“Are you saying that we shouldn’t bother with creating multiple personas with granular details but rather focus on creating only a few (4 if we use the logical-emotional, quick-deliberate quadrant)? But if we add the stages of the buying cycle in there, we could end up with [too many] personas. This is still unclear to us.”

First off, thanks for reiterating these common issues. You probably won’t be surprised to hear us suggest what we’ve said on numerous occasions before: start with what you can handle. If you are unsure of how to proceed, that in itself tells you to shoot for the simpler solution by focusing on the *actual* goal, which is to improve conversion, sell more widgets, get more leads, etc. If you do nothing, you obviously will just continue to have the same results you already have. But if you over-reach for “perfection” to the point at which your eyes glaze over and you become catatonic then you’ll also have the same results you already have. So start small.  A subtle and deep Persona development that doesn’t get implemented correctly is hardly better than using the quadrant approach, and both approaches will definitely work on the important stuff that ought to be improved first.  In fact, if that wasn’t the case, then you’d have to worry, right? Navy blue is still blue, right? An Anjou pear is still a pear, right? And meerkats are still…oops, ditch that last.

And just to let you know: there’s no particular reason that smaller companies should find this harder than larger companies…just the opposite, in fact. We had a recent client, a *huge* technology company, who’s marketing pros convinced themselves they “got personas” and then wondered why their recently-developed PA personas were different than their expectations. So they missed the real point, which is not to reinforce a company’s self-centric approach, but instead to re-think their marketing to be customer-centric. Smaller companies tend to be more likely to implement change, often because fewer sacred cows need be put out to pasture before improvement can begin.

In short, go with the quadrant approach (or even one-dimensional, if need be!) and move on from there. Add in buying cycle, but don’t add a dimension just to keep the count “evened out” — add in distinct differences that result in a required change in persuasion, not a change in demographics. A Spontaneous persona, for example, will often breeze through her Early and Middle stage buying process faster than you can model for, so there’s nothing to be gained by inferring a difference that cannot be measured. Think of buying a candy bar — the buying process is fast for pretty much everyone, except outlier demographic specialties (a diabetic, a seed nuts allergy, a strict bodybuilder, etc). I often refer to this as “the demography seasons the modality.”

Now think of buying a house — surely the Spontaneous is going to go through a completely different process buying a home than buying a candy bar. There will be a Early buying process, and a Middle as well before the house is chosen, inspected the deed is signed and the lawyers paid. The nature of the underlying goal influences how the customer goes about achieving that goal, even when she has a pre-disposition to act in one preferred mode or another. Got it? I like to refer to this as, “The topology mediates the modality.” How much of your content strategy today answers the Methodical’s early stage buying needs?

“We also began questioning the practicality of designing at the page level for all of our personas. Some of us feel that it is possible to use personas for creating a scent trail at the individual page level if personas are very clearly defined but we also believe very large international sites would become extremely cluttered if multiple personas were used in the persuasion architecture of each page. Could you explain your
position on this?”

Another great question, probably because we hear this one a lot as a “freeze” point for larger companies. The answer is almost *never* to be creating multiple page versions, one variation for each persona. That’s not working for personas; that’s working for personalization in an aggregated populance. And if that worked, you’d've seen that emerge a decade ago as a solution that everyone would have jumped on. The reason it doesn’t work is that Persuasion Architecture(TM) Personas aren’t designed to be stereotypes of demographic groups; instead, they are representative models for the buying process and there’s a limited number of ways that the Human Operating System works. Each of us is a little mix of each of the modalities, and even that varies in time, place and context. The Personas are models; the Customers are not. So each of us, as individuals, exhibit varying relative balances of the PA Personas at each step in our own buying process.

So when you design for persuasive scenarios you’re optimizing how the various personas *could* move through the site *persuasively*. Not all possible paths; just those paths along which effective persuasion occurs (that distinction will drive your IT folks crazy. Sorry! ). And to answer the final part of your question, the question of internationalization is a good one, but again is answered by the persuasive process. If someone from Japan buys a camera the same way as someone from Poland, then your issue is one of language. If those processes are culturally different, then the persuasion is different, and has to be analyzed to really lead to optimization (and you’ll have to also determine for yourself, if, say, one quadrant type is different from one culture to another while another quadrant might remain the same), and then you layer the internationalization on top of that.  Usually, though,  when one mode changes due to culture, all modes change and the relative mix of modes changes as a whole.

Again, keep the goal in mind: more conversion, more sales, more leads. You’re looking to optimize your sales system by optimizing all parts of the process. You correctly comment that this can get complex and, in your words, “extremely cluttered”. The “clutter” claim often comes when a company attempts to graft persuasion architecture on top of information architecture — without having understood the persuasion first, an information system was designed and implemented un-prepared to persuade — of *course* it’s going to turn out complex and cluttered. Our experience has been that when you plan the persuasion first, you’ll actually be amazed at how un-cluttered your very talented information architect’s work will be since she’ll be working to a plan for persuasive paths.

I hope that helps! Let us know if you need any further clarification.

This post is intended to respond to the questions we were asked. If you want to know more about personas I’d recommend you read our books or if not download two documents: our Persuasion Architecture (PDF) & Getting Started with Building Persona (PDF) whitepapers.

2. Search drives more sales, but shoppers are thinking longer before buying.

3. Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? Econsultancy research shows that it might.  Make sure to at least set your cookies for 30 days.

4. our friend, Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic blog asks “Is Free Shipping More Attractive Than A Dollar Discount?”

5. A great example of why Amazon is one of the smartest online retailers. They get Social Media, Too.

6.Catch my interview with my buddy Tim Ash Interview on his Landing Page Optimization show on WebmasterRadio.fm. We discuss Brain types and personas and how they influence landing pages.

But (most) websites aren’t linear because hyperlinks break linearity (aka subvert hierarchy).

People don’t read (most) Websites one full page at a time in a numbered order; they read/scan/move from one link that interests them to the next link that interests them, often entering or starting on something other than page #1 (what bad web designers notionally understand as the home page).

This means “Long copy” and “short copy” only apply to Websites metaphorically at best, roughly translating to “content rich & substantiated” and “minimalist / pared down,” respectively.

The upside is that hyperlinks make it possible to get the best of both (offline) worlds. Visitors who want more substantiation and richer content can drill down on the links that interest them, and visitors who only want a quick, bottom-line summary and an express path to converting can get that too – all on the same site.

That said, long copy equivalents still tend to out-convert “short copy” alternatives.  Here’s why.

The crucial element: Are you answering their questions & concerns?

Two recent studies, one involving complex B2B sales/Websites and one on e-commerce sites, show that well over 50% of potential leads/customers fail to convert because the Websites studied failed to answer prospects’ questions and provide needed information.

I’ve experienced it myself: if I need to know a wireless card or piece of software will work on my Mac, I’m simply not buying until I get that answered. Similar dynamics exists with concerns rather than absolute requirements, and, yes, this is especially critical for services, complex sales, and lead generation.

Content rich sites typically out-convert minimalist designs because they more completely answer the prospects’ questions.

And as I’ve previously written, question-answering content isn’t just copy. High quality pictures answer questions and concerns. User reviews answer questions and concerns. So do videos, blogs, forums, etc. And, of course, there’s persuasive copy.

Modeling Customer Psychology and Persuasive Online Copywriting

Suppose you’re genuinely interested in buying something, talking to a salesman about it, and in the process of asking how much it costs. How many times can that sales guy dodge or ignore your question before he destroys your trust?

Once? Twice, maybe.

With online copy, visitors ask questions by scanning the page and clicking on links. If your web copy doesn’t facilitate scanning and skimming, and if you don’t provide hyperlinks and content to answer visitors’ questions, your Website will become that used car salesman who won’t give a straight answer to a direct question.

