digital bias. You may have people who are cookied and people who aren’t, and since this is all data-based on cookies, you may not necessarily be getting a full picture.
Steve Robinson: The benefit is it’s structured, its quantitative data, and when it comes to persona research, we don’t get a whole lot of that, so we’ll take what we can get at, right?
Elizabeth Earin: Definitely.
Steve Robinson: What about social communities? I know, Elizabeth, you have used those in the past.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah. And social communities are one that I have a tendency to use sort of as I get towards my tail end of my research, and that’s because some of the first few steps or first few methods that we have talked about can kind of help give you some parameters to search for, and then once you have sort of an idea you, can do some more targeted searches in places like Reddit industry forums. These are all great places where you can either go in and search for questions — I have even gone in and asked questions before. People love talking about what they are passionate about, and so you can get some great firsthand feedback from people that are the exact target that you are trying to reach.
Steve Robinson: Again, this ends up being a little bit of a bias towards your digitally-connected consumer, because your Luddites aren’t really frequenting their industry forums or Reddit, but it’s great to hear it straight from the mouth of the individuals that you are creating a persona around, and you don’t get that opportunity with all of these sources. So, one that I want to start using more that we haven’t had an opportunity to use as much as I’d like to, mostly because a lot of the technology isn’t necessarily in reach and you have to have a larger group that you are profiling, is social listening. There’s some really great tools out there that can help you build a profile of an audience on social media by aggregating a lot of information across the social networks.
Elizabeth Earin: So I think it makes sense here to kind of differentiate social monitoring from social listening. And I think we are all familiar with social monitoring, and it’s monitoring online conversations about a specific phrase or a specific word or a specific brand. But I kind of like to think about it as a snapshot in time. You see that one piece and it’s not always necessarily in context, and that’s where social listening kind of takes it a step further in that it allows you to quantify and filter the social conversation so that you have a better idea of what was triggering that conversation in the first place, what started it, and helps you to really understand the depth and breadth of the online conversations that people are having about you or your brand or your service or your product. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you going after the free-mium model. You have got things like Viralheat, mention.com, clear.com, Social Mention. They have a tendency to be more keywords-centric and they don’t always store the data and they don’t have any analysis, so while they may be cheaper than some of the more expensive versions, what you are not paying for with cash you are going to be paying for with time as you try to do your own analysis on that. When you get into some of the mid-level options, you have Radian6 and — Steve, you are going to have to help me because I always mispronounce this one.
Steve Robinson: Sysomos.
Elizabeth Earin: Sysomos, which — a slightly higher cost, but you get a little bit more of that ability to analyze that information. And then when you get to the enterprise level, which to be honest, most businesses, definitely small businesses and even mid-sized businesses are just out of their price range, you have got NetBase, Infegy, Crimson Hexagon and Zignal Labs and they do everything for you, but you are paying for it.
Steve Robinson: There’s some really, really amazing stuff that these new tools are able to accomplish here, but the key is if you aren’t paying for the tools, you are probably paying for the resources to do it manually, and when you start aggregating large datasets of unstructured data around what people are discussing and then trying to align those up with who is discussing it and getting that to align with your persona, it could be a massive undertaking or some pricey toolsets. I do want to give a hat tip to Jason Falls. He did a great podcast a while back on Marketing Smarts where he covered off on a lot of the social listening stuff. Definitely worth a listen. We’ll link to that in the show notes. But again, an area that we want to get into more in the future as these tools become a little bit more refined and a little bit more palatable and the cost and reaches and so our costs of resources isn’t so great in order to apply it.
Elizabeth Earin: And then I think the final two methods both fall kind of in the research. And we’ll break these out as primary and secondary research. And I’ll start with secondary research, because primary research can be expensive and so kind of an alternative to that is taking advantage of secondary research, like studies and reports and databases that have been put out by government agencies, industry publications, trade organizations, commercial groups, different types of agencies, they have reports that have surveyed potentially your exact target audience and so you are able to get some great insights without having to spend the money to get that as first-hand research, and so I have used this a lot especially in my B2B research.
Steve Robinson: So if the data exists, by all means, you should use somebody else’s data. And the nice thing about a lot of this data, when it comes from a third party, is it’s already quantitative data. It’s already been analyzed for you and you just need to take those statistics and interpret it and apply them. If it’s not available, that’s the point at which you have to go and do your own research, and so here, you have a number of options. Obviously, a survey to your existing customers is going to be the cheapest and easiest to do, but you are usually battling a small dataset at that point and getting participation can really be a challenge.
Elizabeth Earin: I think one of the other challenges with primary researches is just the costs and resources associated with that. If you are working with a marketing research firm, you can quickly jump into tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars based on the type of research that you are conducting in the area that you are covering. And so that’s, again, something that may not be available to all businesses.
