Hey Gang,
This week we've got a special guest in Whiteboard Studios, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive. Ian and Rand discuss the marketing tactic of creating "personas." If you've ever seen "Shaun of the Dead" (and if you haven't, you should), you'll remember the scene where Shaun and Ed are sitting in the pub making up personal histories for the other bar patrons.
Turns out this is not just a fun way to kill time over a few pints--it can also be an important tactic in evaluating your customer base for both marketing efforts and product development. Personas are essentially imaginary friends, or clients, to be more precise. You invent entire back stories, personalities, quirks, and needs for all of them, then evaluate how each of them would likely react to your products or campaigns.
While it may seem a little far-fetched at first, Ian makes a compelling case both in this video and in several posts on Portent Interactive's blog, for the use of Persona modeling. The video is a bit long (~20 minutes) but definitely worth checking out if you're interested in a new and valuable strategy for helping to direct your campaigns.
Due to the length of the video and size of the file, I'm testing out Google Video this week in order to avoid having to serialize this installment, like I've had to do with YouTube in the past. Let me know if you experience any problems with display or download of the video. Enjoy!
UPDATE from the SEOmoz team: Oops! This video was created using a service that's no longer in use. Instead, please enjoy the 4-part blog series Rand links to below.
UPDATE from Rand: Don't miss Ian's 4-part blog post series on Personas:
- Part I: Creating Great Personas
- Part II: The 4 Rules of Personas
- Part III: 3 Rules for Applying Personas to Email Marketing
- Part IV: Search Marketing & Personas: Opening Your Customers Heads
You might also be interested in Grokdotcom's blog post on the topic - Use of Personas Boosts Conversion by 400% - and 37Signals' post, arguing why they don't use them.
As someone who has written user personas for usability testing since first being exposed to Cooper's versions of them in 2000, I found this interesting.
One mistake that's made is not considering the emotional state of a site visitor or their environment. Try marketing to a woman nursing an infant while surfing the Internet while her toddler is fighting with another child over a toy in the background. You have minus 3 seconds to do 300 things for this mom. How many programmers and marketers have this pictured in their heads?
I tend to create personas who are going to be difficult because if the site works for them, it's a piece of cake for most. Most of my auto parts store personas are women, not men, because the sites are built for men and not the women who want to buy them things like hand made, plush sports car covers.
Special needs personas are also largely ignored. It's assumed that everyone uses a mouse, for example and can see those tiny prices on the monitor.
Absolutely.
I worked in accessibility before I moved into search and, social awareness aside, it is such a huge market. In the 2001 Census, one in six people in the UK (10.3 million) living in a private household reported having a long term illness or disability which limited their daily activities.
Additionally, the less physically able an individual is, the more likely they are to purchase items on-line.
Purely from an economics standpoint, and DDA compliance is a legal requirement over here, ignoring such a huge demographic does not make good business sense.
One of the best whiteboard Fridays ever. Very interesting stuff.
Ian - if you create personas for shopping sites, do you get as specific as which persona spends the most money per visit and how often they return. If so is there any way to test those assumptions?
Also, in your opinion, is there a line you can cross where assuming too much is counterproductive? If so how do you try to feel that out?
Sparrowhawk,
For e-commerce, I'll usually focus on buying patterns and behaviors - if I'm doing personas for an existing site, and I can safely segment their sales data into the personas, I'll use it. Otherwise, we rely more on surveys and discussions with sales and support folks. That kind of qualitative data is often better than the quantitative numbers stuff.
As far as assumptions: In internet marketing, if your gut tells you you're on the right track, it's always better to test those assumptions than not.
To test, I stick with landing pages. If I'm really, really uncertain, or if we can't get agreement among the team as to a persona, we use landing pages so that we don't have to mess with the existing site. We can then check our assumptions, find out if we're right, revise, and so on.
Again, that's why I'm such a fan of personas online. They're not an endpoint. They're just a fantastic benchmark.