At Future Now, we’re big on Personas simply because we’re big on making sure Websites answer the questions and concerns of their visitors.  We find it essential to model and facilitate the flow of visitor-website sales conversations in order to avoid the “used car salesman” syndrome.

So rather than having any old interaction or conversation with visitors, personas allow one to reverse engineer conversations that lead to conversions. To do this, simply:

• Take a persona’s emotional state, concerns, and informational needs upon entering a Website
• Compare that starting point with what the visitor will have to feel, know, and believe in order to confidently take the action you want them to convert
• And then plan out the conversation your site will need to have with that persona in order to make that persuasive journey from starting point to sale.

Going through this process allows Website designers and copywriters to persona-lize the Website. They can plan messaging and links custom tailored for each buying behavior/motivation.  The visitor can then self-determine just how many rabbit-holes of information/assurance/question-answering she needs to in order to feel comfortable buying, thereby getting the exact “length” of copy that’s right for her.

Fast decision makers and late stage buyers that just need a quick and easy way to buy, get it. And those visitors needing a lot of information, insight, and assurance can get that too.

Think of it as an adult and sales-oriented choose-your-own-adventure novel. Or just think of it as a really sincere sales conversation performed by your best salesman who just happens to be available to talk to (and convert) customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

What more could you ask from either long or short copy?

P.S. For a different (but congruent) take on the advantages of Long Copy (and it’s online equivalents), check out Sonia Simone’s excellent article over at CopyBlogger.

• #1: That video was a waste of time.  They could’ve conveyed the same information in way less time.  My questions aren’t answered.
• #2: That video was awesome!  I feel much more educated about their service now, and it was very professional-looking.

Scary, right?  The video was professionally shot, edited, and produced.  It conveyed good information, but it did so in a style that started to persuade one tester, and didn’t remotely persuade the other tester.

It got me thinking about how important video can be for persuading B2B site visitors, but also about how different types of videos are persuasive to different types of visitors.

I think a lot of sites go out and get themselves a video to stick on the homepage and think that they’re “done,” and that their conversion rate will start doubling every week or so.  But, I propose that one video may not be enough, because you’re trying to persuade people in very different personality profiles.  Further, I think the truly optimized B2B site can benefit from multiple videos, in multiple styles, in multiple sections of the site, from multiple video-production vendors!  I’m sure I’m not making any friends with budget-constrained site owners, but hear me out.

The real budget-waster is investing in one video that tries to be “all things to all people.”  You’ll end up with a disjointed video that’s too long for anyone to tolerate.

Let’s take a minute to review some common types of videos featured on B2B sites:

1. The “Get to know us” Video – these videos are great for showing the people behind the website/business.  Humanistic customers will love them.  Methodicals will probably hate them.  Our friends over at SunPop Studios excel at this kind of video, by the way. Check out some of the samples on his website.
2. The “Make the complicated more simple” Video – these videos help explain complicated concepts in ways that web copy and static visuals can’t do as well.  The Competitive and Spontaneous will appreciate this kind of high-level content.  My favorite creators of these types of videos are the folks over at Common Craft.  (Note: this isn’t just because I share a certain dreary hometown with them)
3. The “Product Demonstration” Video – perhaps the most common video on B2B sites, this one takes visitors through the benefits and features of a digital product using voice overs, animation, and screen recording.  Depending on how detailed they are, these videos might resonate with Spontaneous or Methodical customers.  The number of vendors that do these types of videos is too large to single out a favorite.  In fact, most digital agencies can do high-quality product demo videos these days.  If you’ve got a favorite, drop it in the comments, please.
4. The “Testimonial” Video – these videos add a human touch to the standard, text-based testimonial.  These again will be attractive to Humanistics, but the added layer of “realness” can help move the skeptical Competitive decision-maker.  They can be testimonials about the working with the company, or about a particular service, like our OnTarget video testimonial.

So before you start putting makeup on your CEO and rolling the cameras, I advise that you spend some time thinking about the scenarios your visitors are acting out on your site today, what questions or concerns aren’t being addressed, and if or if not video is the right medium to educate (and begin to persuade) them. You may find that several short, less slick videos that answer your personas’ un-answered questions, placed strategically throughout the site, are more persuasive than that super-slick, Hollywood-style video.  See?  I’m was actually trying to save you money

• Dutiful George Washington for Sensing-Judging / Methodicals
• Philosophical Thomas Jefferson for iNtuitive-Thinking / Competitives
• Rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt for Sensing-Perceiving / Spontaneous
• Idealistic Abraham Lincoln for iNtuitive-Feeling / Humanistics

Unfortunately, the cover story (though excellent) treated temperament from a Nine Characteristics perspective rather than a Four Temperaments perspective in a way similar to this Slate article or some recent blog posts regarding presidential personality type.

Yet at least the Time cover/article got me looking for and reading those posts, because the authors guessed slightly different temperaments from each other, and I found the differences illuminating.

But before discussing the blog authors’ picks, my personal predictions were SP/Spontaneous for fiery, action-oriented McCain, NF/Humanistic for idealistic and emotionally intelligent Obama, and NT+Judging/Competitive for sharp-minded and power-hungry Hillary Clinton.

So here’s how the experts typing matched up with mine:

• Everyone agreed that McCain has a spontaneous temperament.
• Emily Yoffe felt that Hillary was an SJ, but it turns out that Hillary has actually taken an MBTI test and has tested as an NTJ, which matched up with most blog post guesses.
• Some experts believe that Obama was an NT, while others felt he was more likely an NF

And here’s what you can take away from the misperceptions and disagreements surrounding presidential candidate typing:

1. Myers-Briggs Preferences (and Temperaments) are just that: preferences.

People are adaptable and can develop or use weaker sides of their personalities – and may even prefer to use them in a given situation.  Introverts, for instance, all have an auxiliary personality that they use for social situations or work.  Johnny Carson was a legendary introvert, but hardly came off as one during The Late Show.

So too could an NT politician learn to speak empathically about deep emotional issues and learn to champion inclusive policies.  Or conversely, NF’s are more than capable of adopting an NT mindset when the need for tough-minded leadership decisions arises.  Hence the NT/NF disagreement over an emotionally savvy, but also emotionally flat “no drama” Obama.

And it’s also why Future Now analyzes buying behavior in terms of “buying modes,” rather than assuming that buying mode will line up with temperament preference.  No one buys accounting software spontaneously, and even the most hard-headed and practical of us have been known to make spontaneous purchases on vacation.

2.  Knowing how temperament preferences overlap – and where they differ – is important

Why would one person see an SJ/Methodical when another sees an NT/Competitive?  Well because both temperaments have a strong preference for logical decision-making.  And an NT with a strong Judging preference, like Hillary’s INTJ personality type, can come off as an organizer – reliable and sufficiently detail-oriented to fool you into thinking they have a methodical temperament*

So what does this mean for your Website/copy?

Rather than pushing copy or messaging styles onto visitors, it’s best to cover all the temperaments persuasive needs according to the “fast up top and slow down bottom” layout method.  That way you can let visitors self-select the copy and links that most appeals to them without worrying about improperly typing them. You can get a sense of how these temperaments interact with a page by reading Howard’s analysis of Jakob Nielson’s eyetracking study.

Conclusion: Put Copy for Fast Decision Makers Up Top and Slow Decision Makers Down Bottom

So the default copy organization for most pages will include copy, links, and calls to action intended for competitive and spontaneous temperaments (your fast decision makers who are less likely to scroll and spend the time to examine the entire page) up top, and copy more suited for methodical and humanistic temperaments (slower decision makers who will examine the entire page) below that.

