Inbound After Hours Podcast - Why Creating Buyer Personas Is Critical - Episode 6

This week we chat about the importance of creating personas and why they are a critical foundation to your marketing strategy. We’ll discuss how to overcome challenges when creating personas and give you advice on how to overcome them.

In This Episode We Discuss:

• What are personas?

• How do we create personas?

• How long should a persona document be and where do you draw the line?

• How many personas should we create?

• Plus loads of useful persona tips

Watch...

Listen... 

This Week's Show Resources:

• Get Your Own Buyer Persona Creation Template

The Read-Friendly Version Of This Podcast & Vlog:

What Are Personas?

Personas are a kind of super researched target customer. How it differs from a traditional "target customer",  however, is that it's a conceptual, semi-fictional person.

The best inbound Personas also cover a Day In The Life and other aspects of the person's life and attitudes. This includes what the Persona's Roles, Responsibilities and Goals are - and not just the ones your client can help with, but in wider life too.

Inbound Marketing Personas also cover the Pain Points they face, the Common Objections to using your service, the Experience Desired when using your service, How They Learn and where they hang out on Social Media.

Here's a filled out example of one of our Persona Templates...

How Do You Create Personas?

If you're an in-house marketer looking to add some better depth to your marketing personas, speak to your repeat customers, survey one time customers and interact on your social platforms more often.

The best way to get some truly useful information for your Personas, however, is to speak to prospects in the sales process and lost leads. This means working as closely as possible with your sales guys in order to get a full understanding of the pain points and challenges that the market is facing.

Then, you can formulate a Persona Document which gives you and your writes the best chance of creating content which resonates, educates and offers value.

How Long Should A Persona Document Be And Where Do You Draw The Line?

We tend to have a Persona somewhere between 1,200-2,000 words long, but the emphasis is most certainly on quality over quantity. Massively.

You're best keeping it in distinct sections which can be easily used for reference and organisation.

If you need a hand, check out this free Persona template.

How Many Personas Should You Create For Inbound Marketing?

You'll be best using 1-3 well thought out Personas, generally.

Then, in the future, once all of these Personas have had a piece of content produced for each stage of their Buyer's Journey, you could create a super-niche Persona for a one-off campaign.

For example, you might work in the marketing department at a big printing firm and target other marketing managers ordinarily, but you might want an inbound campaign (or two)'s worth of content aimed at Universities for their Freshers or Prospectus materials.

In this instance, it would be worth have a dedicated Uni Marketer Mark as a Persona.

Some Other Useful Persona Tips

And, last but not least, some general tips for creating inbound marketing Persona documents and how to use them:

• Keep them fresh.
• Keep them handy and use them for all your copy and content, from social to your contact us page.
• Always be formulating knowledge and ideas which can be used in sharpening your Personas.
• Personas are NEVER finished. The moment a new app comes out or the market changes, your Personas are out of date.
• Remember to speak to lost leads and prospects as much, if not more than, existing customers.
• Understand that Personas exist to help you produce content which is context friendly and more likely to resonate and educate... and therefore lead to more sales conversations as a result.

Thanks so much for joining us this week.

Have some feedback you’d like to share, do it in the comments below!

Full transcript:

- Hey everyone, welcome to Inbound After Hours, episode six. Today we'll be talking about personas.
So, what are personas, Andrew?

- Good question. That's perfect for this podcast. We use personas for our inbound marketing, it's very much a core of everything we do. Especially from a content perspective. I mean, if you know anything about inbound marketing, you'll know it's about answering problems, solving what we call pain points. And these pain points are just tied very, very closely to this thing that we call persona.

It is a person. It's meant to be your ideal customer. Not necessarily the people you deal with day-to-day, but the people that you want to be dealing with. What it actually does is centralises your focus from a marketing perspective. So that you just aiming at one to three, maybe, types of people, as opposed to- if you're a business owner, you'll know you've got hundreds of different types of customers. You might have one great customer, but they're very unique. Even though they're a great customer, it's not worth spending all your marketing on their likes and what they struggle with, 'cause they're so unique. So what this does, brings it a bit back to the first step and it just goes, "Right, we've got two or three. "Let's spend our time and get the most bang for our buck "in marketing sort of terms for those people." And that's why we make 'em.

