Internet Marketing
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February 26, 2008
Search Marketing & Persona Models
Back from lunch. Tamar gave me her apple which makes her the best ever. Now that we're done, it's time to head over to the Paid Search track for more fun sessions. Speakers Brian Bond, Future Now, Inc; Ian Laurie, Portent Interactive; and speaker/moderator Gord Hotchkiss, Enquiro (along with Q&A mod Anton Konikoff, Acronym Media), are going to be talking about persona modeling. Pay attention, everyone, this might be the Paid Search track but you organic search optimization folks can learn from this too.
Gord Hotchkiss asks how everyone doing and how they liked their hot lunches. You don't get that at just any conference. We cover how to ask questions again.
He asks how many people are using personas right now, it's a fairly small number. Most people seem to be here to learn a little bit more about how to get started with that.
Why do we use personas?
Used in psychology and neurology. We believe that people make rational decisions and they optimize their decisions to do the best thing. Prior to 1992, emotions had almost been removed from psychology and marketing. We are rational beings and we make rational decisions has been the assumption for hundreds of years. In truth, there's a whole underlying stew of experiences and emotions that affect decisions. Personas help you mine into those underlying factors that go beyond what would normally be rationally considered.
People manage reward, risk, emotion and knowledge. Find where people lie on the multi-dimension axes is a tricky but necessary part. This is made more difficult by the fact that much of it is subconscious.
You need to understand objectives and how it changes through the various stages of a decision.
- Define decision criteria
- Shortlist candidates
- Determine Budget Scope
- Basic Decision Research
- Detailed Decision Research
- Vendor Contact
- Purchase
- Navigation to Information
While every person is unique, we're more alike than we're different. Humans are one of the least genetically diverse species on earth. The vast majority of people will fall into a relatively narrowly defined norm. It falls on a regular bell curve. As an example, he displays a bell curve of IQ distribution. Most people fall plus or minus 15 points from 100.
Most people are fairly simple. He illustrates this with the familiar eye-tracking study that we've all seen, how people interact with a search engine in the first few seconds of reaching a search results page.
Humans have a fairly narrow channel capacity--four or five things at a time. They don't really stray past the first four or five listings. They like to see an organic result and they judge the paid listings on how good the organic listing is. This is part of why the "golden triangle" is so consistent.
We make broad to specific decisions. You start off with awareness of it, elminating what doesn't work, emotional and psychological drivers play a part. Satisficing is the next step, things become more rational. Then humans build a comparison matrix by defining what's important to them. Head to head detail work comes next and this is the most conscious, with less but not no emotional response. Emotion always trumps in the end so you can remove it from the equation.
Intent makes a difference. The difference between 'find someplace you'd like to stay' and 'book a room at this hotel' is huge in a heat tracking study. Design your Web site with this understanding.
Images can make a huge difference as well, depending on the size and relevance of the image. They can be used to guide people through the page. Universal human behavior is to look at an image and read the text beside it.
Gender differences above the neck: Women use both sides of their brains more often than men do. Search engines are by and large, male territory. Web sites tend to be more female territory. Women use twice as much of their brain for every decision. There isn't so much of a difference that they've seen in how men and women interact with a search page but the differences for a Web page are huge.
Ian Lurie steps up to get us from theoretical to practical matters. It's time to learn how to create a persona.
From Wikipedia: "Personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a site or product." According to Ian: "A persona is your brand's imaginary friend." It's like when you're a kid. You used your fictional archetypes to test out what the world was going to be like and then you played it out in the real world.
The short version of "why we care" is that "All good marketing requires empathy" (David Ogilvy).
Step one is research. Learn the demographics. How old, how much do they make? What sort of cell phone or car do they have? How good are they with technology. You also have to have psychographics. What's their personality? Likes and dislikes? Ambitions. What will make them change their minds?
You can purchase data from all sort of sites but there's free sites as well. Adlab.msn.com is wonderful. [He also lists several other sites that you very much should check out in his slides.] You cannot build a persona purely based on keywords. Your last and best source of information is people. Trainers, sales people, customers (via surveys) are all great resources.
He's not a fan of focus groups. They can be useful for very large branding products but in the search marketing world it won't get you that much. Listen to your gut.
Brainstorm & Write:
Things to avoid:
- the CEO data source -- "I know my customers" Get away from the tunnel vision
stereotypes (He's Jewish but still eats bacon.) - Quest for perfection -- the perfect persona is the one that you never use
- Thesauritis -- persona on the team will only work if people read them and read them multiple times. If you use 'therefore' you've probably made a mistake.
