Thought Leader - Apryl Syed the use of personas in marketing

Foreign welcome to the Sage Thought Leadership Podcast. Experience support for confident business makers. Well, hi everyone, and welcome to our podcast. I'm Ed Kless, and with me today is my former Sage colleague and friend, April Syed. With a diverse background spanning leadership roles at Sage, Blythe Co, and bloomreach, April has honed her expertise in driving success across technology, marketing and sales domains. Now in her own consulting practice, her team specializes in landing pages, conversion optimization, driving revenue generation for businesses. From crafting compelling funnels to boosting sales and ensuring customer success, they help organizations create and execute winning strategies. Welcome to the Sage Thought Leadership Podcast, April.

Thanks so much, Ed. I'm so happy to be here and it's so nice to be, of course, in your presence.

So let's talk about something that you and I have spent a lot of time talking about previously, but you have to give me a short answer this time. Why do you do what you do?

Honestly, I do what I do because, you know, of our time that we spent together and, you know, all of the time that we spent working with the partners after very shortly, briefly. But my father passed away and after that happened, I really kind of searched my soul and said, what did I love most in my career? And it was the time that we spent on the road talking to partners, helping them in their businesses. And that's what I do now today, kind of full circle, is helping people grow their business.

Well, talk to me a little bit about the use of marketing Personas, and I will admit I'm a skeptic on this topic, so I'd love to hear what you have to say.

You know, this is, this is something that we work in all the time. And I could admit as well that I used to be a skeptic when it came to Personas. But what I've recently really uncovered and what we've seen working is that when you very well define Personas and you update those on a regular basis, these are not like we define them once and put them on the shelf. I think that's what happens a lot is folks define them once, put them on their shelves, and then we never visit the Personas again. How we use them is we kind of look at them in the context of what's now happening to that Persona today. What are they experiencing in their world? And we actually tap into emotion. What is the emotion that that Persona is going to feel? For instance, what did they previously just search on and then they landed on your landing page and what emotion did they have before that? Or they frustrated because they Experienced an issue, and they were searching for an answer, and then they landed on your landing page. How do we then convert that emotion into a buying emotion? How do we convert that emotion that they're feeling into something that's going to propel them to forward on your call to action? And that's where we see the Persona work, really do well, where it goes from ad, where we're using it, from the ad space and the language we're using there, into the landing page, into the call to action, and then all the way through the process. If we can get down to each Persona being very, very unique and even micro, then we see that we can increase someone's conversion rates by 3x or more, usually by a second iteration of a page.

There's a bit of a challenge there. Right. And I appreciate what you're saying with regard to constantly updating them. And maybe that's one of the reasons why I've been a skeptic about it is it's usually, you're right, somebody sitting on a shelf. But because we're not pictures, we're movies. Right. We're human beings. We don't live in the frozen space of time that a Persona does. So it requires this updating. But talk to me a little bit more about the emotional connection, because I think that's where you're making the leap from static to a little bit more dynamic.

Absolutely. If you think about, like, what's happening in our world today, there's. There's a lot of different influences. There's. There's, you know, potential of wars. People are, you know, maybe feeling the economic crunch, for instance. And if that applies to any one of your Personas, and that's their mindset right now, it would be important this quarter. Right. That we update the landing pages to reflect that. Reflect those feelings that that Persona is going to be feeling. And that's why I say they're not static. And by the way, landing pages and conversions should never be stat static either. We even work on a basis of where we're A and B testing two theories next to each other and landing pages. We see which one works, and then, great, we. We divert traffic to the one that works. But we don't stop there. We're then working on the next iteration of that. We're always iterating to slightly improve what we can with that. You know, we'll say call to action, or we'll also say that specific language to that Persona, and then we'll continue to always be iterating and updating that.

Yeah, I like that a lot. April, one of the things that you mentioned also is AB testing. And I just want to clarify something because that's also in the moment too. Just because A is popular today or this week or this month, doesn't mean that it won't be B in three months from now. So how is it that you kind of loop back on the a B test to make sure that you've got it right and you're not dismissing something? Well, we tested that a month ago and it didn't work.

Yeah, we usually think of landing pages in terms of elements and so we try not to test more than one element at a time so that we're getting kind of data on an element that works versus an element that doesn't work. So that could be a call to action language. It could be the hero section, it could be a pricing section, you know, and how we lay out the pricing on a page and we would only work on one of those elements at a time to test it. So technically what we think we're doing is actually building towards a better page because we're learning pieces about these various different elements. And of course you have to have structure in order to do that. You have to have, you know, the, the thought leadership in place to understand what is to test based on best practices. But over time you basically get like the best of breed of your types of landing pages. Then we get into, yeah, should we ever go back and test a certain thing. Well, based on a Persona? If we're seeing that a Persona might react better to maybe a particular element, we'll test it again. And you know, and that again goes from the ad might be different. That's going into the landing page, that's going into that conversion strategy.

And April, as you know, we have an exit question that we ask all of our guests and that is who is a hero of yours and why are they a hero?

This is a tough one for me to answer because I've been recently looking at a lot of women leaders, a lot of self made women leaders. My firm is over 50% women. It's something that I've really tried to foster an environment of folks being really rewarded for their contribution, their mind and what they contribute versus maybe what they look like or where they're from in the world. So I think a hero of mine is Vera Wang. She was, you know, self made. She remade her entire career into wedding dresses at the age of 40. And I've just been kind of reading a little bit about her journey and her story and how she really felt like maybe she was made her entire career into wedding dresses at the age of 40. And I've just been kind of reading a little bit about her journey and her story and how she really felt like maybe she was at this place where she didn't know what she was going to do next and then she launched into this amazing career doing something that she loves so much. So I'll go with Vera Wing.

And lastly, April, how can somebody contact you?

Yes, so we've got a special offer set up. Our company is Conversion Strategy Group, but our website is Conversion SG for the Strategy Group. And if you do that.com sage we have an offer to review a landing page for you. So if you go there and you submit a landing page, you can book a meeting time with us and what we'll do is give you our best practices of how we would transform that page. And that is a gift to all of your users and that's a great way to get in contact with me.

All right. And we will definitely put a link to that landing page in the show Notes April Syed thanks so much for being a guest on the Sage Thought Leadership Podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

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