Creating Great Personas

by Ian Laurie

How is it that some web sites just click, the moment you look at them?
What makes some people just love Grolsh beer, while others swear by Guinness?
Why do you like BMWs, while I like Teslas?
Why do I like one candidate, while you like another?

This isn’t luck. Someone designed these brands or campaigns to appeal to certain personalities. And they started with personas.

Part 1 – Personas: Your Imaginary Friends1

Wikipedia defines personas as “fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product”.

In short, they’re your marketing campaign’s imaginary friends. Playing with imaginary friends helps kids learn to interact with real people. Your personas will teach you to interact with a real audience.

You should create at least 3 personas, defined by unique traits: Different levels of experience with your product, different benefits for your organization, different social classes, etc.

There are lots of ways to sketch out personas. This is how I do it – it’s worked for me and I’ve refined it since I started writing for a living way back in 1990.

Start With Layers

I look at personas in layers:

Who they are, every day.
What they want, all the time.
How they interact with you and your competitors.
What might make this interaction happen/not happen?
How they may affect your organization.

Research

This might include statistics, but you must at least gather a team that knows these personas. The team might include:

Experts on this audience.
Anyone working with these personas on a daily basis: Salespeople, teachers, trainers, bosses, installers, tech support, etc.
Writers who write documentation or marketing copy for these personas.

Statistics are pretty easy to find, too:

• Social media: What do folks on Facebook, in the blogging world, etc. say about this brand, type of product or service? Don’t take the first post as gospel – make sure you research.
• Quantcast (free): What are the demographics of people visiting similar sites?
• Keyword data from Google Adwords (free), KeywordDiscovery, WordTracker. The phrases people use are a great peek in their heads.

While you research, write down the impressions and insights you gain into each persona. You’ll also probably dig up new personas as you go.

Then it’s time to write. I usually need 1-2 hours to complete each persona. It may take 4 hours if I’m stumped. But it’s worth the effort. A good persona focuses your whole campaign.

Writing: Answer these Questions

You don’t have to answer every one in detail. The idea is to write something (like this example) that makes sense:

Who they are, everyday: Demographics

Where do they live?
What’s the climate like there?
Typical stuff: Age group, children, married/single, salary, job, home ownership, ethnicity, education, nationality.
What group might they belong to? What’s their status within that group? Are they influencers? On the fringes? By ‘group’, I mean something like ‘cyclists’, ‘travelers’, ‘skiers’ or ‘people who like to cook’.
What’s their lifestyle?
Any special interests? Party affiliations, etc.?
Any accessibility issues?
Are they internet novices? Experts?
What kind of gadgets do they have?
What’s their reading level?
Would this user be comfortable using a chat program? E-mail? A web-based form? Or only on the phone?

What they want, all the time: Emotional

What’s their self-image?
Personality?
What are this person’s beliefs? This isn’t about religion, necessarily.
Where would they fit in a typical personality test?
What are their day-to-day goals? Survival? Fun? Family? Something else?

How they interact with you and your competitors: Relationship

Has this person used this kind of product/service before?
Do they know much about it?
When do they use this product or service, or otherwise take action?
What’s their role in this interaction? Decision maker? Researcher? Something else?
What’s the environment in which they’ll use this web page? At home? Surrounded by co-workers? Barking dogs?…
How do they feel about it? Is this a product they get excited about? Or is it a necessary evil?

What might make this interaction happen/not happen: The Pitch

What’s their goal in buying the product or service, or otherwise taking action? Think of the big and little picture here.
During this interaction, should they feel adventurous? Secure? Confident? Luxurious? Powerful? Independent? Peaceful?
What makes this interaction fun? Memorable? Maddening?
How important is confidentiality?
How much is trust an issue?
What frustrates them about this product or service?
What will make feel they’ve received value?

How they may affect your organization: Impact

What effect is this person likely to have on the business? Help? Hurt? Earn money? Cost money? A long-term customer?
How often will they come back and use this product, service or interaction?
Will you enjoy working with this person?

When you’re done writing, you must at least get a picture of your best, just OK, and worst customer. See my next post for the many types of personas, and how you can make sense of them once you’re done.

Wow…

Yes, this is a lot of work! It’s also crucial: As Chris Garrett says, empathy is essential to great copy. It’s also essential to great internet marketing: It affects your web site, your landing pages, and indeed every bit of your message and strategy.

Once you’ve written the personas, continue to Part 2.

Part 2 – The 4 Rules of Personas

Personas can drive a great internet marketing strategy, if you follow four rules:

1. Pursue only focal personas as customers until you dominate this little marketplace.
2. Then pursue the ‘eh’ personas on a test basis. Make them into either focal or exclusionary personas, and adjust your strategy as necessary.
3. Then expand your business in a new direction.
4. Never, ever, ever try to win over the exclusionary personas. Trust me, I’ve tried. At best, you fail. If you’re really unlucky, you succeed and end up in some truly awful business relationships.