Ian
I am really impressed by the variety of knowledge SEOMOZ is bringing to these WFs, and relating on how us grumpy curmundgens paranoid know-it-alls/newbies can apply the knowledge online, great job!
What is the witch's broom beside Rand?
I really enjoyed this, it is generally a dull topic and it came across well and I was interested.
No, seriously, what is that thing?
Great video, thank you! Much food for thought... I might be wrong but I guess the SEOMoz personas are more varied (did white board appear too small for all of them?).
On a serious note, trying to find myself among the personas I figured I am partly Ian, partly Kelly and partly Burt - I guess that's what Ian meant to say... But then again why sorting them into three different people if none of them can actually completely describe one person at a time... You always say "I can be Kelly in this situation but there is more of Ian in me in that situation", is that correct?
Btw, I noticed that Rand gets particularly excited when cleaning the white board... can I add this detail to your persona? :)
Hi Ann,
In reality, most of us are a blend of whatever personas marketers use. So yes, you're completely correct. The key with personas is that, no matter how they blend for a particular individual, they can guide your marketing campaign so that you resolve a problem for him or her.
And yes, personas are typically super-detailed, 2+ page documents. The SEOMoz crew wisely told me not to write that small.
Ian
PS: Thanks, Rand, for inviting me to Whiteboard Friday. It was a blast!
Thanks SEOmoz! It's great to hear and see (!) that more and more people are becoming aware of the value and essence of creating personas. As an Interaction Designer at a Dutch website company specialized in usability, we create and use many personas, and related to that scenarios, use cases, etc.
Since I've been using the personas, I can see that they are very valuable internally, to the team, as well as externally, to the client. Personas are fictive, but become very vivid while presenting them.
Though, I have a question. Would you say, when you're developing more and more personas for different clients, at some point you will find some repetition of a persona from a former project? Especially related to the psychographics, the goals and motivations of a persona? And is this a good or bad thing?
Hi Rozalinde,
Yes, you can sometimes find repetition. That's not a bad thing.
But you should not find much repetition when it comes to the "If we can do X, then this persona will buy from us." part.
Every business is unique, and has a unique selling proposition. So that part should be different from one persona to the next.
Ian
First off, mad props to Scott for the superb quality, great edits and cuts made the 20 minute length flow by smoothly. I also liked the switch to Google Videos. It seems a bit more reliable than Youtube.
As for the personas, I think this IS something that's often over-looked in online marketing, while being a long establishment of classic media marketing campaigns. If you're Budweiser you know exactly what sort of persona your next campaign is going after, and there are entire story boards behind how the campaign will relate to that person(a): Where they shop, what they read, what they watch, married, single, etc.
Ian, in terms of an example like a landing page, do you test by strict persona or do you add elements that might be triggers for each?
Chuck: We add multiple elements. It's rare to design a page strictly for a single persona - no way you can control who gets there that precisely.
That's what I was thinking, but this video added to my thoughts the element of a different sales process for different types of visitors. For example, if the learn it, get it, do it persona (to paraphrase heavily) hit the landing page and then clicked on the link targeting him their sale page might be concise: what you get, the guarantee, what to expect, done. Where as the grudmuggin's sale page might be addressing some of the more skeptical elements of the sale...
Is that the right train of thought?
Again, thanks for the video. It was very well-done all around.
I'll go out on a limb here and say, yes, this is a very good way of thinking.
I'll add that one way you might split this traffic is through the ad copy or ad origin.
If you have two adwords ads, one saying "get a quote, buy today" and one saying "you've got questions, we've got answers" obviously you'll be targeting different personas from each ad and so they should land on seperate pages.
Similarly to that there are seperate ad locations, such as advertising on AOL versus advertising on Technorat, Porn vs. a .edu, etc... The source of the ad can be of infinite variation, and some of them may call upon a seperate landing page or feature-set.