For instance, if you have an NT/competitive who follows a link intended for Methodicals, the page he lands on will still have some bottom-line or big picture copy at the top of the page and a call to action appropriate for his temperament.  And if that particular competitive keeps reading, well, he may just be in a more Methodical Buying Mode.  No big deal – as long as your pages are set up properly.

And that’s what I took away from the recent spate of articles and blog posts on Temperament and MBTI.

P.S. If this stuff interests you, I highly recommend that you check out this free audio book.

* For the record, what probably should have pushed Yoffe away from typing Hillary as an SJ, is that she is very much an ideologue.  Her political stances were sharply radical when she adopted them and required something of a philosophical bent to arrive at.  She didn’t enter politics by being an outstanding administrator; she entered politics because of a commitment to her political theories and ideas.  Plus, her career as a lawyer indicated an NT preference over SJ.

Overall, conversion rates are starting to trend downward.

Almost everyone I speak with is looking for areas to cut expenses in and approaching spending from a more frugal mindset. Some are beginning to make drastic cuts, including personnel. While I’m not a financial expert, I can safely predict that this financial mess will likely get worse before it turns around. This isn’t another dot.com bust but a larger crisis that will leave few untouched.

So what does this mean to you, your company, and your conversion rate? Can you come out of the other end of this with little to no damage? Anyone who has been in business through a recession knows it’s absolutely possible to survive and, sometimes, even grow a bit (or a lot as competitors fold under pressure).

They will also tell you that it’s never easy.

For online marketers wishing to thrive, a down economy brings two big-picture lessons. First, now is the not the time to stop being innovative. Second, efficiencies are not an option.

Innovate Your Way Through

In a good economy, the rising tide lifts all boats. In a down economy, you’ll quickly know how good you really are. And let’s face it, we could all get a little better, right?

Conversion optimization basics may no longer be working or working less well. You must innovate your way through.

For example, I was recently asked in an interview about creative use of personas. The interviewer and I were talking about a retailer who was worrying about cutting inventory on hand. I was asked if the retailer could use marketing personas to help people buy more effectively or target more profitable buyers. The answer is absolutely yes.

Creative merchandising, creative buying, creative offers, creative marketing, creative cost-cutting, and creative customer-relationship-building will make a difference between who thrives and who dives.

When I say “create” or “innovate,” I’m not talking about a crazy sock puppet ad or simply redesigning a logo. Instead, I’m talking about offering customers more perceived value at less cost to them and you. I’m talking about finding innovative ways to cut through the clutter of our media-crazy environment and the pain people are feeling from this crisis by increasing message relevance and spending less. True innovation always stretches those limits. And that involves much more than screaming louder, telling a funnier joke, or changing the color of the “buy now” button.

Work harder and more creatively at answering the question: what can we do for our customers today? There are only two things riskier than being innovative: being gimmicky and doing nothing. Neither is acceptable.

Offer your customers something better — or your competitor will.

Bow to the Throne of Efficiencies

The more you master the craft of doing more for less, the more secure you’ll be in the coming months. Don’t try to do three jobs with one person until that person begs for mercy. Instead, make marketing dollars go much, much further. That includes cutting fat from marketing budgets and creating a culture of marketing optimization that leaves no penny unturned. It takes work, but it will bulletproof you internally with the bosses and externally with the customers.

Your customers are already acting more efficiently. You should, too. Recently I noticed a pattern in the top 10 retailers by conversion rate. Last month three big florists made the list, but FTD.com fell off the list. More important, The Children’s Place made the list in September, but not in August during the back-to-school shopping season. That raises the question: is this a sign of early holiday shopping? Could this be a sign that people are looking for a better value by shopping earlier and earlier?

You must start optimizing now.

Need help? Refer to my latest book, “Always Be Testing.” There are reasons why I chose to write a book about Google Website Optimizer, even though there are other, more sophisticated tools. And for many looking for efficiency in marketing, Google Website Optimizer is the right price — free to get started with. This is a first step your company can take to get focused on continuous improvement.

A Few Tips for Rocky Times

Finally, a few tips as we head into the storm:

• People will still buy what the need and want; they’ll just buy slower and more methodically. Expect longer sales and lead-generation cycles. Customers won’t ask you for more value, they’ll just search for it elsewhere.
• Don’t be shocked by changing patterns in your metrics. Your customers may behave differently based on newfound attitudes. Ask why they are doing what they are doing. Use personas to find ways to persuade them and calm their fears. Test to find the answers.
• Don’t cut back on optimization.
• Consider visiting or revisiting price-point- and shipping-cost-related offers. They are at least worth a test or two.
• Stay focused on your customer first, not on the market.
• Even though you can, don’t blame the economy. It likely won’t hear you, and if it does, it won’t do anything about it.
• Don’t think you’re immune. I don’t want to see you in the ash heap.

Is the economy affecting you yet? How? Let me know.

* cross posted from ClickZ

Editors Note: You can also download our white paper titled Grabbing Market Share: Marketing in a Recession.

Remember a few weeks back, when I wrote about the perceived marketing strategy for the Jenny Craig weight loss centers? At the time, I ruminated over the possibility that the marketing and advertising execs at Jenny Craig were either consciously or unconsciously using personas to drive the success of their celebrity spokespeople campaigns. (To read the original post, traverse over here)

I noted the distinct differences between Kirstie Alley (Spontaneous), Valerie Bertinelli (Methodical), and Queen Latifah (Humanistic), and applauded Jenny Craig for being savvy enough to create different marketing “languages” for each celebrity’s ads – language that resonated with the segment of the female market that was targeted. At the time, I wrote:

“It will be interesting to see if the next celebrity spokesperson for Jenny Craig completes the persona cycle by using a Competitive type. Hmmmm. I wonder who it will be. Who would you like to see in the spotlight?”

Guess what? Jenny’s new spokesperson is a Competitive.

It’s also a man.

NBA star Baron Davis of the Los Angeles Clippers is the newest face of Jenny Craig. Talk about competitive – a star athlete who has the drive to win at all costs. The story is that he is trying Jenny Craig as a way to “stay in shape during the off season.” There are no TV ads yet, but check out this copy taken directly from the Jenny Craig website:

“As a powerful professional point guard, Baron Davis never stops improving his game. And as a professional athlete, he knows that a balance of height and weight is crucial to a player’s performance. So when Baron wanted to drop weight in the off season to get into his best game shape, he went one-on-one with Jenny Craig and lost 19 pounds!*

As a busy guy on the go, Baron enjoys the convenience of Jenny Direct®, the at-home program where consultations are done over the phone and food is delivered right to your door!”

This is a Competitive type’s dream copy – talk of improving your game, striving for ultimate performance, and the convenience of the at-home program. It speaks directly to the heart of the potential customer.

Having a man complete the cycle isn’t bad at all; Competitive types in particular are drawn to achievers no matter what the gender. It will definitely bring in more male clients to Jenny, and Competitive women will see that weight loss can mean more than looking good in the mirror. It’s all about performance.

Kudos to Jenny Craig for some of the smartest marketing around – they are quickly becoming my new “poster child” for brilliant marketing to women.

Great video, great message.  Now imagine that the guy in the suit worked for a corporation, and his boss asked him to come up with the words for the beggar’s sign. 
 His sentence would have been made into a paragraph by Corporate, watered down by Legal, and politically corrected by Human Resources.  I’m thinking it would be a completely different message by then. 
 Uh oh, I think my cynicism is showing again. [emphasis mine]

Yup.  Nothing like the mental image of some tone-deaf suits destroying the impact and emotional nuances in one’s copy to spark a good, hearty rant.  I’m right there with you, Susan.  But believe it or not, this is a problem that personas can go a long way toward solving.  Seriously.

