Rapid Persona Creation for Everyday Marketing

Rapid Persona Creation for Everyday Marketing | 1


The marketing persona is a powerful tool for modern marketing organizations. But many organizations struggle to translate their personas into actual, customer-centric content.

In nearly 20 years of working with clients, we’ve found that most organizations have invested in some form of audience research — with the output typically being a set of customer personas meant to represent key audience groups. But for too many organizations, personas sit on the shelf collecting dust because they’re not suitable for the rapid content creation processes of modern, agile marketing.

It’s time to put your personas back to work.


When you’re running a big campaign, it helps to do in-depth upfront research and planning. But large, coordinated marketing campaigns are only part of the recipe. What gets forgotten are in-the-moment ad hoc campaigns that make up the bulk of an organization’s marketing output — and this content just doesn’t allow for the same amount of extensive research.

To make your everyday marketing more customer-centric, try running a quick workshop to turn your existing customer research into actionable, easy-to-use personas that can be used for any content marketing campaign.


SETTING UP

1

the Workshop


WORKSHOP OVERVIEW

GoalTo quickly establish a cast of characters that can be referenced for content creation and easily remixed for unique campaigns.

ParticipantsFour to eight participants representing different pockets of knowledge and responsibility from your organization.

Time RequiredThree to four hours, depending on the amount of research you have to synthesize.

MaterialsPlenty of Post-its, markers, and a quiet conference room. Coffee and snacks don’t hurt, either.


To help you prepare for the workshop, we recommend answering the following questions in advance:

What existing customer information do you have?

If you already have personas, are they based on assumptions and anecdotal insights, or first-party customer research?

What format does it take: reports, raw data, or full personas?

How have these resources already been used?

1.

3.

2.

4.

START WITH WHAT YOU HAVE

Be honest. If they’ve just been collecting dust, that’s a sign that they aren’t easy enough to use, or they don’t convey the right information.


The success of your workshop relies on getting the right people in the room — and having you as the facilitator. Depending on your organization, your core team will vary pretty significantly. In addition to the people responsible for creating and implementing your personas (such as a content strategist), try to bring the following people into the room:

WHO NEEDS TO BE IN THE ROOM?

The ResearcherThis may not be a defined role in your organization — but you’ll want to invite someone with in-depth knowledge of your customers.

They may have conducted your existing research themselves or coordinated directly with any third-party research firms. If you don’t have much existing research, or the original research lead is no longer with your organization, feel free to deputize someone to take the reigns here.

Responsibility:This person should come into the workshop with a solid understanding of any existing research. They will be responsible for advocating for the research, making sure the group isn’t straying too far from the realm of facts. They should be ready to identify assumptions as they arise.

The Researcher The Marketer The Decision-Maker


The MarketerSince the focus of the workshop is to make personas that are easy and practical for your content creators to use, you’ll want to make sure you have one or a few people from your content creation team — including writers and designers. If these folks tend to be responsible for mostly execution of ideas, make sure to encourage them to openly contribute.

Responsibility:This person is responsible for making sure that whatever comes out of the workshop is actually useful. They should be ready to flag anything that isn’t helpful and give the team insight around the needs of content creators.

WHO NEEDS TO BE IN THE ROOM?

The Decision-MakerYou need someone in the room with enough power to quickly green-light your ideas (or get the ideas in front of those with the power to approve them), but not too high ranking to stifle the group’s thinking and creativity. Use your discretion to bring someone into the room who can help guide the big picture without getting in the way.

Responsibility:This person (or people) should advocate for the big-picture organizational vision, making sure that it is represented in the output. They should also be able to quickly validate ideas and steer the conversation in the right direction.


RUNNING

2

the Workshop


This activity will help you generate the raw material you can use to build your personas. Where possible, draw this information from existing user research. Your researcher should challenge any assumptions that arise and ask questions to help the group fill in the details. Note: Make sure that you have enough Post-its to go around and that there’s space on a wall for each person to put the different characteristics.

Instructions:Ask your participants to begin writing down characteristics of your customers into the following groups. It’s okay if some of these are contradictory — we’ll sort them into separate groups in a later exercise. As facilitator, continue to ask questions that help your participants identify traits. Questions like “Where does this person go to get information?” and “Who do they need to convince to make a purchasing decision?” Resist the urge to start sorting!