- Is this a fictional person then? Does this persona have a name?

- Yeah, it can be. Good advice is if you have got a great customer who you want more of, you can base it exactly on this person so it can be a real person. Whether or not you use their real name, it's up to you, but it's usually semi-fictional representation. You can add in, sort of, you're speaking to your real customers. We'll go on to this later, but when you're actually building your persona, you should be speaking to your customers. So, the stuff that's in the persona is from reality. The pain points are from reality, and then...

- The behaviours as well as reality, isn't it?

- Yeah.

- That's an important bit as well, like getting your head around. When I first started, working in Inbound was like the, you include a day in the life of the persona. So that you know down to what they'd just gone through when they're needing a blog on the train. Like, I don't know, they're jealous that their husband's staying at home that day, or whatever. Then you know what mindset they're in and it helps.

- That's the difference between a persona and a target audience site. The traditional marketer's like, "Who's your target audience?", and that's based on demographic sort of data and such like, whereas a persona takes that and goes deeper, doesn't it? It goes into the person, what his personal goals and ambitions, what's his challenges? What's his day look like? And that's how we go deeper and produce better content, really, isn't it?

- Well that, yeah, and you need that to do Inbound, because we're not writing about... We are writing about the very bottom of the funnel stuff, about how a marketer can increase conversion rate, for example, but we also need to be writing about the stuff way before they even get to conversion rate. It's just about struggling to get things signed off, or becoming a better marketer. Improving the CV, and you're wanting to talk about things that they deal with in and out of work, because that's the stuff that's gonna cut through and really speak to people. It's very personal to them, so if we can define at least half of that in a persona, then you get a real good head-start with content marketing especially.

- Okay, what does it look like? Is it just a word document? And what kind of topics and questions need to be in there? Can you just sort of help us out, how we visualise it?

- Yeah. So the persona contains a few very simple sort of demographic, you start with. You probably get a picture. I mean, we've got an example here of one that we--

- An old template.

- It's an old template, it's something we've used in the past, but you've got a picture. It's nice to visualise. This, again, a persona's something that's not just for me who made the persona, to give to the client, and we just have it filed away. If anything, it's not really for me or the client, really, it's for the people who are doing the marketing, 'cause the writers, sales people.

- When they're making you ask that audience.

- Yeah, meant to have this by your desk, in a folder, before you write a blog or do an email. Let's have a read through, and think what do we wanna be saying?

- So you write everything back to that.

- Exactly, yeah. So you'd start with some demographic information, roles, their goals and challenges. The way we did it, yeah, we'd just bullet point that at the start, and then you go--

- Those goals as well, they're everything, aren't they? They're not just...

- Yeah, so again, yeah, all their roles could be like Dad, challenges could be, you know, progressing in their career. So the personal element, specific role for things.

- That's one of the most common things I see people miss out, is they'll put what the goals are as like, increase visitors or increase leads, if you look at a marketing manager, you want to be thinking this guy wants to get a promotion, he wants to--

- 'Cause that's the real goal, isn't it? Increasing traffic.

- Exactly.

- When you speak to them as well, in the content, is like if you get spoken to as a marketing manager, rather than a person who is a marketing manager.

- There's a big difference isn't it?

- It's gonna resonate more.

- So yeah, I'll just quickly run through. So we have the overview stuff, a bit of demographic information, so age, location, so the city centre people, who live out on the countryside. Company size and sort of industries, and income and things like that. So you're sort of placing this person, so their income could dictate what they do outside of work, maybe their sort of attitudes to work itself. And then we just run through things like the challenges, the goals, pain points which is the big one, which everyone probably talks about in relation to personas. The day in the life, as Paul's mentioned, is a really good one. You can get pretty creative with them. The main aim with those is just to know, when is this person checking their email, when are they checking social media? What do they do when they get home? You got people that get home and carry on working, get home and learn. You got people who get home and completely forget about work. And if you, especially things like e-commerce, you wanna, that's where people do switch off, about thinking particularly about what they're doing in the day. So it all, and that all ties into when you send your emails, when you launch things, when you try to actually speak to these people.