Steve Robinson: Right. So basically it’s a horse apiece. Do you want to pay the money and get the reach that you need and get the statistically significant data and get the value that you need from that third-party independent research firm, or do you want to get some data that may not be as robust by the time you take the number of contacts in your CRM system and multiply that times the response rate you are going to get from such a survey? But either way, it’s definitely worth pursuing one way or another if you can, because it’s just another piece of the puzzle that you can piece together. I think that this brings us to a good point for us to take a quick break and talk about helping some folks. When we come back, we’ll get into some basic keys to success and the process.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue, I’d like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Brandon Tschacher of MyCombine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Brandon asks that you make a contribution to the Salvation Army Echelon, creating opportunities for young adults to engage with the Salvation Army and mobilizing the next generation of volunteers. Learn more at salvationarmyechelon.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast, please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the “Share a Cause” button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So before we left, we went through a very long list of all the different ways you can go and research your personas, but I’d like to touch briefly on some of the lessons that we have learned, some of the keys to success that we have discovered and share those with our audience. Where would you like to go first, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: I think we touched on this in I think almost every single one of the methods we discussed, and that’s understanding the bias in the source, understanding where the bias exists, no matter which one you are looking at, because there’s going to be bias and being able to recognize that and really take that into account when you are reviewing the data is going to help to ensure that you have got an actionable and realistic persona.
Steve Robinson: And along with that, you are going to be looking for patterns. You are going to be seeking to find where there are commonalities. And so in addition to needing to sniff out the bias, you also need to sniff out where you are running across individual data points that are more anecdotal. Our brains aren’t really good at understanding when something is not significant versus when it is, and if you read a great story that you can easily identify with and seems to make perfect sense, it can jump out even if it’s just one data point as being more important than three or four small things that you read elsewhere. And so it’s really understanding the significance of what it is that you are reading and whether or not it’s just one individual little story or two instances of something among a sea of evidence that indicates something else.
Elizabeth Earin: And this has happened to me before. It’s that one piece that really jumps out at you and we did one for a client and I gave too much credit to one source that I read and the persona was completely off, and so this is one that can really get you, so be warned.
Steve Robinson: And it’s another reason to have a diversity of research sources that you are using, because oftentimes, the more data you have, the quicker you can find the signal and the noise. The third thing I think that’s important is that you are not going to have all of the answers. Even if you do a ton of research, you are still probably not going to paint that perfect picture. And when you think about your objectives behind that persona in creating that shorthand for the organization that is useful, regardless of the context in being able to easily identify with, empathize with that persona, it’s important that you create that full picture. And so that means you are going to have holes. And in our experience, and granted there are some people out there that would argue with this, but in our experience, it’s best if you fill those holes with what you know. So chances are, if you have gotten 80% of the way there, you can think of two or three people that fit this persona to a T that are in your head and you can pull from your own experiences to fill in those holes so that you have something on paper to, then, go and explore and refine in the future.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think this is something you are sort of doing at the end of the process after you have done all of your research, after you have analyzed the data, and you notice where you have got those holes. By this point, you have got enough of understanding of who this person is that you can make those assumptions. And I think that the key here when you do make those assumptions is that, again, this is a living document. It’s constantly going to be growing and evolving as you learn more about your persona. And so, if you put those things down there and they don’t feel right, test it, experiment it, and then go back and change it and tweak it and make it so that it is something that is right. So it may take a little bit of time, but you will get there.
Steve Robinson: Absolutely. So what are we talking about for process here? What is the first step in the process of researching a persona?
Elizabeth Earin: So I think the very first step is some preliminary research and this is the research that happens before you have your discovery meeting with your internal teams. And what it is that you are trying to do here is to make sure that you have enough information that you can facilitate this conversation and accomplish what it is that you are working towards. And this is true, I think, both for someone who’s new in the organization, who may not have this information just at the tip of their fingers, but it’s also good for someone who has been in the organization for a while to make sure to go back and do kind of a check of “Am I still current?” “Do I have biases that I’m not aware of?” “How does my understanding of who this audience is relate to what we have got in our database?” And so looking at your CRM database, doing a quick look at your web analytics, these are great places to sort of get in touch with that.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, and then the next step is that discovery meeting. It’s to get the front line of your organization, the people interacting with your customers or at least representatives of them, around a table to talk about the personas. And those people are sometimes really hard to get around a table, particularly those really active sales people that really don’t want to spend time in a conference room, but it’s worth the effort. You are probably going to have some feelings that you need to prep a ton for this meeting and have a roughed-up persona to present to them. In our experience, that’s not the right answer. And the reason for that is you really want this team’s buy-in and you don’t want to be too leading in the questions that you are asking and the information that you are gathering because they’ll follow, surprisingly more than they should. So start with a blank slate and ask the questions that need to be asked.
Elizabeth Earin: And to help you with that, we have got a free tool, a list of questions that can help facilitate that meeting and will link to that in the show notes.