Yup, I just used some terms you’ve not heard before: Focal personas, ‘eh’ personas, and exclusionary personas. Read on, and you’ll see how this works:

How it Works (told ya)

Let’s say you’ve created 10 personas:

1. Mean Mary
2. Loyal Larry
3. Flaky Frank
4. Rich Robin
5. Spendy Susan
6. Demanding Dave
7. Connected Chris
8. Timely Tim
9. Slow Stephanie
10. Bad Bob

Now you need to filter them, building the audience you want, the one you don’t need, and the one you want to avoid.

Focal Personas: Your Little Marketplace

You really want some personas as customers; they’re your perfect match. They’ll be loyal, or spend a lot on you, or vote for you every election, etc. They’re called focal personas, and they’re the target of your internet marketing strategy. They form a small marketplace where you can sell to a receptive, happy audience.

As a rule, have no more than 5 focal personas. If you have more than five, consider splitting them up into smaller sub-groups for separate campaigns – it’s hard to find consistent selling propositions among more than 5 personas.

Let’s assume that you want Connected Chris, Loyal Larry, Rich Robin and Timely Tim as your focal personas.

‘Eh’ Personas: Nice To Have, But OK To Lose

Some personas might be OK customers, but only just OK. They buy quickly but never come back, vote for you once and then hate you forever, or they’re a poor match for your brand. These are ‘eh’ personas.

In this case, our ‘eh’ personas are Flaky Frank, Slow Stephanie and Spendy Susan. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if they were customers, but it wouldn’t make our day, either.

Exclusionary Personas: Run!

You don’t want these personas. They’ll make your life hell, or pay late, or grind you down on every dime. Regardless of the reason, make a decision, right now, to disqualify them. Build a campaign that shows this audience you’re not their best choice.

For our exclusionary personas, we’ve got Bad Bob, Demanding Dave and Mean Mary. We’ll avoid them like the plague. Life’s too short.

What now?

Build for the focal personas, and to filter out the exclusionary personas. Present as neutral a face as possible to the rest. See that? You’ve just outlined the broad strokes for your campaign! You now know who your market is, who it might be someday, and who it should never be. You’re off and running.

*If you’d like to see more about personas and applying them in internet marketing, please comment below. I’ll continue forward with this series. If not, say nothing. I’ll slink into the corner, grumbling, and write something else.

**The original concept of focal and exclusionary personas is not my own. It comes from many, many sources – too many to count. So I’ll just link to the Google Search Result. ‘eh’ personas I made up all by myself.

Part 3 – 3 Rules for Applying Personas to E-mail Marketing

Now we’ll get a little more tactical, and use ‘em where most folks forget: E-mail Marketing.

Follow these three rules:

1. Design for convenience, for that persona. ‘Convenience’ means different things to different people. For me, it means messages I can easily scan and delete or act on. For someone else, it might mean all the information they need, right in the e-mail.
2. Tailor every offer to that persona. Sending a 10% off deal to a persona who wants luxury at any cost won’t get you much.
3. Refresh your memory. Every time you launch an e-mail campaign, review your personas. Otherwise you’re going to drift into what I call ‘coupon land’, where every e-mail starts with ’20% Limited Time offer!!!!’ or some such. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a bad offer. Just make sure it’ll work for your audience.

And with that, a quick example that I received today:

Here’s an e-mail sent by TheNerds.net (yeah, yeah, laugh it up):

If they created accurate personas, they aren’t using them. They send me special offers on decidedly geeky items, like cables for my home-made hard drive enclosure. What are the odds that someone like me would be downloading images from every e-mail, the moment I receive that e-mail? Zero.

Now, look at the same e-mail, viewed in the preview pane of my e-mail software:

Not exactly compelling, is it? If TheNerds.net created personas, they undoubtedly would figure out that we’re, well, nerds. As such, we like text e-mail, or at least e-mail we can scan very, very rapidly and then delete or read it. I’ll delete this e-mail every time.

To create an e-mail that really caters to The Nerd persona, they should have at least a line or two of plain old text that tells me why I want to read this e-mail. For instance:

Save $10 on Cables To Go Orders

And, they should have a subject line that’s more compelling than ‘Cables2Go’.

E-mail marketers, have mercy on us. Think about those personas before you click ‘send’.