- Yeah, where did they come about? Are they on Facebook, are they on Twitter?

- That's it, yeah, what social platforms do they actually bother being on? And that can be quite hard to find out at first, and it does change constantly. We've--

- How are you finding that out then?

- How do we find that out? You've just gotta be in those platforms. If you're in Twitter, you use it, have a scrape around, search your hashtags and see, and jumping profiles, see who's actually speaking on this platforms. The best way to start internally is to speak to customers. We try our best to sort of interview best customers for clients and ourselves. And ask them directly. That can come... It sometimes, if you're working in house, you've probably got some sort of relation with customer service team, or the sales team. Have a speak to them, and find out who they've got good relationships and try and have a joint call with them. If you don't have any access to that, I think you've got to get out there. Get on LinkedIn, get on Facebook, get on Twitter and do, have a look around in your industry. Look at some of the influencers and who are following those people. Look at their profiles, what are these, who are they thought they were. The people that are following and watching the stuff and interacting with the content we want to be producing. And try and sort of work your way back from the platform.

- Lot's of surveys as well, you can't directly speak to people. I mean, you should try and speak to people. If you can't, surveys are probably the best best option of getting new primary data really. And find out, such as what platforms you want, is a nice easy drop down or checklist question on a survey, as well.

- Ask people you know as well. I find useful. If you're selling an X job, you'll know someone, you'll know someone who knows someone.

- There's very few personas you can relate to, I find, and I'm

- Yeah.

- Definitely.

- I find that most, most of these customers.

- This is interesting: objections. So this is one of our personas. This guy is called Marty Mike, there is also Marty Mary. And right at the end, we've got objections to Digital 22. So that's, do you wanna talk a little bit more about that? That can work for any business?

- Yeah, so that's a really interesting one, and when you're writing content, particularly about the funnel content, when it comes to objections, that's quite key to know what their hesitations would be from buying from you. The place we actually get that type of information from is the sales team. So they were the people selling to this particular persona. What are the friction points, the objections they're getting back from clients.

- That'll be important, make sure you ask when you lose a job, feedback and stuff isn't it?

- Yeah, that's why it's important not just to survey or speak to customers, it's to speak to prospects and people in the industry in general. But if you're an in-house marketer, speaking to your sales team can get you a hell a lot of estate in speaking to your customer service team as well can get you hell a lot of estate as well. That information's in the company somewhere. You just need to find the right personnel, and it's normally the person who's front-line speaking to customers, day-in, day-out that'll know most of that.

- Okay, some examples. Some examples hiding behind that laptop. Some examples, no guarantee it will work. We've got that, we've got has been burned in the past by other agencies.

- Yeah, very typical.

- State's lack of budget. This is things what we come up.

- Yeah, and that's just come from our...

- Experience.

- Experience of speaking to people and what their normal hesitations are around starting in brand marketing or working with an agency in particular.

- Yeah, you mentioned Andrew, pain points and challenges. The knock off effects on that on the website and the copy, can you talk a little bit more about that, guys?

- Yeah, I've got a quick list here, of just how we try and use personas in content. The obvious one is your blog titles and you write your blogs and your tone of voice. Which is the obvious use for these, but we just take it as far as we possibly can to times where you probably think you're going as far as you possibly could with it. Your social messages, so even when you've written a blog, sharing it, use pain points in the share, landing pages, obviously, and thank you pages in your social ads, your emails, your workflows, web copy, just any words on your website should bear this in mind. Pain points specifically.

- And that's all represented with the GDD websites. It's good to get them in early doors there as part of your strategy. For Inbound.

- So your websites as well.

- The site as well, the site becomes Inbound.

- The strategic side of it is not just the copy and do that, it's the copy designed, you know, before you've even written anything, it's like what do we write, and the pain points, you usually, a lot of blog titles. And they can come from sales, income fromor customer service or whoever. You've got objections, write a blog about it. Sort of endless leaves all weekly, because that's what people want to get rid of, so if you can help them do that, they'll pay you.