You see, absent a well defined and imaginable audience, most people tend to do one of three things:

1. Market to themselves.  We all naturally tend to fall back on what WE like and what WE find motivating.  Great if we’re selling to people just like us; not so great otherwise.
2. Market to Stereotypes.  As in, “hey, let’s target our advertising towards soccer moms!”  People are funny like that: they know when they’re being talked down to.
3. Market on Price. Not that you’ll immediately advertise a sale, but it’s easier to talk about features than real benefits when you’re not clear about the prospect’s emotional itch.  And that’s a game of emphasizing features vs. price.

Most clueless revisions and edits fall into these three categories.  A lawyer might Latinize your copy because it sounds more like the formal language he’s around all day.   He’s making your copy sound like the language he respects and that “speaks” to him.  He’s marketing to himself.

Same thing with executives.  As a group executives naturally skew towards a Competitive temperament.  Plus, Executives with non-competitive temperaments often find themselves operating in that mode due to the professional demands of their jobs.  So they tend to re-write copy to better speak to them:

• Put the bottom-line up front
• Bullet out the important points
• Get rid of the fluffy crap and don’t get dragged down into the weeds
• Etc.

And that’s great for Competitive temperaments, but it can leave everyone else cold.  Unfortunately, Competitives only make up 15% of the population.  So now you’re potentially leaving 75 85% of your audience unconvinced.  Yikes!

Unfortunately, telling a client or boss that they are marketing to themselves never goes well.  Never try this one at home, kids, ‘cause that conversation aint going to stay about the copy.  Same thing with pointing out stereotype-based copy.  There is simply no neutral way to say these things; they’re always interpreted as an accusation.

Fortunately, personas can say things you can’t

Instead of telling the VP of marketing that he’s re-written your copy based solely on what appeals to him, imagine being able to pull out the persona you’ve been tasked to write to and having a discussion about how well the VP’s copy would or would not connect emotionally with that persona.

Now you can put your objections to his edits in terms of what the personas – and therefore the customers – do and do not like, rather than what you or your editors do and don’t like. Telling a VP that his version of the copy fails to address the emotional concerns of Sally is far less threatening and far more persuasive than telling him his edits have sucked the life out of your copy.

And this works for everything:

• for explaining that Sally doesn’t understand the jargon-filled features your editors are trying to cram into the copy
• for arguing the more appropriate connotations of one word over another, for example, “normal” rather than “average”
• for explaining that Johnny really DOES want to know the details and methodology
• etc.

In short, personas give you a vastly more objective basis for discussing the emotional nuances of your copy as well as the tone-deaf edits that might be threatened upon same.  With personas, these conversations DO stay about the copy and they usually do end up going well.

So while I admit that ranting about bad edits can provide a nice break to the day, I’ll also tell you that successfully defending your copy is infinitely more satisfying – and that personas are an excellent tool for achieving that goal.

While other companies have featured real-life success stories in their advertising, Jenny Craig has chosen another route: the celebrity spokesperson. While I’m not a big proponent of celebrities as an effective marketing tool, Jenny Craig has applied the use of personas (either consciously or unconsciously) to their campaigns and is experiencing a surge in revenue.

Consider the last three Jenny Craig campaigns, and how they’ve followed the persona business model:

Kirstie Alley: A Spontaneous type if ever there was one. While annoying to some consumers, other Spontaneous types were drawn to her quirky delivery and “it’s so easy to do” mantra about the Jenny Craig program. Throw in her effusive comments about the different kinds of dessert you can have, and you’ve got the Spontaneous dream of what a diet should be.

Valerie Bertinelli: A born Methodical, Valerie’s ads were all about the structure of the program. She cited statistics about obesity and facts about the nutritional value of the Jenny Craig foods. She was straightforward, dependable, and encouraged other Methodicals to apply structure their eating habits. That, combined with regular, specific updates on her progress cause membership to surge amongst Methodicals.

Queen Latifah: This is the woman who’s reaching out to the Humanistics that know they need help but are fearful of specifics and possible failure. The advertising program for Queen Latifah has moved away from previous messaging and started talking about “just feeling better.” She’s telling others that for her, it’s not about numbers on a scale but rather living a healthier, happier life. And, most importantly, she not only talks about how a healthier body feels better, it also means you can do more with your loved ones. That hits the “hot button” for a Humanistic – it’s often not about her, but how she can have a stronger connection with friends and family.

It will be interesting to see if the next celebrity spokesperson for Jenny Craig completes the persona cycle by using a Competitive type. Hmmmm. I wonder who it will be. Who would you like to see in the spotlight?

Review the Jenny Craig campaigns when you can – they are an excellent case study for success using personas, and good examples of how you can apply them to your own marketing and advertising.

Editors note: If you’d like help with your personas and planning campaigns for them please let us know.

While it may not make you popular with cool kids, fancy book reading does have its benefits. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read about a new study published in the latest issue of New Scientist magazine (subscription required).  It shows that “readers of narrative fiction scored higher on tests of empathy and social acumen than those who read non-fiction texts.”

In other words, reading fiction helps us empathize with others and grok them better. By the way, I just finished Ask the Dust by John Fante…have you read any good fiction lately?

Now let’s head out to the business world – a world dominated by analytics, numbers, feasibility studies, ROI, and other non-fiction information.  All the “non-fiction” stuff is absolutely essential to running a business, especially in a soft economy.  But, when it comes to understanding your customers, and getting them to interact with your business in profitable ways, a little fiction helps.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this…Wouldn’t it be great if there were fictional representations of your target customers that allowed you deeper empathy and understanding of their behavior online and off? Harry Potter readers would realize Dumbledore and Voldemort wouldn’t be motivated the same way or want the same things and this would influence how you marketed to them.

P.S. Today is Harry Potter’s birthday.

A recent Advertising Age article, What All That Chatter Is Really Saying, talks about how text analytics can turn customer feedback into more meaningful insight.

Today it is marketers who are increasingly turning to text analytics to mine information from the mountains of customer data they’ve accrued from customer-service surveys, e-mails, online forums, hosted feedback sites and user-generated blogs.

“You can have someone read through 100 comments, and they will likely overstate the importance of some concepts, understate the importance of some concepts and totally miss other things,” said Tom H.C. Anderson, managing partner, Anderson Analytics. “For instance, if one person in 100 mentioned something, it would be missed. But if in 100,000 responses, 1% of people say the same thing, it could be noticed as important, like a new trend that’s developing or something wrong with a product that’s just starting to surface.”

So what are these companies learning? Unilever’s Dove brand is using text analytics to gain insight into who their customers are and what really matters to them.

In recent work for Unilever’s Dove brand and its Pro-Age marketing campaign, Anderson went digging for consumer insight on Dove’s own message boards, coding the text content against 43 different psychological attributes. Anderson found the vast majority of women who posted comments appreciated the realness of using older nude models. But they also discovered other common sentiments. For instance, most women over 50 strongly dislike the concept of “perfection” in beauty images. They also often talked about their mothers, grandmothers and daughters with concern about their portrayal in media. In fact, two in 10 women expressed real anger at how other advertisers portray women.

“Text analytics is a new methodology for us, and we were very pleased with the results and the depth of insight,” said Catherine Cardoso, associate insights manager at Unilever, in a statement. “The results were helpful beyond understanding reactions to our campaign. We also gained an understanding of what motivates people on discussion boards, which issues are most important to women in our target group, and how to create better products and messaging for them.”

Interesting stuff. At FutureNow, an important part of our persona development work is assigning value words to each persona – these are words personas may be typing into search engines, may use to describe their problems or the solution they are seeking, or may be words that appeal to their buying modality.

How do we determine these value words? One of our secrets is mining the text of customer correspondence, blogs, and live chat logs.

What are you doing to use your customers’ words to better understand who they truly are and what they truly want?

Viral videos are, by nature, non-targetable. The message can be targeted, but the delivery is meant to spread in an out-of-control and, well, viral manner. But that’s OK since optimizing the message (e.g., with persona-based messaging) is usually far more effective than trying to control who actually ends up seeing your viral video.

We also need to be careful with the term “successful”. How are we defining success? If a video spreads virally but delivers no benefit to the creator or business, should that be considered a success? I would say no, it’s not. Accordingly, the only successful viral videos I have seen are the “Will it Blend?” videos by Blendtec.

But don’t take my word for it; watch this video to see if an iPhone will blend:

Impressive, isn’t it?

Not only did these videos go viral, but, according to Blendtec’s founder, they brought qualified buyers to the company’s website and drove sales.* Now that’s impressive.

So, here are three must-do ideas to consider before trying this at home:

1.) Viral Videos Must Remain “On-Message.” Yes, they have to be funny, amusing, insightful and wow-inspiring to “go viral,” but the those qualities have to be organic or intrinsic to the commercial message. The humor can’t be gratuitous.

The great Bill Bernbach once said…

Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product. You are not right if in your ad you stand a man on his head just to get attention. You are right if [it’s done to] show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.

Merely to let your imagination run riot, to dream unrelated dreams, to indulge in graphic acrobatics is not being creative. The creative person has harnessed his imagination. He has disciplined it so that every thought, every idea, every word he puts down, every line he draws, every light and shadow in every photograph he takes makes more vivid, more believable, more persuasive the original them or product advantage he has decided to convey.

Exactly. The Blendtec videos are ABOUT the product: blenders.

2.) Videos work better as part of a campaign… rather than as a single, one-off event. There are at least 10 Blendtec commercials that I’m aware of, and, when they first came out, I probably watched five or six of them. That repetition of message compounded the effectiveness of both the viral spreading and the intended message. If you’re planning a viral campaign, do yourself a favor and plan it as an actual campaign, i.e., as a series of videos.

3.) Know WHERE and HOW your videos fit into the customer’s buying process… and plan accordingly. Watching the “Will it Blend” videos probably isn’t enough to get anyone to immediately buy the product, but it will put Blendtec on a customer’s short list the next time they’re in the market for a high-powered blender. That means their website has to pick up where the videos left off. That means the website has to be findable.

Notice that Blendtec also has a willitblend.com domain set up and has done the SEO work to be the first organic result when the titles of their videos are typed into Google. Notice that Blendtec has not assumed that anyone will be paying enough attention to learn the name of their company. (Viewers are most likely remember the name of the videos themselves. Prepare for that.)

The Microsoft campaign that Dave wrote about doesn’t play by these rules, and almost certainly isn’t as effective as the Blendtec series. Try it for yourself: Google “The Break Up” or “Inspiration, Anyone?” You’ll find the videos, but not any websites where Microsoft even has a chance to convert interest into business.

. .

*UPDATE: Word of Mouth marketing expert Andy Sernovitz reports that Blendtec’s sales increased 500% as a result of their “Will it Blend” campaign.

I’ve heard from some folks who got initial buy-in, but whose companies quickly lost the stomach for testing. They ran some tests that did well, but they ran some tests that actually hurt conversion. The tests that hurt conversion are especially painful for smaller companies, where that lost revenue is felt directly by the business owner.

So what can you do to keep morale high and commitment to testing firm? What can you do it increase your chances for getting the best results from your testing? There’s a wonderful article by Lily Chiu at Omniture called “How to Make Testing Successful.”

There’s a lot of great advice in Lily’s post, but one bit really hit home with me:

I’ve seen some companies fail because they try to limit risk by treating testing as project-based task that just needs to be executed once per quarter. By doing so, they actually increase risk because the chances of testing being looked upon favorably decrease with every test that doesn’t generate lift. By limiting the number of tests you run, you limit the number of tries you get to knock a test out of the ballpark.

Here are a few more points to add to the list:

• Give yourself more chances to win. Get commitment to run more than just a a few tests. The more tests you run, the better your chance to create a real winner.

• Any tests that hurt conversion are only temporary. You only hurt conversion for the short period of the test. Once you get valid results, you can revert back to the control and immediately stop any losses. But tests that increase conversion? Those are the tests that keep on giving. You will enjoy those gains, not just temporarily, but for months, and years to come. Even a small increase can have a big impact on the bottom line when you enjoy those gains over long periods of time.

• There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. Now, I know that business owners are probably thinking, “Yeah, easy for you to say. It isn’t your wallet that’s affected.” But look at the opportunity cost of NOT doing testing. You are left guessing which changes to make to your site, or you may not be making any changes at all. How much MORE money could you be making? You’ll never know.

Testing is one of the best ways to gain real insight. You learn something from every single test. The combination of that learning IS going to result in gains, but it doesn’t always come in the first few tests. So hang in there. Don’t get discouraged. Sometimes you knock it out of the ballpark in the fest few tries, sometimes it takes a little longer. The more tests you run, the better your chances for success.

Hint: Want to get better create better tests? Personas can help you know what’s worth testing.

You were on a roll. Just two years ago, You were Time magazine’s person of the year. When Web 2.0 changed everything, You were there. You did it. You turned the Web into the “interactive” medium we always knew it could be.

You changed the rules. You took control.

So what happened? Lately, it seems that marketing and advertising executives are either blind optimists or furrow-browed skeptics about social media marketing. Are we — the marketers, the bloggers, the people who read and post comments on blogs and message boards, the 2.0 digerati — overestimating our audience’s desire to interact?

In a Copyblogger guest post, Hoffman/Lewis advertising CEO Bob Hoffman insists we’re marketing to ourselves. (Et tu, Bob?)

Marketing to “Me”

Bob’s article is a must-read, especially for marketers who are self-proclaimed “Facebook addicts”, “Twitterholics”, or the like, because in it he claims that You, the aforementioned social web-savvy, are the only ones who actually know how — or care — to interact with content online. (He defines interactivity as “the ability to interact with the content of the medium, not just the medium.”) According to Bob, for most people, the internet is a passively interactive experience, like TV but with a mouse for a remote. The net effect is that marketers are living in their own web-savvy bubble and are now guiltier than ever of marketing to themselves.

While I agree with most of Bob’s piece, I wholeheartedly disagree with his conclusion:

Don’t kid yourself. As an online marketer, you are facing the same challenge that every marketer since the beginning of commerce has faced: How do you attract the attention of people who are actively trying to avoid you? The methods currently in our arsenal just aren’t good enough.

It would be lovely if the “social network/conversationalist” crowd were right and interactivity between marketer and marketee would evolve as a caring, loving relationship.

I’m officially skeptical.

Fair enough, but who ever said that social media marketing has to be a forced interaction? The problem isn’t that the methods in our arsenal aren’t good enough, the problem is that “social media marketing” is a misnomer.

Social media marketing should be a largely introverted activity, one where the marketer spend more time listening, researching, and refining their message than they do actually pushing one. It should be about creating environments, and playing in existing ones, where you learn juicy details about what’s actually important to your customer segments. Yet for most, it seems “social media marketing” has come to mean the tactics by which one goes about hunting down customers and annoying them under the guise of “friend”-ship.

Of course push marketing tactics don’t work well on the social web. They never did so well in Web 1.0, either. The problem isn’t social media. The problem is marketers putting tactics before strategy and expecting different results just because the technology and format are new. That’s what’s laughable.

In a recent interview with Josh Bernoff, co-author of the new book Groundswell: Winning In a World Transformed by Social Technologies, we discussed the need to put people before objectives, strategy and technology (just remember the acronym P.O.S.T and you’ve got it). Keep that in mind when considering these other stats about the online population* from the book:

• 25% read blogs, visit social networking sites, and/or read customer reviews
• 20% regularly update/maintain a profile on a social networking site
• 18% contribute to online forums or discussion groups
• 14% comment on someone else’s blog
• 11% post ratings/reviews of products or service, publish, maintain or update a blog, and/or listen to podcasts
• 8% use RSS
• 5% use Twitter

*Figures represent percentage of online U.S. adults participating at least monthly.

Bob is right to a degree. Most people online aren’t involved in social media. But, as Seth Godin points out, the “who” matters more than the “how many,” and if someone is willing to give you free insights about your products, services, or brand, shouldn’t you listen?

A Sea of Irrelevance

Neil Postman, a notoriously cranky (and brilliant) theorist of the mass media era, came to mind after Bob outed himself as being “cranky” and “skeptical” about social media marketing. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman defers to two other media skeptics, both famously crankier than even Bob Hoffman or Neil himself:

What [George] Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What [Aldous] Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

Orgy Porgy, Centrifugal Bumblepuppy, Stumbling your Friend Feed, Twittering your Facebook in public. Anyone care to explain the difference? Point is, Orwell’s vision came true in 1933 (16 years before 1984 was published) and Huxley’s vision came true somewhere between 2005 and last Tuesday.

We are living in a sea of irrelevance, but don’t let it bother (former person-of-the-year) You! The constant hissing of digital white noise only makes relevance that much more valuable a commodity. After a day of swimming through mental 2.0 excrement, even a fleeting sip of relevance tastes like champagne.

And that’s our job as marketers; to keep the campaign champagne coming.

Ah, but if only it were that easy. How do you know when to recommend a Sicilian Syrah blend, an earthy Chilean Cabernet, a crisp-and-buttery New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, or maybe a reserve bottle of South African Pinotage? What if an ice-cold Budweiser will do? You’d look pretty stupid offering some fancy-pants varietal to someone who just wants a Bud.

And that’s exactly how social media helps us. It gives us new data to plug into existing methods. But as Postman warns, “there is a limit to the promise of new technology . . . it cannot be a substitute for human values.” Very true, especially considering that I lifted that quote from Wikipedia.

So I wonder, if Neil Postman were an “interactive” marketer, and still alive today, how would he ensure his message was getting to people distracted by the technology that’s come to define them, when it should be the other way around? My guess is that he’d use personas.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m in the Persuasion Architecture business and my target customers are marketers and business owners who read blogs and occasionally comment. Your social media strategy might look very different from mine.

UPDATE: Brian Clark, the editor and founder of Copyblogger, has made a brilliant contribution to this discussion: “The Five Essential Elements of Effective Social Media Marketing“ 

. .

About the Author: Robert Gorell is the Editor of GrokDotCom. If you enjoyed this post, he invites you to subscribe or, like, totally join FutureNow on Facebook.

Lead generation sites fail to convert for three basic reasons:

1. Visitors don’t understand the value they get in exchange for giving their information.

2. They are informationally challenged and collect too little, too much, or incorrect information.

3. You haven’t established trust and set proper expectations of what to expect when doing business with you.

Obviously, each is interrelated and flow from one to the other. There might be a few more reasons, but for now, these three culprits are enough to start you identifying specific problems on your site and determining action items for optimization.

Keep in mind, more leads may not be what you need. You may need more qualified leads, and a properly planned Web site should help the visitor qualify herself.

We’ve worked with several companies that have seen a decrease in the number of leads, but increased sales and optimized the sales team time and closing ratios because the quality of their leads was improved.

Exchanging Value: My Name for Your Service

Many sites offering “free” whitepapers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information do a poor job of merchandising their downloads. Your downloads contain valuable information. Treat them as such.

Stop thinking of these downloads as free. You’re asking for something extremely valuable to both you and the visitor, their contact information. To get this valuable information “merchandise” your downloads better. Show the visitor the value of what they’re downloading. So when they fill out the lead form, they feel they’re making a good exchange, valuable information for valuable information.

Include thumbnails of documents.

Let them know what they’ll learn from the download.

Let them know what they can do with the information.

List everything what’s “in it for them” in the download.

Let them know what will happen with their information. Will you be calling them? (More on this, below, under “Establishing Trust and Expectations”.)

If you offer a free trial or demo period, provide clear information about what they are getting. Is it a fully functional trial with a time limit? What happens when the demo runs out? Will you offer them support during the trial? (Sounds like a good way to win over a potential customer doesn’t it?) Disclose system requirements before they begin the sign up process.

Track the number of “bogus” e-mails you get, either bad e-mail addresses or e-mails from Hotmail, Yahoo, or Gmail. If you get too many emails from lucilleball@yahoo.com or elvisp@hotmail, rest assured that visitors don’t see value in the offer and the exchange.

Beware, sometimes these tactics will cause a drop in the number of leads, but rid you of junk leads. You have to determine if this is an acceptable trade off (it almost always is).

Help for the Informationally Challenged

Information, information, information is all around us. Some is useful, sometimes it’s hard to find what’s useful, and some information is just plain not helpful at all.

One approach to determine if you have info problems is to examine time spent on page. Often times I work with sites that have low time spent on main content pages but their FAQ page gets more visitor time. This may indicate that visitors aren’t finding information they need elsewhere. If a visitor relies on your FAQ to get information, it reduces trust. Why aren’t these frequent questions answered frequently (or linked to) on key pages like home and service/product pages?

Often sites put up so much information that visitors cannot find the piece of info they seek. This occasionally indicates an information architecture problem, but more often indicates that the visitors’ needs and motivations aren’t addressed in the content.

Another key issue often neglected is that often the person doing the research on the Web site isn’t the decision maker. She’s trying to gather, sort, and print (you do make it easy to do that, right?) information to give to the person making the decision. Are you making your site easy to understand for this person as well?

There really are no easy solutions to get your information in order. First begin to establish a persuasive framework, building personas then planning each persona’s interaction or persuasion scenarios with your site, and determining what information they need and when and where they need it on the site.

Establishing Trust and Expectations

Visitors must trust you. If they don’t, they don’t become leads or often they become bad leads. Visitors may even fill out a lead form if they mistrust you. Sometimes they are just going through the motion of getting proposals and pricing and are planning on buying from your competitor. You might have the better solution for them but the site or the lead process doesn’t instill enough confidence to take you seriously.

Most visitors who aren’t confident simply won’t contact you. They fear harassment from the sales team. Or sometimes your site is ineffective in communicating the values of the visitor and they bail. Again, this is a tragedy especially when you consider they could be in the market to buy what you sell.

Other times, visitors are in early stages of the buying process and an overly aggressive lead form will cause them to tighten up, assuming you’ll push them somewhere they don’t feel ready to go. Here are some things you can do to help instill trust.

Include information about what it’s like to work with your company. Let them know when you will contact them. Assure them that you will only help them determine their needs and not pressure them.

Ramp up your About Us page.

Ask as few questions as possible in your lead form. Don’t force them to give you all types information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs.

Include short, friendly lead forms in several places on the site (not just your contact page). This will help you track where they filled out the form and better inform you what they might be interested in.

Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their info, tell them how soon they will be hearing from you. If possible give them a choice of how and when they prefer to be contacted.

Some visitors like to be prepared for the call. Provide a checklist of information they might need to have handy when they speak with you.

Some visitors prefer to call. Provide the phone number near the lead form.

Now go get some leads.

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Originally seen on ClickZ.

Editor’s Note: Want more tips on lead-generation? Join Bryan on June 3rd in Manhattan at the Call to Action seminar.

In this interview from London’s recent Search Engine Strategies conference, Bryan sits down with Ralph Wilson — in what appears to be either an airplane hanger, a convention hall, or a school gymnasium — to discuss how planning websites with personas will increase revenue and ROI . . . for a few reasons:

• Personas show copywriters and designers who they’re writing and designing for.
• Personas allow customers to choose their own buying experience.
• Personas prevent customers from being stereotyped.

Want to learn more about Persuasion Architecture? It’s how our clients get results with personas.

“Yeah, right. Save the April Fools‘ pranks for Google.”

But it’s true! Spirit Airlines wants to have a threesome with me.

They told me so via email:

What kind of persona do they think I am?

Seriously…

Do you think they got their message across?

Our presentations went over the high-level basics of creating personas and planning content that speaks directly to your personas. We had a full house for our session and I’ve received lots of insightful questions since from audience members. Overall, the feedback has been extremely positive. But what struck me most was the coming of age of the notion that personas ought to be an integral part of any online marketing plan.

This really excites me, to see people so open to a concept that Future Now has proved effective in almost every interaction. The sheer number of seminars about visitor behavior and the number of times I heard “persona” used in comments and questions suggested a bold new era for interactive marketing.

The rest of the conference was equally thought-provoking. I thought it showed a deeper level of thinking and debate than I’ve witnessed at past industry conferences. (Hats off to Danny Sullivan and the crew at Search Engine Land!)

If you’d like to see my presentation, here it is:

For more in-depth instruction on how to creating personas for your business, read Part 1 and Part 2 of Howard Kaplan’s series on “How to Get Started with Personas.”

If you’d like help planning your online content strategy with personas, contact us.

[Editor's Note: Brian Bond is VP of Marketing and Product at Future Now.]

Occasionally — perhaps more often than we’d like to admit — there’s at least some grain of truth in stereotypes. There are a few attributes that may be accurate about each of the groups others lump us in. So why are they so harmful?

In an article for MSNBC (”Science Gets the Last Laugh on Ethnic Jokes”), Kathleen Wren discusses a recent study showing that real personalities don’t match stereotypes. It seems there’s further proof our prejudices may be misleading…

A possibility is that some very specific components of a stereotype may be accurate — for example, Italians may gesture with their hands a lot — but that they don’t necessarily tell us anything more generally about personality.

Stereotypes keep us from digging deep enough to truly understand people (e.g., your customers). We see one or two traits and assume several others must also be true. Very dangerous.

But here’s the really scary part:

We may be “hard-wired,” to some extent, to maintain inaccurate stereotypes, since we are less likely to notice and remember information that violates our stereotypes.

When analyzing data, surveys, focus groups, and other information we gather about customers, we may be more likely to focus on information that reinforces our stereotypes since, well, it just “feels right.”

Think this can’t happen to you? Think again.

When I create male personas, I check in with the men on our team to make sure they’re accurate. (I’m not trying to brag here, but… ) I’ve been helping clients create customer personas for a long time, and my results confirm that I know what I’m doing. Still, there have been several times where the research information I was getting just sounded dead wrong. I simply could not believe it. But after extensive checking, it appeared it was indeed true.

I’ve done enough research on the difference between men’s buying processes and the ways women buy to know there are indeed some BIG differences. So when I see something that goes against my gut, I don’t just write it off. I investigate and try to keep an open mind. But this is why it’s so dangerous when marketers (even yours truly) claim to know something’s true in their so-called “gut”:

Generally, according to Robins, when we encounter people who contradict prevailing generalizations, we perceive them as unique individuals rather than representatives of their national or cultural groups.

How true. But stereotyping doesn’t end there. When ethnic stereotypes don’t fit, it’s gender stereotypes to the rescue!

I see this all too often: “Oh, the research says this woman is happy with her weight. She even thinks she looks good, even though she’s obviously overweight. That can’t possibly be true. All women want to be skinny.”

Guess what. There are many women whom the beauty industry would consider overweight who are perfectly happy with their bodies and do think they look good. (Look at the success of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, or Jenny Craig “plus size” spokeswomen Kirstie Alley, Valerie Bertinelli, and Queen Latifah.)

How can you break through stereotypes and really understand your customers? First, consider that stereotypes are the single biggest reason why so many marketing-to-women efforts fail, then read my post on Copyblogger (”Surprise! Not All Women Think Alike”).

. .

Shameless Plug: Holly is co-instructor of our Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar on June 2nd in New York City, and co-author of The Soccer Mom Myth — Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys.

Marketing firms, usability firms, even companies’ internal marketing teams are crafting personas. Posters of personas are hung proudly in conference rooms. Tacked-up personas dress cubicles from coast to coast.

Sadly, many of these personas are only attracting dust bunnies. They don’t see any recognition past the initial creation.

If you spent any amount of time and resources building personas that represent your customers, it’s reasonable to consider getting more out of them.

Instead of letting your personas drift into a faint memory, here are a few things you can use your personas for.

Tweak Your Personas

A reason some personas get put in drawers is they aren’t as effective as they could have been. Profitable personas are representatives of all buying modes your customers have as they consider you or competitors. The measure for effective personas is that they must evoke empathy in your team and be tied to your business goals.

Go ahead and tweak your personas if need be.

Your Personas and Your Competitors

See exactly how well your competitors are doing with your personas. Take your personas through their site. Be brutally honest.

For each persona, note where your competitors do well and where they fail. In some cases, you’ll find they do better with one or two of your personas. Use this information to shore up your site to provide a superior experience for all your personas. Many times you’ll find new ideas and inspiration for changes in your persuasion scenarios.

Keyword Research

We’ve had many clients who eagerly used personas for everything but researching keywords. We often have to remind them to use their personas for this purpose. Start by brainstorming some of the terms and phrases each persona would use in relationship to your product/service in the early buying stages. Then move on to middle and late stages. By going through this simple exercise, you’ll immediately have a list of potential keywords you may not have otherwise considered.

Be sure not to ignore the low-traffic keywords you dig up. Often times these terms cost much less, reveal true buying intent, and, as a result, convert at astounding rates.

Offline Inspiration

Personas can also be used to inspire and guide your offline marketing efforts. Run all your creative through your personas, and estimate their response. Often you’ll find a particular creative works for some personas and not for others. Instead of ignoring the rest of your personas, adjust the creative to reach them as well or produce additional creative for the other personas. Have you noticed that Geico has very different simultaneous campaigns? The gecko and cavemen campaigns appeal to different customer segments.

Give Personas a Say in Your Marketing Budget

A well-crafted, well-researched persona set represents all your potential customers. But not all personas are equal in their monetary value to the company.

When you’re trying to make tough budget decisions on where and how to market, you can use your personas as a guide. We had a client who had more marketing opportunities than resources and time. Using his personas, we were able to help plan the rollout of an ambitious redesign project by starting with the site elements that appealed to two of his most valuable personas. The redesign’s second phase was to shore up site elements for secondary personas.

You can use this same line of planning to determine how and where to spend marketing dollars, online and off-.

Conclusion

Don’t let your personas get off easy by using them for only one or two projects. Instead, drag them out for everything. Run all your new creative by them, even use them to come up with more effective site optimization ideas. (That’s a column for another time.)

What have your personas done for you lately?

Reprinted from my ClickZ column.

[Image from Ingmar Bergman's 1966 classic film, Persona.]

If a sales person avoids the dreaded “show-up and throw-up” technique by engaging in honest conversation and asking intelligent questions while answering yours in a respectful manner, then how is your Web copy supposed to be a substitute for that?

It’s as simple as ABC — and, no, I don’t mean “Always Be Closing”…

A) Hire a great copywriter or become one yourself.

B) Blueprint/plan persona-based copy.

C) Write persuasive hyperlinks that fit into your plan/blueprint.

Personas let you see your customers real. And that allows you to write to them instead of writing at them, which is huge. But more importantly, personas let you hear the other side of the conversation by giving you insights into your customers’ motivations — and that enables you to anticipate your visitors questions, which is where embedded links come in.