The overall content should be present, if not simply elsewhere on the site then further down the page, but overall availible to every customer. The difference is the presentation should be in some way manipulated: re-ordered, highlighted, reworded, etc... to suite each persona, or a group there-of.
Fred, Chuck: You're both correct.
Different personas frequent different sites and will respond to different creative or copy elements on a page.
You can easily use a single page (in many cases) to cater to many personas, based on where they come from, what keywords they use to find you, what phrasing they're most likely to respond to, etc..
For example, you might have a home page that has two separate 'business solutions' and 'clearance' boxes on it.
Ian
Thanks for this intro. Not coming from a traditional marketing background, I haven't done anything like this before ('Bert' on this subject).
I would worry that you would make decisions based on details you had essentially made up. How do you know, for example, whether Ian (or Bert, or whoever) is married? Supposing you make the assumption that he is and has young kids, you might assume he wouldn't want to travel, and therefore (e.g.) not organise a conference where most attendees would have to travel.... Am I over-thinking this?
Hi Will,
Yes, you may be overthinking a little, but not necessarily.
The key here is that part where you check your assumptions. Talk to the sales force, or the tech writer, or whatever else. You DO make up the details, but only based on the feedback that they give you.
For example, if a salesperson told me that their best customers were 39 and drove a car with 2 car seats in it, I'd probably assume they had at least one child and were married.
Again, these are assumptions only. You get to test them, click by click, visitor by visitor, when you put them into practice.
If you think about it that way, the persona becomes a test platform, not a marketing foundation, and you're off to a great start.
Ian
Just one quick question,
If you are starting a new site and need to build persona's for your future visitors , how would you get the details like age etc.
Lets say I was starting something like a "plumbing repair" help site.
Would I just think about what kind of people "might" show up, and then work from there?
Any answers would be awesome!
Thanks again for the great video Ian!
Understood. Thanks for the update. And great video - I thought you did a fantastic job.
Ian, if you don't mind my asking, how much is this typically worth to a client? If you don't feel comfortable putting out a number, perhaps you woudn't mind contrasting or correlating it to the value of say... keyword research, analytics, or backlink analysis.
I ask because I always spend some time with the client asking questions about which personas (s)he might wish to focus on, but it's always oral rather than written. I wonder if it might improve the cleints experience and satisfaction if I spent the time writing this out- as compared to the dollar amount I would ask for having done so...
It compares to a rigorous one-time SEO sweep and report on a site. Does that help?
yes it does help, I'll add it to my itimized options list and occassionally suggest it where needed. Thanks for the interview, and for your response ;)
-just "Fred"
Ian, thanks for explaining this incredible valuable marketing tool. It seems to be a very interesting exercise to explore the profile of the company's target audience. Even if you don't apply it exactly the way you explained, you can kind of do it your own way in order to understand the different profiles and behaviors of people (= personas in Spanish) that match (or don’t match) the company’s services and products and conduct your marketing plan according to that. As you said the testing phase will give you a good idea of the accuracy of your analysis and the parameters that you need to improve.
Yes! Internet marketing is the perfect place to user personas, because they're not precise. Online, they don't have to be. You test, refine and revise them, all the time, the same way you revise what you say to good friends depending on their mood, or news of the day, or something else.
Hats off. Thanks for the walk-thru... a huge concept to squeeze into a whiteboard... even the new and improved, bigger whiteboards. I'm doing some catch up on posts and WBF, so glad I didn't miss this one.
Also great to see the further convergence of traditional marketing and SEM, which I think we will continue to see in leaps and bounds.
The subtle beauty of personas is that they extend beyond just marketing. This should be a key point to keep in mind for anyone in SEO dealing with clients or even other internal staff.
Because SEO is still very foreign to many of the people we work with or even clients, it may help to do this kind of run through, less elaborately, whenever faced with trying to explain the importance of doing something. It helps when you can do it from their perspective ... newbie looking for solid answers on how-to vs. traditional marketing veteran who needs tested and proven methods, possibly related against a more familiar background.