Part 4 – Search Marketing and Personas: Opening Your Customer’s Heads

Get Inside Your Searchers’ Heads: Why You Should Read This

OK, all you Heroes fans: I’m not talking about Sylar slicing the tops off of peoples’ heads here. Don’t read this post if that’s what you’re looking for. This is a respectable marketing blog, even if I’m of questionable character. We don’t truck in such silliness. But aren’t you glad Peter Petrelli’s back!?

You do need to read this post if you’ve ever:

• Crafted what you thought was a brilliant pay-per-click campaign, and gotten no sales;
• Worked for months to get that top 5 position for “baby buggy bumpers”, only to realize it was the wrong keyword;
• Gotten a top 5 position for a great keyphrase, but received a fraction of the expected traffic;
• Wanted to slap your SEO consultant because they insist you should use “stroller pillows” instead of “baby buggy bumpers”.

Personas are a powerful search marketing tool. In the Conversation Marketing model, they help you know the room, dress appropriately, sound smart and observe and adjust, all at once. You can use them as a common-sense model for audience behavior, and test your assumptions about keywords, different search engines and landing pages. Here’s how:

Check Your Keywords: Use Common Sense

Sometimes a keyword shows promise because it gets lots of searches. But it may make no sense at all in the context of a particular persona.

Check your keywords and phrases. Do they make sense for that persona? Keywords that don’t fit may still be relevant – you’re probably missing another persona that bears consideration.

For example, if the persona ‘Bob’ is a 23 year old surfer, he probably won’t search for ‘nifty ways to decorate a board’. He might search for ‘rad board graffiti’ (my apologies to 23 year old surfers if I got that wrong). But there may be another persona you haven’t thought of that uses the ‘nifty’ phrase, instead. You just found a whole new market!

Think About the Search Engines: Focus Your Effort

Which search engines do these personas most likely use? Different people prefer different engines. I won’t make any sweeping generalizations here – you can find this kind of demographic data on a site like Quantcast, or you can purchase it from Connexity or Nielsen.

Armed with this knowledge, you can focus your paid search marketing (pay per click) efforts. You can also tailor your organic search engine optimization campaign to specific search engines.

Let’s use ‘Bob’ as an example again. He’s a 23-year-old surfer. Bob’s probably not a Live Search or Yahoo user. He’s more likely going to use Google (I’m making this up – do the research, people!). So, focus your paid search efforts on Google Adwords. And make sure that your site doesn’t do anything that might offend Google’s anti-spam team.

Consider Schedules: When Will They Search?

Most paid search programs provide some form of dayparting – you can limit ad delivery at one time of day, and accelerate it at another. Make sure you deliver ads when your focal personas will be online. Make sure you do not deliver ads when your exclusionary personas are on the prowl.

‘Bob’, our surfer, is a great potential customer – a focal persona. He hits the internet in the afternoon. So, show your ads 100% of the time between, say, 2 PM and 7 PM. ‘Frank’, on the other hand, is your worst possible customer – he’s an exclusionary persona. He browses the web at 2 AM. Turn off your ads in the wee hours, so there’s no chance of accidentally hooking him.

Tailor Description Tags: Maximize Clickthrough

Search engines use the description META tag to format the snippets they show in their organic search results:

Search terms typed into Google will return bolded text within the search query results if the webpage contains those terms in the meta-description tag

Google’s crew writes about it here. While the description tags don’t affect ranking all that much, they will affect clickthrough rates: A good description will lead to more clicks on your organic search result.

If you already rank well for a few phrases, check and see which personas will use each phrase. Then see which pages are listed in the search results. Edit the description tags on those pages to best appeal to the relevant personas.

Say you have another persona: ‘Sally’. She’s a 45-year-old lawyer – a partner in a law firm. She’ll appreciate a well-written description tag with a reasonably formal tone. You think she’ll search using keywords distinct from Bob’s. You do a quick search on Google, and see that 2 pages on your site rank in the top 20 for that phrase. Tailor those description tags Sally, so she’s more likely to click.

Think About Conversions: Pull it All Together

What’s your site’s goal? Will your personas, after finding you on a search engine under a particular keyword, and landing on a particular page, be more or less likely to convert?

This is one last gut-check. Make sure it’s all coming together the way your personas – not you – will want it to.

Observe and Adjust

Watch how visitors behave when they come to your site from a search engine. Do they match what you expect? Probably not exactly. Adjust your description tags, landing pages, keywords and overall strategy accordingly.

No technique’s 100% perfect. But apply these rules, and you can use personas to continuously improve your search marketing results. And you don’t even need superpowers.

Personas are not just for marketing purposes… They can also contribute to sales, strategy, business development, UX design, product innovation and more. Here are some additional resources to assist you with developing a persona:

• Xtensio.com – User persona templates and examples.
• JustInMind – 15 must-see user persona templates.
• Invisionapp.com – 5 essentials for your persona template (with examples).