matt higgins

You’re selling something. Whether it’s a new energy drink, a SUV, or SaaS for doing inventory, if you’re in marketing, you’re selling something. The question is: who are you selling it to?

Most people instinctively do the basics of audience identification. If they’re selling a new energy drink that’s all-natural and sustainably manufactured, they know their customer cares about being healthy and the environment. For the SUV, the person wants space and safety. The software customer wants value and efficiency. That, again, is just the basics. It’s superficial in the true sense of the word. For real marketing, we need to get deeper.

The process starts with those basic premises and then incorporates demographics. The more details the better, but the real value is in going even deeper. You’re selling to a person, an actual person. This was articulated by software developer and programming pioneer Alan Cooper who focused on personas. He aimed to make software for a specific person who had specific goals, desires, and behaviors. He used as much data as he could to create personas and even named them.

For specific use in marketing, Angus Jenkinson, coined the term Customer Prints, which were essentially the same as Cooper’s personas. And like Cooper, his fictional profiles identified values, attitudes, and behaviors and focused on motivations, frustrations, and goals.

For me, it’s all about the audience, so persona marketing isn’t a maybe, it’s a must.

Who Reads Magazines?

When I was an executive editor at a publishing company making special-interest enthusiast magazines, I used a similar process to persona marketing for our flagship product. I had a team of editors who were all subject-matter experts. Every one of them was an asset. The problem was they were pitching article ideas as if they were the audience. To break the habit, I led a meeting focused entirely on audience personas. Like the above-mentioned Cooper, I had them give a name to each of the different personas and I intentionally let them get in the weeds. What did they wear? What other interests did they have? Where did they work? What frustrated them? It was a fun exercise, and it achieved exactly what I hoped it would. The editors focused the content on the audience and not just what was top of mind in their world.

Different Strokes for Different Folks

As a marketing professional managing a brand with a wide lineup of products, I used persona marketing. In this instance, the parent company used a third-party company to identify and describe the personas. The company dug into a variety of sources from sales data to surveys to craft the different personas who bought any of our brands. You don’t have to use a third party. In fact, you shouldn’t have to, but the benefit is the results come with no bias. The company hired had no experience in our industry and knew nothing of our audience. When they were done, they identified three different personas and the motivations and characteristics of each.

In product development and eventually the go-to market process, we would identify the product’s target persona or personas. While there’s a lot more persona marketing can be used for, here it was used mostly for positioning.

Tech and Data to the Rescue (kind of)

Some companies use a CDP (Customer Data Platform), which is a data and analytics software system that combines customer data from multiple sources to create a single customer profile. Originally a function of CRM software, CDP is sometimes a standalone service or function. CDPs track customer behavior. The information available in a CDP is not the same as a persona. It can be used to build a persona.

Based more on data, an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is a newer term than personas. At the widest is target market, which is fairly general, and at the narrowest it’s very similar to persona marketing, which can get extremely specific. ICP focuses on identifying customer types or groups with the highest likelihood to buy and the highest value. A SaaS sales team might use ICPs to strategize specific business types to target. For example, existing data might show their SaaS is ideally targeted at dentists in a suburban location with a high volume of patients. ICP is more about who’s the perfect customer.

How to Build Personas

It’s not complicated. Start collecting proven internal data. Product registrations, surveys, warranty cards, web analytics, etc. Start building a picture with the data your organization already has. Keep your own biases out of it as much as possible. Start asking yourself questions and see if you have the data for the answers.

You should be able to start forming a persona or realizing your company caters to more than one. Hypothetically, a company like Cabela’s might have the following personas: Ted, the diehard hunter and angler; Pat, the family camper; and Liz, the outdoor lifestyle enthusiast. These three personas purchase different items, shop differently (in person, online, mix), shop at different frequencies, etc., etc. Ted wears trucker caps and wants his gear to last a lifetime. He shops before hunting season and again before fishing season. He returns when he needs something. Pat researches online extensively but ultimately his wife is the deciding vote on purchases. They buy online but visit the store a few times per year. Liz wears yoga pants and trail sneakers, wants contemporary gear and replaces items before they wear out. She shops regularly online and in person to see what’s new. All three are Cabela’s customers, but all three should be marketed to differently.

After you have a loose look at your possible personas, the next likely step is a purposeful survey. Here’s your chance to play FBI profiler. Dig deep. Get the demographics, the socioeconomic details, the media and content they consume, all of their interests, favored brands, musical tastes, etc. Dig deep. Would you rather try to sell to a stranger behind a curtain or close friend?

Bottom Line: Using a persona approach is customer-centric and, when used through the entire marketing process, has you target the right people in the right place using the right language.