- So it's a must-have really, anything we do, the first thing we do is write a persona.

- 'Cause it's in our strategy session, we'll kick off with any client, you can't really do much. Like Andrew's listed all the things there that uses persona, but I think the lists' a lot shorter the things you can do without them, really. So it is key. And again, when we speak to people who's trying to self-implement Inbound, or has worked at other agencies, and it's failed, when we say where's your personas? That's always one of the things missing, and it's like, well...

- You've got 30 of them, or not enough.

- Yeah, exactly.

- Yeah, we'll come to that in a minute.

- I find that most people can't be arsed. Really, 'cause if you get into Inbound, the exciting thing's probably doing the content, doing the downloads and it's like--

- Posting a blog.

- Post blogs. I'm doing social. And this is actually, it's a lot of work, and it's a lot of time as well. We spend a good 60 days strategy to actually come up with these, and some people just really don't wanna do that, like I just wanna get on Facebook and start talking about my business, and it's sort of, the intent's in the right place but I've never seen it work, I've never seen it actually go, I'm actually, you didn't need that persona. You've smashed it. It just doesn't..

- It comes with strategy in generally, really. And most businesses just think, cost, in-house marketers are under pressure from the boss just to start getting results, we're under pressure from clients just to start putting stuff out there. Everyone wants to skip strategy, which personas are a big part of. But like you say, it doesn't ever really go right. And for every hour you put in to strategy, and personas is one of them, you get the rewards back out of that in the long run. There's no doubt about it.

- It's gonna take time.

- Yeah, oh God.

- In your report, day in, day out, you do this out, you write personas. But I've seen them done pretty quick. I know it's 60 day full strategy session, but people are listening now, thinking, shit, 60 days?

- It's not 60 days out.

- How long does it take you, who does this day in and day out?

- From when you sit down to make it, I don't know, it could take up to somewhere between half a day and two days, but all that data that's in there, you've been accumulating from the strategy documents, the strategy meeting, your research, keyword research, speaking to USC, other guys, speaking to the sales people, speaking to your client contact, and then what I like to do, after all that's been formulating for a couple of weeks, or up to a month, then you pull it together. Then you go through the exercise again and sharpen it, and then you get to the client. I don't know, is that the way you do it?

- Definitely. I think it's like, people who cook for a living, the prep work, the chopping, and getting it all laid out, getting everything lined up, the actual cooking of the meal takes you 10 minutes, and then you're done, and that's the same with personas. Interestingly, we've, the way we speed it up is we've got an awesome template, which...

- Ker-ching.

- Download off our website, which will help you speak, so at no end, 'cause of the things when I started two years ago, we were working, was one of the first things we actually worked on was a good persona template. Taking that from the idea stage and having it, and it's something that we worked on and improved over time, and that took a lot of work. And I think that puts people off.

- It's supposed to be able to overlap, as well, aren't we? From a lot of similar things from being a marketing professional to being, I don't know, a construction professional. There will be similar overlaps.

- Yeah, definitely.

- Which you then know where to go and look. You look at the construction version, or those places where the marketing there was learning.

- I think the in-house people, as well, if you're tasked with coming up with persona, you know in the back of your mind, you can probably write it all out in an email or whatever, but you're conscious of how it's gonna look, because you're gonna have to present it to people, you'd have to print it out and give it, produce it around the company to people who probably aren't as on board with it as you, don't get it, aren't interested. You've gotta win people over. So again, our template will have... It's a one page document, it's very well designed and easy, you can interactively sort of edit it and print it out. And that's gonna, it'll make it concise for you, so you're not gonna be writing reams and reams, but also, you can save it and send it round your company, and that's gonna give you a head start and get people on board. They've got a print out, your boss can just quickly have a look, then done, use it in a meeting when you're trying to explain what this thing is that you've created. People aren't gonna get too bored with it. Immediately, and I think that'll help a lot. So that's a big thing which you do a lot of work before, but you just, when you get to the end, you could write pages and pages, once you've been doing it for weeks and weeks, you don't want all this stuff, and you think, I just wanna write it all down. Write all this, write down on Tuesday's different to a Wednesday. So you have to like just bullet point it.