Steve Robinson: One of the key things that you want to get out of this meeting, though, is understanding where the edges are between personas, when does Jim and Jack begin? Because your frontline will kind of know the archetypes. They’ll know the buckets to put people in, and you are going to further refine them later as you finish your research, but it’s really helpful to get that from the frontline before you start that research so you have a rough idea of how many and which personas you are looking at. And as we talked about in episode 3, fewer is better. It’s much easier to split a persona than it is to try and combine two later.
Elizabeth Earin: So once you have had your discovery meeting and you have collected information and you have the buy in from your internal teams, now is when you start the research and you start using all of the methods that we outlined earlier in the podcast. And we also, as I mentioned earlier, have a blog post on this that gets into a little bit more detail specifically on some of the social media resources. But this is where the information from that internal meeting is going to help guide sort of the path you are going down. And so from that point, you’ll have a better idea of which of those methods are going to help you accomplish the goal of getting together a finished persona.
Steve Robinson: And once you have done that research, now you have to do some analysis. And it’s better if you do the research separately from the analysis because you are trying to analyze stuff as you go. That’s really when those little anecdotal bits of story will jump out and take far more precedence than they should. If you get everything into an Evernote notebook or into a bunch of Word docs or an Excel spreadsheet, however you best organize this unstructured data, and then come back and try and recognize those patterns, you are going to be able to spot true patterns a lot more easily. As you go through, you are going to be refining is this Jim or is this Jack and where does that line need to live between a set of job titles or ages or whatever your delineation is? And in the past when we have done this research, we have recognized patterns that indicate that things need to be split. You have got a great example of this, I am thinking one client in particular with the buyers that we needed to split.
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, we went in thinking that we are looking at a corporate purchaser or a corporate buyer and that this was one person in the role and it was pretty straightforward. And as we talked to our internal team and as we started doing research, we figured out there’s actually two types of buyers. There is the buyer who is coming in every day and doing their job and clocking in at 9 and leaving at 5, and really just a task-oriented punching the clock, and then we have got that other buyer who’s more informed and who has a stronger understanding of the business and is looking for those cost efficiencies and those process improvements and is really involved and takes ownership over the process. And how we talked – how we spoke to each of those people, the message that we communicated and how we communicated to them, where they were getting their information varied enough that it made sense that these needed to be two separate personas.
Steve Robinson: And there were other edges that allowed us to feasibly target those two individually, because if you can’t break people up in the two different personas, sometimes it’s not worth splitting. But in this case, we knew how we could get at persona — the one that was a little bit more involved versus the one that was checked out based on the type of company they worked at or what they did. Once you have done your analysis, then you draft your persona. And make sure that you label the draft because it is a draft. It still needs to go through a bunch of steps, but get the stuff on paper and give them a picture and give them a name so that people can start to empathize with it, and then you call everybody back to the table for refinement meeting.
Elizabeth Earin: Yes, and I think it’s important to note, going into this, if they come in and they tear it apart, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Remember, we are trying to get to an accurate picture of this group that we are trying to target. However, I found most of the time, that we go into these meetings, if you follow this process, it’s amazing that they have maybe one or two little changes or sometimes no changes at all. And that’s a pretty amazing feeling when you are sitting there thinking, okay, we nailed this, we got this right.
Steve Robinson: Coming out of that refinement meeting, then, you have got some tweaks you got to make, right? And then at that point, it’s just a matter of publishing a nice, pretty 8.5 x 11 glossy persona. Now keep in mind, though, this is a living document. This is something that is going to get revisited on a regular basis. As a matter of fact, the more you use it, the more you find out it’s wrong and that’s a good thing. So make sure that you have a process in place to continuously be improving that persona.
Elizabeth Earin: With that being said, though, don’t be afraid to share it. And we talk about this in our blog, “Personas – The Great Brand Unifier,” because marketing, management, business development teams, your research and development team, sales, customer service, human resources, employee relations, they can all benefit from this persona that you have developed. So, even though you may be making some tweaks to it in the future, definitely share this because they are going to help be able to provide some information, too, to help you get more — make sure that that’s on track with and becomes the fully flushed-out persona that you are looking for.
Steve Robinson: It not only benefits you. I mean, imagine your sales team is armed with these, so that means that, as they’re gathering leads at your trade show, they are segmenting them by persona as they put him in the CRM. As your customer service team is working with individuals, they are segmenting them by persona. And they are both noticing instances where your persona is just slightly off, and then getting that feedback back to you as they are interacting with the public, thinking in terms of these personas.
I think that’s a wrap for this week. We have actually gone pretty long for one of our podcasts. I don’t know if we are going to hear about that, but I want to thank everybody for making the time for us this week, and until next week onward and upward.
If you haven’t already, be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show, sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There, you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group, where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our username is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then, onward and upward!
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