He shows a screen shot of a sample persona and mentions there's a typo in it. It starts with a representative quote, goes to demographic data, shifts to psychographic data, mentions how she'd find the company and what it will take to get and keep her as a client.
Create your campaign -- Based on the persona, look at your keyword list and discover the sort of things that she'd be looking for. Understand the trends behind what each mean.
Personas can help resolve conflicts as well. It's a more practical and emotional template that allows you to say 'this person' not just 'our audience'.
Segment Your Audiences: Tracking is key.
Measure, Adjust, Repeat -- Online marketing allows you to tweak and refine. Use that as an advantage.
Brian Bond is up next. He's going to be reinforcing the power of personas, discussing the critical elements of personas and then getting into what personas are like in the real world.
We can start looking at our customers as data points, instead of as real people with motivations, fears and desires. Personas are stand-ins for your visitors. The power of a persona is the ability to create a deep empathy. You can rally people around a persona's needs and wants. They can be debate enders because "Emily needs this", not just "we should do this" without the empathy to back it up.
Personas represent your audience so you can craft a message to speak directly to them. If you had to write a letting to a crowd, that's impossible. If it's someone that you've heard of or see but don't know personally, it's a little easier and you can mold it a bit. Stereotypes fit into this level, they're dangerous because you can't have empathy for them yet. Now imagine if you're writing a letter to your closest friend. What will they care about, what do they need, how will they respond? You'll be able to say something very concrete and engaging.
While you don't know your customers as well as you know your best friend, this is where narrative comes in. You can learn who they are. As insight increases, so too does empathy. Your Male 25-35 years old isn't as engaging as Todd the Tech Guy who is similarly less engaging than Todd Hill who you know about and care for.
It's not about how much you have sold. It's about how much you could have sold. That's the focus of personas and analytics. You need to see both the people who are converting as well as finding out why people aren't converting.
In action:
- Pick the persona you want to start with
- Refresh yourself with their needs, motivations, wants, fears, limitations, etc.
- Become empathetic to that persona - really put yourself into their head.
- Too hard? Get a team together to act the parts…but be careful in your casting choices. (Don't cast a competitive person as a competitive persona. It's cross contamination.)
Build your campaign to woo your persona.
Match your advertising to the persona. One small change can have huge returns.
Gord steps in before the Q&A: Personas are a tool and just like any tool, they're only as good as the use you make of them. You need to get buy in. Apple is an extremely good example of a company that is totally bought into embracing user-centricity.
Q&A
You talked a lot about the persona based on search data. In most large companies the data already exits, how applicable is that to search and why should you spend more time developing search specific personas?
Brian: You can use that kind of data. People behave differently when they're using search engines to find something.
Ian: The problem with research is that you need to believe what people do, not what they say they'll do. Take a holistic approach. Make your personas work in all situations.
Gord: We used it as a starting point.
Are there any tools, software, templates that you should read?
Brian: The User is Always Right (book), Grok.com (site)
Scent tracking is expensive and I don't have the budget. How can I do this without an analyst?
Brian: You don't need to detect scent, to do this. Just look at it and determine what you should be seeing, what you need to be seeing.
Gord: One of the curses of search is that we measure everything and we tend to get analytically obsessed. One of the best tools we have is our gut instinct. You don't need to run a psychological profile of your best friend to write that letter, you're already there. You're a human looking to connect with other humans. It's not about crunching numbers in a spreadsheets, it's about people.
Ian: No one has ever held up a spreadsheet to sell a car. I didn't buy Apple because of the spreadsheet. It's about empathy.
Gord: Marketing is a persuasive conversation and that's what personas help you build.
Gord: Customer service is a goldmine and we're all trying to outsource it!
How do you filter out the people you don't want?
Ian: You use different ad copy to cater to different groups and track it to see how people react.
Can you recommend resources on the difference between men and women?
Gord: Think Pink is a book on marketing to women. Pick up a book on evolutionary psychology.
Brian: We're publishing a book in about a month, "The Soccer Mom Myth" that's on this topic. It's on Amazon. [AN: Hey, Bruce, can I buy that?]
How do I get the CIOs instead of just the lower rank IT guys?
Ian: It's not just about the keywords. What ad copy will they respond to, what page do they need to see?
Is there a score card?
Gord: [Very passionate explains what I'm going to summarise as] No.
Embrace the messy, qualitative, subjective. It's good for you.
That was a great panel.
Posted at February 26, 2008 2:44 PM
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