Pointless personas

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You probably know what a marketing persona is, but just in case you don't: it's a sort of stylised version of your ideal customer that you use to produce marketing material. When you're writing something, putting together a campaign, or whatever, you imagine you're writing for this fictional person, and since that person is based on your actual customers, your end result is relevant to your target audience. 

On paper, these look like great tools. They condense all your customer research and insights into one digestible package. They take some time and energy out of briefing people, and they keep your marketing material consistent. 

And sometimes they are great. But more often, they're not helpful at all, because they focus on the wrong details about these mythical people. 

Meet Marketing Mary

Marketing software provider Hubspot have a pretty good reputation as smart marketers (I've written admiringly about their website before).

So it's kind of surprising to see how weak one of their marketing personas is. Take a look: 

Getting to know Mary

Mary is professional marketer running a small marketing team in a mid-sized company. That's nice. But what does it actually mean? It could mean that she has lots of autonomy, or barely any because the small company's CEO is involved in everything. It could mean she doesn't have much of a budget, or it could mean that she works for a funded startup with a huge budget. And so on, and so forth. 

It could mean basically anything, especially because the mid-sized company has between 25 and 200 people. 

Then if we move down to the goals and challenges, it gets more vague. For example, one of her challenges is "too much to do." This is everyone's challenge! It would be just as relevant for Rob Roofer or Donna the Doctor as it is to Marketing Mary. 

There's a couple good things in there, though. "Easier reporting to sales and CEO" as a reason to love Hubspot is valuable. That can be turned into a strong benefit statement. Same goes for "easy to use tools that make her life easier" - although that's not as strong. 

But the fact that she has two fictional children (ages 10 and 6) really does not add value. Hubspot is a marketing tool. The number of children someone has is not going to affect how you communicate with them about marketing tools. 

Okay - so we've established what a crummy persona looks like. Now let's shift gears and focus on how to make a useful persona. 

Step 1: be specific about the things that matter

Marketing Mary is specific about things that don't really matter (like her university degree), and vague about the things that do matter, like her goals and why she loves Hubspot. 

Flip this around when you create personas. I get that it's useful to have a name and face for your personas; it gives you a useful shorthand to use. But don't spend too much time or energy fleshing these characters out. You're not writing a screenplay. 

Rather, spend that time and energy writing specific points about the other stuff - your persona's goals, challenges, anxieties and pain (more on that in a second). The more specific you can get, the better your marketing material will be. 

This is actually a bit of a theme throughout these instructions, so if you don't feel like reading anymore, just remember this: be specific. 

Step 2: focus on the pain

Persuading someone to do something is really about alleviating pain of some kind. This means that for copywriting, an audience's pain points are some of the most valuable information available.

If I have a solid understanding of what is making a reader's life worse, I can write copy that shows how your product relieves that pain and makes their life better. 

Again: be specific.

Also, make sure the pain you focus in is pain that your product can alleviate. As I've written before, it's not uncommon for businesses to build their messaging around a pain that their customers feel intensely, but can't actually be alleviated by their product.

A good example of this mistake is the "get paid faster" messaging that heaps of small business software companies use. Getting paid too slowly is a very real pain, but it's pain caused by things like clients forgetting to pay, convoluted systems and just plain bad business practices. It's not something that software can solve. 

Step 3: say what your persona cares about

This is closely related to the pain points from the last step. To write for someone, I need to know what's important to them. 

This gives me the ability to prioritise product features and benefits, and choose how to articulate them.

For example, if a car is fuel-efficient, it's both cost-effective to run and  better for the environment than a gas-guzzling SUV. If a marketing persona tells me which of these is important to your audience, then I can use that information to prioritise these benefits. 

The Hubspot persona has done this a little bit, with the "goals" section, but it could be a lot more specific than it is. 

Step 4: Connect it all together

All the points you write in your persona should be connected to one another. If you're writing things that your persona cares about, your pain points should be things stopping your persona from getting those things. If you're writing about your persona's goals, the pain points should be things stopping them from reaching those goals. And so on, and so forth. 

This creates something really useful - a framework you can use to tell all kinds of interesting stories, and write all kinds of persuasive arguments for buying your product. 

Once you've done this, if you must, throw in some biographical details. They can't hurt, and people like doing them. So go ahead and treat yourself. 

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash