futurenow - getting started with building personas

Getting Started with Building Personas www.FutureNowInc.com | 1.877.643.7244 | www.GrokDotCom.com

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Getting Started With Building PersonasBy: Howard Kaplan

In this unprecedented day of empowered consumers, “selling” to customers is 100% about facilitating their buying process.

Consumers are looking for information that’s transparent, genuine, relevant and salient. That’s why its critical to anticipate what

each customer type (or persona) might need or want to see in order to feel confident in taking the actions that you want them to

take, such as filling out a lead form or proceeding to checkout.

This whitepaper will go through the basic persona building steps. This paper is based on a collection of Persona Building blog

posts from FutureNow’s GrokDotCom blog. GrokDotCom offers fresh, interactive marketing insights on strategies and tactics.

Topics range from a/b testing, persona building to persuasive copywriting. It’s updated daily and is one of the web’s top 25

marketing blogs (www.grokdotcom.com).

“Does your website speak to me?”

© 2008 FutureNow, Inc

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The Common Mistake Marketers often ask: “How do we know which types of people

make up our audience?” Many try to answer this question by

hiring a research firm. This is a fast and easy way to go about

the issue, but results are typically minimal. This is because:

• Results are usually too general (i.e. your audience is

made up of “Info-Driven types,” “Conquerors,” and

“Browse-2-Buy” types)

• Research firms ask about past purchases, which are

not great predictors of future behavior

Don’t Trust What People Say!Believe what people do, not what they say they’ll do. Why?

People don’t always tell the truth. They’ll tell you:

• What they think you want to hear;

• What they want to be perceived as;

• Something they simply don’t know (the right brain

makes the decisions, and the left brain articulates and

rationalizes them, yet both sides of the brain “speak” in

different languages).

Actions speak volumes louder than words. Asking consumers

to fill out an incentivized survey may not give you the most

accurate results, and is not a true indicator of their future

behavior on your site.

The Big QuestionDon’t worry about “Who makes up my audience?” “Who”

makes up your audience is irrelevant. Focus on “How will

each different type of person approach and buy my

product?”

Here are some examples that illustrate the importance of

consumer buying modes:

Example 1:

My mom is a Methodical personality type, meaning her

preference dictates a logical process, and one that is

rather deliberate in its pace. She works professionally as a

bookkeeper and routinely catches oversights by her auditors.

She remarks with bewilderment that someone whose

singular concern is maintaining hyper-accuracy of the data

can so easily miss the details. Notice, she wouldn’t qualify

the details as minute, though to many others they would be.

To a strong Methodical, no detail is too fine. When she buys,

chances are she’ll ask 10 - 20 extra questions than most

other buyers, and with each successful answer, she’ll gain a

little more confidence.

Example 2:

My preference shares her bias towards a logical process,

but has a much faster pace, what we call a Competitive

personality type. Whereas Methodicals need a sense of

order (or structure) to their process to gain confidence over

time, Competitives are perfectly comfortable living amongst

the chaos, and letting intuition guide their decision making

process. The Competitive type can quickly dismiss logical-

sounding fluff. Think like “The Donald,” and you are probably

closely resembling the Competitive’s approach. When he

buys, he’s in a hurry, and just wants the bottom line.

The key word in the examples above is preference. My

mother doesn’t methodically choose where to get her nails

done, or where to go for a special dinner. In both of those

cases, she buys more experientially, favoring more of an

emotional process, and eschewing her normal deliberate

pace for a much quicker one. She’s quite comfortable giving

it a whirl. After all, “How bad could it be”? (Spoken like a

true Spontaneous type, she’s operating outside of her typical

buying mode.)

The Take AwayKnowing your audiences’ type doesn’t tell you which mode

they’ll be in once they visit your site and buy your product.