ACTIVITY 1: AFFINITY MAPPING

PSYCHOGRAPHICSIdentify the attitudes, values, buying

habits, and lifestyles characteristics of your customers.

CHALLENGESWhat are the things that stand in the

way of your customers getting what they need? Be specific wherever possible.

DEMOGRAPHICSFor B2B in particular, we recommend staying away from biographical details

like age and gender, and rather focus on things like job title and

reporting structure.

NEEDSWhat are your customers’ primary

needs? Try to focus on their desires rather than just how they relate to your

organization.


Now we move on to grouping similar characteristics and building out our defined personas.

Instructions:Once your participants start to slow down and you have a substantial number of characteristics up, it’s time to start grouping your characteristics into affinities. Draw from all four different sections - demographics, psychographics, needs and challenges. Start to group together the similar words and phrases (see figure below Group A, Group B, etc.). As facilitator, help your participants identify the similarities and relationships. As you start to see the groups of characteristics come together, participants can continue to add additional attributes. As facilitator, try to ask questions of your participants that help identify similarities and relationships. As groups start to coalesce, participants can add additional characteristics.

ACTIVITY 2: GROUPING

GROUP A

GROUP C

GROUP B

GROUP D


ACTIVITY 3: DESIGNING YOUR CAST OF CHARACTERS

Once you have these organized, it’s time to start developing your cast of characters. Before you do that, it’s important to understand what your cast is.

What is it?The cast is a collection of actors: characters whose traits are based on real customer research. They are representatives of your customers. As you design campaigns and identify content needs, your actors play different roles in those scenarios. This helps bring the customer to the forefront, allowing us to look past our own biases and understand how they see things.

The Cast:The leading actors are representative of the majority of your customers. They are the stars of the show. As the lead actors play out different scenarios along the customer journey, their content needs and preferences will be the primary influences on your campaign.

Supporting actors are people who have a direct impact on customer experience or participate in the customer journey at some point. While it is important to understand supporting actors, they aren’t the primary audience for your content.


By now you’re starting to see some real similarities come out, so it’s time to start creating our personas. Use the information you’ve already identified in the grouping exercise, as well as anything new you can supply, to answer the following questions:

What is their mindset?How do your personas approach learning about your organization, engaging in the buying process, and all of the steps in between? Are they analytical thinkers? Are they emotional buyers? Do they need to consult someone else or comparison shop?

What is their perspective?What is their relationship to your organization? Are they existing customers or are they coming to you for the first time? Knowing this will help you understand how to contextualize your content.

What are their goals?All of your customers have a goal. The actors in the cast need to reflect that. Ask yourself, why are customers coming to our site? Draw from cards (or Post-its) in the “needs” section of activity 1.

What are their pain points?Pain points are moments in the journey where a customer has a negative experience. Pain points are generally created when a customer has expectations that are unmet. Understanding these will help us predict and prevent them.

ACTIVITY 3: DESIGNING YOUR CAST OF CHARACTERS


PUTTING IT

3

All Together


Actors are outlined via a standard template that includes their mindset, perspective, goals and pain points.

Use this simplified template to quickly identify the most important characteristics of your lead actors. Because these are quick and easy to create, you can establish separate sets for different campaigns, rather than relying on a standard set for your entire organization.

THE ACTOR TEMPLATE

NAME

MINDSET

GOALS

PERSPECTIVE

PAINPOINTS


Want to see what that might look like?

THE ACTOR TEMPLATE

NAME

MINDSET

GOALS

PERSPECTIVE

PAINPOINTS

Erin, Marketing Manager

• Likes a lot of information

• Reads CMO.com

• Looks to peers for recommendations

• Increase marketing qualified leads for sales team

• Doesn’t know us

• Scoring leads

• Tracking sales conversions

• Using the right analytics platform


After you’ve created a few personas, you’ll want to put them to work immediately. Encourage your team to begin using the personas in their daily marketing activities. The quicker you can introduce and circulate your personas, the better.

After a few weeks, check in again. Find out what’s working and what’s not. Treat your personas like a constant work in progress. Your customers are always changing and so should your personas.

And to keep your personas fresh, we recommend running some form of this workshop once a year to keep up with changes to your company, your customers, and the market. Introducing easy-to-understand personas is an excellent step in the journey towards becoming an agile marketing organization.

WHAT’S NEXT?


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