Every click a visitor takes represents a question they are asking you (or possibly a response to a prodding question your copy has raised). By anticipating the questions visitors are most likely to have, a smart copywriter can use embedded hyperlinks to model the interactive flow of a conversation. Your copy talks, then your visitors talk by clicking on the links most relevant to them. The more often a visitor clicks on a link and feels she’s been heard, the more she has her expectations met and questions answered, the more her website visit resembles honest dialog. And that’s effective selling.

Conversely, the more your website fails to answer — or even to acknowledge — visitor questions, the more your Web copy resembles the “show-up and throw-up” doofus in this video:

Does your copy speak to your visitors or are you just vomiting up a canned sales pitch? Are you anticipating visitor questions and concerns with your hyperlinks or are you expecting them to respond to ridiculous questions (“What will it take to put you in a new car today?”)?

In this 20-minute tutorial, Ian Lurie of Portent Interactive and SEOmoz founder Rand Fishkin discuss how to create simple customer personas and use them to boost the performance and relevance of your website.

As anyone who’s read Waiting for Your Cat to Bark may know, we have quite a bit of experience adapting the customer experience to fit the needs of personas — and I’ll share some more ideas for how to create them in a moment — but first…

Take a moment to watch Ian and Rand’s wonderful crash course on personas:

Ian’s first step is to “Brainstorm 7 to 10 people.” If you’d like some ideas on how to do that brainstorming, here are some specific steps you can take to get started.

Ian’s 3rd step is to measure and research. At Future Now we call that “uncovery” and it’s absolutely key to your success. Successful uncovery plus personas is how you go from knowledge to understanding.Ian’s 4th step is writing out the personas’ stories — usually 500 to 700 words — including who they are, demographics, and psychographics. (If you need some help with the psychographics part, read about the four personality temperaments; a great starting point for understanding how people make buying decisions and how they’re viewing your website.

Avoiding Stereotypes

In Ian’s 4th step, the issue of stereotyping comes up. Stereotypes are incredibly harmful to personas. Why, if stereotypes are based on common attributes shared by a group, how can that be all that bad? Well, stereotypes keep you from digging past a few surface-level facts to truly understand the real person. They are a shortcut used by people to try to understand those who are different from them. This shortcut prevents you from having real empathy for that person, especially since the majority of stereotypes are negative. Ian seems to send some (understandably) mixed signals on this point. On one hand, he explains that it’s not so cut-and-dry as it may seem. Meanwhile, he recommends giving the personas funny nicknames (like “Ian The Angst-ridden”) to help us remember their core motivations. Although this does help you get inside their heads, be careful that the qualities you lump onto your personas don’t end up causing new, unintended stereotypes just from the name you give them. But Ian’s right; it’s not as simple as it seems.

(NOTE: Ian and Brian Bond can discuss these finer points in their upcoming panel discussion on personas at the Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara. In the meantime, here are a couple more ways to get started with personas.)

Personas are powerful. Sure, some people claim they’re useless because they are artificial, not real people. But here’s the thing: Not everyone thinks or behaves like you do. (Yes, I hear the echoes of “Duh!” reverberating from your monitors right now, but how many times have you had an argument with a client or colleague because they want to run a commercial, create copy, or add functionality that they like. Personas give you a framework to have informed discussions about who your customers are, how they behave, and what they want.

Personas allow you to have empathy for customers who aren’t like you. Besides, if they don’t work, you can always fire them.

Finally, Ian’s 7th step is perhaps the most important: TEST your assumptions! Personas give you a framework for not only seeing what people do on your website, but for understanding why they do it. Think about it. You may run a test to see what happened, but do you really understand why? That’s where personas can really yield fantastic results.

P.S. If your personas aren’t working as well as you’d like, we can always help you optimize them.

What: Search Marketing Expo – SMX West is certain to be to the “must-attend” interactive and search engine marketing event of the year on the West Coast, delivering superior value to conference delegates and exhibit hall attendees alike.

SMX West has sessions designed just for you, whether you’re just starting in search marketing or you’re a seasoned expert. Your All Access registration pass gets you in to the more than 50 search marketing sessions on the agenda.

• New to search? Participate in the SMX Boot Camp which covers all the bases of search marketing success: copywriting, link building, paid search fundamentals and search engine friendly web design. After the Boot Camp, you’ll have two full days to dive deep on your areas of interest before SMX West unwinds.
• Got some experience? Learn the latest techniques for achieving superior results in both paid and organic search marketing. There are more than 20 sessions designed just for your skill level.
• An expert? Heard of Search 3.0? Search 4.0? SMX West has entire days dedicated to keeping you ahead of the curve with the inside scoop on future developments that only the editors of Search Engine Land can deliver, topics like the personalized search revolution, the social graph, and searcher behavior.

Where: Santa Clara Convention Center — Santa Clara, California

When: February 26 – 28

Why: Because your customers are personas just like you (but different) and they’re more likely to find your business if you know what’s motivating their search.

More Info: Visit the SMX West homepage.

In a recent American Marketing Association article (”How Toyota Got So Smart“), Travis Adkins explains genchi genbutsu:

One of the most religiously followed of these practices is something that Toyota calls genchi genbutsu – roughly translated as “go and see.” In essence, this means that to truly grasp an issue, employees must get up close and personal with it.

The New York Times article gives an example of this practice with the story of Yuji Yokoya, a Toyota engineer who had been charged with the redesigning of the Sienna minivan:

He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans — on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets — and make Toyota’s superior.

In the AMA article, meanwhile, Adkins points out that it’s become much more difficult to “outknow” your competition:

There’s a difference between knowing and understanding, although the two are often confused. Two organizations might have the same knowledge, but the one that posesses [sic] understanding can see consequences and implications that remain invisible to the other.

In other words, you can’t just know the facts; you must be able to interpret them.

I believe that in order to go from knowledge to understanding, one must have real-world insight into one’s customers. You have to dig deeper, ask better questions, and yes, put yourself directly into your customers’ shoes.

We don’t all have the time and resources to go as far as driving a minivan in every state in every type of weather condition. But that’s where customer personas can be your best friend. Doing a deep and thorough uncovery is absolutely necessary. This will be the first step in going beyond just knowledge to understanding. But creating personas gives you the missing link between knowledge, understanding, and applying that understanding.

Personas help you take facts about customers turn them into insight. And not just insight, but actionable insight.

So start with genchi genbutsu -- go and see. Then apply personas to turn that very valuable knowledge into crucial understanding.

Isn’t it bad enough that my people can’t even agree on how to spell the holiday?

One might expect Balducci’s, the fine food emporium, to know better. After all, they wrote the we’re-not-taking-sides-but-you-should “holiday” menu(s)*:

Balducci’s has everything you need to create a magnificent holiday meal, no matter which holiday you celebrate. Whether it’s an informal Chanukah get-together, an elegant Christmas feast, or even a glamorous New Year’s Eve fete, with our Holiday Entertaining Menu and Ordering Guides you’ll find all the ingredients for a memorable meal.

Ah, but that just shows how thoughtful they can be online. What about when NancyKay Shapiro goes into one of their stores to shop for the “holidays”? Apparently, the product doesn’t match the persona.

Okay, so it’s not like they were marketing this for Ramadan. And maybe I did have a prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich for lunch, but that thing was good. (Don’t tell my rabbi.) Besides, a stock room clerk — not a marketing manager — probably made this mistake. Still, it’s important for marketers to be careful with those “holiday” promotions.

Happy Chanukah/Hanukah/Hanukkah**!

(*Which, for some reason, you can only download as a PDF. It looks good, but why not host it on the site? That way, customers could have the option to download, print, or email to a friend.)

(**To anyone for whom that’s relevant.***)

(***Now do you see why George Costanza recommended we all just celebrate “Festivus”?)

[Hat tip to the Good Experience blog.]