The second of my three-part series on personas looks at different approaches to their creation…
[If you missed the first one – about how persona research has evolved from the middle ages to 1950s Madison Avenue to millenials – then it’s worth catching up]
Where does persona information come from and how valuable is it? When does a persona start to lose its value? Are there alternative ways to get a better understanding of your target audience? To add a bit of diversity to the conversation, I looked at personas development from the perspectives of marketing research and character creation in writing.
How do you form a persona?
This is an interesting question and one of the main things that has inspired debate on the validity and usefulness of personas.
To recap, a persona is a fictional character created to illustrate the wants, needs, and interests of a specific type of target audience/ user/ reader, and consider how they would react to a product, brand or its content.
The person in persona comes from the idea of creating a three-dimensional character that helps you “think like your audience”. Personas usually have a name, a picture and key details that tell you what makes them tick. Like a slightly overly-specific dating profile, you should get the essence of that ‘person’ in a simple, yet highly informative way.
Without real people behind the research, it’s easy to fall into the trap of subconscious biases, generalisations and misconceptions. And let’s face it – it’s lazy, occasionally offensive and can really damage your content, campaign or even your brand.
Personas should ideally be the qualitative match to the quantitative statistical data you might glean from other types of audience research, with the aim of helping you connect with the people behind the numbers. Critically, the persona that’s developed should always be based on a large amount of actual research.
This is where a lot of the criticism comes in. When you’re trying to build out a sample person to represent an audience, it can be very easy to take short cuts and jump to conclusions. Especially if you’re working to an impossibly tight budget or restrictive deadlines. With a steady stream of persona toolkits on the market and prepopulated research, there’s been an increase in the abuse of the practice.
Without real people behind the research, it’s easy to fall into the trap of subconscious biases, generalisations and misconceptions. And let’s face it – it’s lazy, occasionally offensive and can really damage your content, campaign or even your brand.
So how do you get it right?
As fun as it might be to build out a model character, persona creation shouldn’t be a creative writing exercise. It should be based in research. Data collection. Surveys. It should be based on real people, not who you imagine your audience to be. That’s the whole reason you’re doing this work. To flesh out your actual audience rather than just who you think you’re talking to.
Remember why you’re putting together a persona. It isn’t to prove that your instincts about your audience are right. It isn’t to prove that you can create interesting characters and show off your writing skills. It’s to tell a simple truth about who your audience actually is.
For an example of a company nailing this check out Mail Chimp and its post on persona research.
Creative writing for creating real people
You don’t just want to know their age, sex, location and job. If your aim is to truly connect with this audience, you want to know how they think, how they act, how they feel. You need a 360 profile of this person, not just their vitals and a stock photo.
This is where some writing techniques around believable character creation can come to life. Some creative writing teachers suggest introducing a foreign object into the room and see what your character does with it. How do they react? This will help you understand how your character thinks. How they deal with things? What motivates them?
What would happen if you did that with your content, product or brand? Make sure that you ask the basic direct questions: how does this person interact with your message? What is their experience with you? How did you meet? Why do they like you?
Other creative writing exercises that could help build out a more complete persona include:
- Write an essay from the perspective of your persona: How does this person speak. What do they say? Who are they talking to?
- Identify their dreams and their nightmares. These are the very basics of human emotion and at the core route of everything we do. What deep underlying fears and dreams motivate this person? What will they react positively to and what would frighten them off?
I want to stress again: This should be information gathered by research and by questioning real people. You should never make a guess at something as important as someone’s dreams.
Applying personas to content creation
So why do I care about all of this? Apart from a fascination with behavioural marketing and the application of research, understanding audiences is a core part of what we do in our content studio at Stranger Collective.
When creating content for a particular audience or developing a tone of voice that will resonate, it’s extremely helpful to understand not just what kind of content the audience is interested in, but also how they like to communicate. What type of language do they use? What would make them want to find time for your stories? What might repel and repulse? There’s a fine line between intellectual and pretentious. Helpful and prescriptive. Baldrick-blunders funny and wedding dress food-poisoning funny.
While audience research can be very useful, for content that really connects you need to know how your audience talks, what kind of content they trust, and what captures their attention. As discussed in my previous post , magazines in particular have been practising this level of audience understanding for years.
As brands become publishers, they need to think about how to create content that connects to tribes of people who are picky about what they read, sceptical of fakers and dedicated to things they love.
Talented editors and writers know what will resonate, engage and drive audience numbers. But they don’t guess at this. They have dedicated research teams who poll readers. They spend time and budgets building out full profiles of who they are. They talk to real people and in turn know how they talk.
As brands are increasingly becoming publishers, they shouldn’t just think about creating content. They need to think about how to create content that connects to tribes of people who are picky about what they read, sceptical of fakers and dedicated to things they love. They need to go beyond getting clicks and shares. They need to build trust and create dedicated and passionate fans. And this will only happen if they know who they’re talking to and what that audience wants to hear.
By building persona based research into your content strategy you are more likely to create content that gets results. There’s a great slideshare from Content Marketing World on how much of a difference this makes.
Walking the talk
In my next post, I’ll discuss how we tried to tackle the persona question with a client project. Where we made some of the mistakes I mentioned above, what we learned from it and what we plan on doing going forward.
So have a great weekend and see you next Friday 31 July.