Ooooh, now I'm a 'veteran'. Not sure if that makes me feel competent or old...
This is still helpful, 3 years later! Also, love the hair, Rand!
I am 99% sure some one has asked and I am 99% sure you can't, but I am going to be that guy who asks, if there is any way for you to put the video back up in a different manner. I read a few comments and it seems like the video was gold. I would greatly appreciate it if you could, if not I understand.
I have read the four part series from Ian, and I will have to say that did help me so much. I am truly excited to start a new email campaign. Any other post regarding personas or email campaigns that you think are totally worth the read, please comment.
Thank you guys and gals for this awesome community.
I will check, but I believe we no longer have access to that video. Thanks for your interest!
Rand & Ian,
Thank you, Thank you , Thank you !
This was the best seo moz ever !
I really really really enjoyed this video!
Now, this is something you wont just see anywhere else
Once again, Thanks guys!
Aw, shucks :)
ha! Fry's as a point of interest? We are all huge geeks!
Fry's is where I go for spiritual renewal.
Thats a very cool concept that you have featured here Rand. And I would like to add my point of view. It's important to carefully segregate your target audience but at the same time I belive it's equally important to not to try to please each one of them. You may divide them into 10 personas but the best thing to go about is to concentrate on top 5 (if you are serious about conversions and revenue). If you try to please all of them, you might still end up pleasing none.
Exactly. I touch on it very briefly, but you assign your personas as 'focal', 'exclusionary' or what I call 'meh'. The 'focal' personas are the folks you really want. The 'exclusionary' personas are the ones you want to drive away. The 'meh' personas are the ones that we don't care about yet but might someday.
Thanks a lot. I feel like I am talking to yet another Kotler. It was actully a useful post. hope to see you soon again on white board friday :)
I had to Google Kolter. That's high praise :)
The best whiteboard friday I've seen, both from a content AND a production point of view.
The subject matter was very interesting to me. In software engineering I've seen personas used very effectively in exactly the same ways as Ian suggests.
For me the key has always been not to over use the personas. Use them to help relate to your users and validate assumptions whenever possible. This can be especially helpful when you've got a room of programming geeks that never see the light of day, and hence, can't relate to other people very well. (this is me!)
I especially like Ian's point about the same person fitting different personas at different times. You're not trying to create rigid buckets into which you want to place your users (we're all unique snowflakes). Instead, you're trying to motivate your product/service decisions to best serve users by taking into account where they may be coming from and the motivations that might go with that.
Fantastic.
Nice video!
This is like target groups personalized. I find it very irritating when I see websites that are build up after the structure of the company but not after the needs of the customers. Or where Investor relations get as much space on the front page as the products and services they are offering. They need to think more like this.
It's also a lot of fun to make personas, specially the ones you want to exclude.
Sometimes I think personas were created to beat back investors and boards of directors who are bent on sending marketing off in a random, useless direction.
Excellent Whiteboard Friday. They only time i've actually used personas was in an Interaction Design class during my undergrad. At the time, I thought they were a useless boring exercise. I now realize the value with them.
The problem I still have with them is that once you create several personas you're site is trying to cater to all of 'em. Without being able to segment different personas and users, and serve up different messages to each, you can see how this is problematic with a mixed messaging allure and varied marketing approaches on the site.
Yup, you're correct. That's why I mention that 2-3 personas typically works, while having 4+ focal personas is a danger sign.
Personas usually overlap - that's the key. You need to design your site to cater to the overlaps, and at the same time fashion hooks and paths through your site for the unique needs of each persona.
For example, in the SEOMoz personas, we know that Ian and Kelly have some overlap: Both are pretty discriminating and want to know that the site's legit. So does Burt. So that's an overlap: Deliver good content right away and you'll have all three.
Ian, will want to preview premium content.
Kelly will want to preview nice, presentable data.
Burt doesn't want a preview. He just wants a soothing, intelligent tone.
These needs differ but don't conflict. So you can cater to all three.