Traditional research cannot provide an accurate answer for

that. Consumers do not know for sure what they’ll do once

on your site. That’s why it’s critical to anticipate different

scenarios and provide answers to any possible questions that

Actions speak volumes louder than words. Asking consumers

Persona Buying Modes


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consumers might have while on your site. This involves using

live test subjects. The experiment needs to be designed so

that the subjects do not know they’re participating. This way,

they are actually operating according to their own motivation,

which makes the experience become the experiment.

Planning the customer experience in advance will allow

you to hypothesize consumer motivations that’ll drive their

buying process (or what buying mode they’ll be in) and test

their actual behavior—in a real environment—thus proving

your assumptions about their motivations and optimizing the

experience accordingly.

Getting Started on Your Persona ProjectNo one knows your business better than you do, so to help

you get started with your persona-building project, try this

exercise:

1. Assemble a small team (2 - 4 members) with diverse

backgrounds. Make sure to include people who have

close contact with end customers, and have a strong

understanding of the value proposition (benefits) for

the customers. Don’t worry about explicitly including

experts in your business for now. The goal is to better

understand the buying process, not redoing the sales

process.

2. Give everyone on the team 15 minutes to brainstorm

as many attributes as they can about the product,

why someone would buy it, or what makes it unique.

Collect these attributes, and combine them on a

central whiteboard for all to see and discuss to ensure

clarity.

For example:

3. Next to each attribute, gain consensus on whether

it’s more likely to be appealing to logic or to emotion.

Resist the urge to say “both” for each attribute; the

exercise is designed to make sure you make some

hard decisions. Re-sort the list into logical attributes

on one sheet, and emotional on the other.

4. Now repeat the process, this time gaining consensus

on how hard it is to understand the attribute, and

to which pace it’s likely to appeal. Is the attribute

something concrete and crystal clear to anyone after

3 seconds of reading it? Or does it require a bit

more education or a finer, subtle experience level to

reach its full value? Re-sort each list according to

“faster” (quick) or “slower” (deliberate) pace.

5. You now have 4 lists sorted into quick/logical, quick/emotional,

deliberate/logical, and deliberate/emotional attributes.

Lastly, take these lists of attributes and make them more

concrete by using your demographic data and your market

“segments” to build a profile or a story that sets the context


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for the attributes on your lists to be appealing.

You’ve just taken the first step towards building a system to

plan different experiences for different types of people! These

insights can all be easily executed on the same website,

within the same copy, that provides feedback to prove or

disprove the motivations and attributes you assumed. You’ve

begun to answer question 1 of the 3 essential questions (see

below) for designing a persuasive system.

The Essential ThreeYou must answer these questions in order to effectively map

the buying process to the selling process:

1. Who do you need to persuade?

2. What actions do they need to take to satisfy their

(and your) objectives? I’m not referring simply to

the ultimate conversion goal; I’m talking about every

single action these people will take on your site – first

click, last click and all the clicks in between. Each click

is a point of conversion in your persuasive process.

3. What is the most effective way to persuade these

people to take action? How are you going to motivate

them to make conscious decisions to click on the

hyperlinks that will take them deeper into your

persuasive process?


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Your Four Basic PersonasNot sure what your four sorted lists mean? Below is a snapshot of each persona’s basic attributes. You now have all the

building blocks for your persona project.

Competitive Perspective

Humanistic Perspective


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Now, start building your personas! Align your sales process with the customers’ buying process.

Methodical Perspective

Spontaneous Perspective


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Favorite Comments From Grokdotcom Readers:

I agree with you that ‘asking’ customers for preferences or feedback has never served to reveal reality. That is why we profess

that actual observation of customers and their behaviors is much valuable than the traditional surveys or secret shopper

approaches.

I profess that you can’t outsource customer experience; the interaction with the customer is too strategic to leave it to someone

to do it for you, or to tell you about it.

-Rob HowardCEO, Clearbrick LLC

Your assessment of Persona development option #1 is BRUTAL (and yet amusing, in a ghoulish sort of way)! Unfortunately, I

think you make the case that it’s also pretty accurate.