- It becomes symbolic, doesn't it? You're thinking about the main point or a bullet point, or something in their day or an objection, which actually represents hundreds of different things, 'cause there's 50 different leads who match that persona. And they've all got their own little angle on that pain point. So you need to, it's nice being able to own it when you get the right feeling, and it's like, that comes

- So I think if you can speak to the right people within your company.

- I think if you're in house, that's a little bit easier as well, 'cause obviously a challenge as an agency is we've gotta have a meeting, we've got to get the stakeholders around the table, altogether and we've gotta have sales and customer service, and the business owner, usually, et ceterea, et cetera, and getting them round tables quite hard. Whereas you're in house, you can probably just pop over to Joe in customer service and Ben in sales and have these little conversations, can't you?

- When you had your agency, you designed the agency before, but Inbound is a thing. What was the equivalent of... 'Cause I've only ever known this.

- We call them avatars. But back then we didn't have marketing Mike, we just did general overview of the target market.

- Is it like a marketing, again, yeah?

- A lot of this is emotion based. Family based or challenges, so it's so much more in depth. We used to do top level avatars.

- So like you--

- Which is a lot companies do target markets.

- The marketing manager, it was this, this and this.

- Demographic.

- Demographic, yeah.

- Age between this and this.

- It's interesting, the thing with personas, it goes from, whilst they are called marketing professionals, marketing Mike, the actual content isn't about the role, it's about the person. And that's how it's different, isn't it? You're sort of trying to get through to somebody outside of work, really, so that you're sort of sticking around.

- Definitely.

- The way Inbound works as well, isn't it? The people it vibes with, is the people who are looking, who can't resist looking at their work emails, who are eating about work things.

- They're the ones that you're gonna convert. Virtually work with somebody, yeah. And actually make the move. Interestingly, something I've advised people to do, who are trying to make these themselves, is if you're a one man band marketer, and you're in an uphill struggle to sort of sell Inbound to your company, but you believe in it, you've got all these ideas. I would say, before, you know, you book in with your sales team or customer service, your boss, all these people, you're not gonna do. Actually to make your own, your persona on your assumptions. And take that round and get everyone to disprove what you've put down. And say, is that right? Is that right? If you show that to your boss, if he goes, that's all wrong, this is what you should do.

- You've gotas well, haven't you?

- You've got that communication stream, so I'd say it's an easy step, download the template Fill it out with what you think, top of your head, what you've learned since you've been in your role, do a bit of research but nothing major, and send it round. If it gets slated, that's awesome, you've triggered people.

- That's feedback still, isn't it?

- Yeah, and then you start that ball rolling and like, what is this? What are you doing?

- You'll be surprised as well, people who go, oh, my Mrs does this. I'll show you it there.

- Yeah, exactly, and then you start that communication brewing.

- One thing we never did, we never involved, we would write it, and that'd be it forever. I know we were constantly evolving. We find something out about persona, that we update it on our system, and it's constantly evolving, so that's something to...

- Like anything to do with strategy or research, extremely hard to nail 100% first time, isn't it?

- The habits change as well.

- And, yeah, the actual changes rather than you just being slightly off the mark, as well, so it is good to review them, once a quarter, it depends on your business and your volume and stuff, once a quarter, once every six months.

- And if you're working as well. I've always found that if you launch something, you're gonna get your leads through, that's great, and you'll get some that are absolutely bang on the money marketers, and you'll get a handful of people that are nothing what you expected or there's a load of sales people when you're aiming for marketers, and you think, actually, well they are now, we're talking to those there, and you think, you've just gotta watch what comes in.

- Is that were the PA came from? 'Cause we had... I remember being confused when I first joined about why is the business, why are we not targeting the business? We've got a business persona there, we know what you use, we were targeting the PA. Which is the business owner going. Andrew, could you just look for, find some stuff on this.

- It's interesting--

- That's typical, isn't it?

- It's aimed personally.

