Conference Buddies

Persona’s help you identify who your audience is.  It’s also considered a way of profiling. Power to create deep empathy with your customers.

David Ogilvy once said, ”All good marketing requires empathy”
 

Key Points:
- Personality, wants, fears motivations, aspirations, etc.
- Speak directly to your audience   (Exactly what they need)
- Narrative  = description (demogr, psycho graphics, business) to get closer
- Empathy / Insight

Process:

1.     Research
2.     Brainstorm 
3.     Write it down 
4.     Create your campaign
5.     Segment your audience
6.     Measure, adjust, repeat

Research:
1. Demographics
    Geo, Gender, Income, etc.

2. Pschographics
    Personality, likes/dislikes, ambitions

What’s that one thing that will stop the purchase?

Resources:

1.     Quantcast.com
2.     Compete.com
3.     Adlab.msn.com
4.     Prizm / Claritas.com (expensive, data based on zip code)
5.     Trellian Keyword Discover
6.     Word tracker
7.     Google Suggest
8.     Adwords
9.     People (Trainers, Sales Team, Customers (Surveys))

Avoid like the plague:

1.  The CEO Data Source
2.  Stereotypes
3.  Quest for Perfection
4.  The perfect Ad is the one that never launches
5.  The perfect Persona is the one that you never use
6. Thesauritis (Easy words / easy to read / not too long)
7. CEO-it-is  (I know my customers syndrome, therefore I don’t need to ask)

                                             
Other sites to visit:
ConversationMarketing.com/Personas
PraticalPersonas.com
GrokDotcom.com

Decision Making Landscape (Low to High):

 i.      Emotion
ii.      Knowledge
iii.     Risk (loss)
iv.     Reward (gain)

Define and Understand Objectives

We’re more alike than different (Standard behaviors)

Channel Capacity:

Short Term Memory = temporary memory i.e. white board
1.     Limitation  = channel capacity (i.e. too many listings, users can’t click on everything)
2.     Limited to 4 to 5 things / 4 to 5 listings on average in which a user will click on
3.     On average all users will at least click on 1 organic listing
4.     First 5 seconds (on average the attention spam before a user clicks on a listing)

Long Term Memory  (Journal putting away for long time)

1.     Heuristic vs. Otimal Decision Criteria
2.     Heuristic (meet or surpass cutoff)
3.     Bounded rationality
4.     Sati-slicing 
5.     Misc

Find what meets general criteria
Narrow down then detailed rationality
     i.e. find key dealerships then drill down for best price of those 3 to 5 (and not price 100 dealers)

Model:

1.     Awareness
2.     Satisficing
              a.     Cut down to fit mental white board
3.     ComparisonMatrix
              a.     Now more rational
4.     Head to Heads
             a.     Sub Concious / Concious

5.     Focusing on Information Scent
         i.     Understand intent
        ii.     What is your objective
       iii.     Information Scent / Focus / Clustered in logical area
g.     Navigating with Scent & Images
h.     Men vs. Women        
         i.     Women use both side of brain (use 2x as much as men when in search)
        ii.     Search Engine made for Men
i.      Misc
        i.     Usage Case

Overall, Personas are fictitious personalities that we give to different type of imaginary customers, in which we do our best to understand each type of customer segment (by demographic, lifestyle, shopping behaviors, etc.), in order to tailor our marketing messages to each specific niche or segment.   This in turn helps identify, find, and communicate to customers that are within the target market of our products or services to lessen wasted advertising spending and focus on a more effective ways to acquire customers and grow sales.