I am FAR from an expert in the whole concept of developing and applying Personas, but from a “beginner’s mind,” here are

some areas I think there is a lot of confusion among those not as steeped in the methodology as you and others that “get it”

better than most of us…

TYPE vs. MODE– you do a good job w/ your mother story helping articulate the difference. Not always obvious at first blush to

many.

DEMOGRAPHIC vs. PERSONA– yes, I was there during the “after session” at Internet Retailer (no apologies necessary),

and it was obvious that many folks who have spent TONS of time and money on DEMOGRAPHIC profiling have a hard time

distinguishing that from Personas. Or perhaps more accurately, after having spent so much time and money on demographic

research and technology, it’s a bitter pill to swallow that it’s of limited value in developing usable Personas.

“PERSONA-FICATION” vs. PERSONALIZATION– Bryan addresses this a bit in the ClickZ article you reference. While not

a direct correlation to persuasion architecture, I thought the YesMail presentation at IR gave some good examples of where

“personalization” as we’ve come to conveniently define it falls short in understanding the MODE a visitor is in at the time of a

touch– be that online or via email.

“UI” vs. CONTENT– I like what Bryan says about the persuasion “UI” being the content rather than the navigation (my

paraphrasing). My understanding of the proper application of a Persona-orientation (if you’ll forgive the Newtonian physics

metaphors) is NOT in reducing sales process FRICTION found in UI, navigation, linear sales processes, etc., but to increase the

GRAVITATION effect drawing the guest into a sphere of influence (persuasion) based on really understanding them (and their

needs, motivations at POA) rather than just conveniently labeling them.

My thoughts and observations as a relative “newbie” to the conversation, for what their worth. That and $4.60 will get you priority

mail postage…

-Kurt HaugFounder and Principal, Shuriken Systems

I agree that most traditional market research is a laugh. A colleague of mine makes this obvious with the following typical

research question: “Can you please tell us why you did not buy a white shirt from our company yesterday?”

-Ewald Verhoog


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Related Articles On Grokdotcom

See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps

http://www.grokdotcom.com/category/personas/

How to Avoid Marketing to Yourself

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/05/30/marketing-to-yourself/

3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/25/3-reasons-your-visitors-dont-convert-to-leads/

Interview on Persuasion Architecture, Personas and ROI

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/04/17/king-conversion-interview/

Persona Models Presentation at SMX West 2008

http://www.grokdotcom.com/2008/03/04/smx-persona-presentation/

About UsFutureNow, Inc. is a New York City based interactive marketing optimization firm. Our passion is helping clients to better un-

derstand their website visitors and how to monetize their traffic. Our Persuasion Architecture™ methodology combines proven

consumer psychology and website usability techniques to plan, launch and optimize marketing campaigns — online and across

channels.

Founded in 1998 by bestselling authors Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, FutureNow is widely recognized as a leading voice for

online marketing optimization. Our firm has helped companies such as Universal Orlando, Leo Schachter Diamonds and Volvo

Construction to routinely increase conversion rates by 50% or more. Visit us at FutureNowInc.com or call (877) 643-7244 to

learn how you can market better.

Our SolutionsFutureNow has several lines of services to help you get started in website optimization and persona building. Our services are

tailored to meet your budgets and business goals. Here’s a brief overview of our services:

• Conversion Optimization - analyzes and removes any obstacles visitors might encounter at every buying stage and

motivates visitors to keep moving toward conversion.

• Persuasion Scenario Analysis - dives deep into communication techniques for all visitor types and examines their browsing

patterns, click by click.

• Persuasion Architecture Planning - takes an in-depth look into every possible detail of how your customers will approach

your products or services and maps out the complete customer experience across your website.

Our solutions are based on the core concepts behind Persuasion Architecture, a proven methodology for understanding your

clients, their buying motivations, and how they move through and interact with your website. Call us today at 877-643-7244 for

a free consultation.

To learn more about FutureNow’s solutions, visit: www.futurenowinc.com/consultingservices.htm.

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