- Yeah, with that one in particular, we found that, yes, the business owner or sort of the project manager was the ideal person, but the earlier stuff that we were creating, that sort of ideary sort of was never on their to do list, they always delegated that. So we then aimed and did a persona on the PA, on the receptionist who's tasked with actually finding that information out, and spoke to them on the level of, we know you need this information for your boss, to do this quickly, like here's this full thing, but we're gonna help you. This is, we know you need to price the size on the timeline, that's all they care about. The figurative they. And that works really well. Yeah, how they figured that out, and that actually came internally from the client, who said, yeah, when we're on the phone, it's always mid-30s women PAs having to sort of figure this out and get some quotes and get some ideas together.

- That's weird when you get down to that level, isn't it? When you have... It's like stereotypes.

- Yeah, that's it. It's a bit weird.

- You can see why she's free doing it, but then you look at the leads and stuff, and it's like, actually, they're not coming out.

- We found actually, that we started writing stuff for PA's, and the traffic that was up. Sometimes the people that downloaded it ended up being the business owner, but then you track it and you find that they're from the same company, that person that was viewing everything, then they were sending links across. So the actual conversion comes from the ideal person, but you just, the net has been made for the early stage researcher.

- You touched on something earlier, how many, I know we've had a client, mentioning no names, he wanted something like a 17 personas doing, which is a lot of work. Once we actually did the research, it was nearly five. How many, in a typical business?

- I personally don't think there's an actual limit, I think it's more a case of where you start. So we had the client who started with Inbound wanted to start with 30, and you're thinking, right, we've gotta do an awareness based piece of content, the decision based piece of content, the consideration and then we've got a blog all around this for each persona, like fine, we can do that, but we need to be blogging seven times a day. Which is unrealistic.

- Yeah, to start with, it almost kind of makes it irrelevant, to actually bother.

- It does. You don't get the penetration in any persona well enough to do that job really well. So I think you've gotta marry it against your resources.

- But why is that?

- What's that sorry?

- Why won't you get that?

- Yeah, so if you've got to target, if you've got to target and write to 30 people, the amount of content you're producing is still the same, then you're gonna be releasing one blog related to that persona every 60 days or something, rather than releasing something almost twice a week. You're wanting to traction quickly.

- You've also only got one social platform per platform. Which is just gonna need to be, 100 messages an hour, and no-one can pick up, there's a very slim chance they're gonna see something related to the persona.

- They only see 20, all related to them, so just switch off.

- And tune out, yeah.

- Yeah, your blog round ups are crazy, your content's, you're gonna only appeal, and then your segmentation, when you're building your database, your persona segments, you're gonna have two in that one, in that one, rather than 50 in that to start.

- So why don't we do just one?

- 99% of business that we deal with, I don't think we'd need more than three, or four.

- I'd say three. Two works just fine.

- If they're being honest with themselves, as well, I think, when you speak to marketers, they're actually much more aware of this, but when you speak directly to business owners, and say, who can buy your product? They'll say anyone. Yeah well, maybe, but not very likely in a lot of volume. If you just spoke really well to this one person, you'll sell a lot more.

- I think it scares business owners.

- To switch people off.

- Because you're saying, "Don't sell to everyone".

- Yeah.

- In their heads, but we're not saying that, we're saying sell better. There's enough marketers out there to sustain your business forever. But people are scared, and then traditionally, you just tried to appeal to everyone and hope. Whoever comes in, that's who we'll sell to. Whereas now we're saying like, you do have to ignore those people because they're just not efficient.

- If you try and speak to everyone you speak to no-one. And I think that's so true, your conversion rate will be very low. If you speak to a specific audience, a specific, one's great, but if there's two or three, you can probably still add to it.

- How can you refine, as well? That you're doing something well. You're not gonna know, are you? If you're spreading it so wide, you're not gonna get that level of data.

- I like having three per client.

- I think that's about right, isn't it?

- Its not like you've got some, very few things that apply to all three, you've got some that are very, very niched to one, but most are two, and it's sometimes those two, and it's sometimes those two, and sometimes those two.

- I think you always end up in tiered system as well. Whenever we've got three personas, how we sort of get a client to three is say let's have three, but what's your top one? What's your second one, what's your third? Then we'll sort of direct our stuff towards those mainly, and sort of work back from there.

- And I think theof doing it as well is if you look at your target one persona, for example, and we're gonna write for this persona and the web copy's gonna speak specifically to the persona, and I think people are scared that no-one except that persona will get in touch. And that never ever works out. You still will get. If someone really wants your product, and they read it, and say, this product's for chefs, but I'm not quite a chef, there's something slightly different, but I still want that, they'll still buy it.

- It's all about you being confident, as well.

- Yeah.

- If you say, we're creating the best ever software for marketers ever, and I'm a business owner who's got a team of marketers, I might go, I want that for my marketers. It attracts me because you're shouting out about you being a specialist for your persona. It attracts the people on the fringes as well.

- It's like, why, I don't know, why do we wear Go Techs coats to walk to work in? It's designed for upper management.

- Exactly.

- You are always gonna get those people who will just want it. So I think that's a myth about tuning people out, but I can see why a business owner would be scared of doing it.

- Where do you draw the line? You could go on and on and on. This is a three page, now we put it in a one page template, we're gonna put in the notes. Can we also put in the notes a template filled in, so the guys can see what we actually--

- Probably just bump those on there.

- Put a couple of hours on there. So where do you draw the line? One page?

- What I've actually got to the point of doing is sometimes, I've actually had two documents, so you have the one page for sharing round, and that's the reference guide. If you do have a lot of data, there's no point in binning it or just hiding it. You might as well get it down in a usable form, for somebody that maybe is just for you whereas just marking the agency to have more in depth, but we've got more sort of like need to read this stuff. But sometimes I start, and yeah, this one is three pages, a lot more descriptive stuff in, then I'll create the one pager, give that to client or your boss, someone who doesn't wanna be reading reams and reams, but then you keep this stuff, because it is valuable to you. If you're a marketer that spend ages putting this together, it is gonna help you. Not really an answer. I would always go for the one-pager, for distribution.

- It needs to be memorable as well. Like, I know Andrew said earlier, that it's something that you should have there in front, but the reality is you're too busy for that. It's something that you look at during a campaign, planning the campaign, in the middle, and when you're reviewing the data at the end. And then you review the persona, it's sell for every quarter or six months. If you speak to our rivals, they know, persona pain points, just know them in your head, that's why they one page persona helps.

- Okay, well we've got a couple of minutes left. Key takeaways are anywhere from one to three personas. We've got that. What else have we got? One page, yeah? Look at emotions. Not just the professional side, the content. Andthe tone of voice, buyer's journeys.

- Ties into everything you're gonna do.

- Anything else we've missed there? Big takeaways?

- Speak to everyone in your company, even if you find that difficult, just get something down on your one page template and pass it around, and get them to discredit it, 'cause that will give you good feedback and you can make it better.

- And push them as well, how many times have you seen it when you say, who do you speak to? It's X. And then you ask a few questions and you go, actually, it's not them, is it? It tends to be these kind of people.

- I think treat it like any market research, you've gotta get the closest people around you first, which is normally got the information from the client. Base it on that, then you wanna go online and do third party research, find what you can find online from stats websites. There's a lot of good persona websites out there that'll help you get a bit of research, and then thirdly, if you can actually interview the person and speak to them, that's primary research, and you're gonna get the best data from that. So treat it like any market research really, and go through those phases. And that's gonna get you your best personas.

- Just a quick one. If you do interview anybody, record it on your phone. Don't try and make notes. I've tried it in the past, write stuff down, you come and think, crap, that's rubbish.

- Yeah.

- Get your phone out, stick it on record, upload it, share it.

- Great tip, yeah.

- I like that.

- Thank you. Thank you gents. Well that wasn't too hard, was it? To express all that. I think we did okay. I'd like to know what you think.

- Yes, always.

- As always. So that's it for this week. Thank you. Please share. Please give us any feedback, that's always helpful.

- Let us know what you wanna talk about next.

- Yeah. Thanks guys.

- See ya!

- Thank you.

- Bye Facebook guys.