Using Buyer Personas to kick start your Digital Marketing strategy with WSI’s Cormac Farrelly

Greetings everybody, welcome to the Wednesday, January 22nd, 2020 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. I emphasize 2020 because I keep writing 2019 in everything that I'm jotting down, so at some point I'm going to remember that we're in 2020. This is Eric Cook with WSI Digital. We work with clients to help them engage and connect with their customers. Online, I have been mentioning this for a number of weeks, and I am very excited that today, and Cormac, our guest, and I were chatting a little bit before the pre-show. I literally just changed the A record, and those of you that are geeks on the show know what that means. And our brand new poweredbywsi.com website is out and available. Cookie statement enforced. Blogs are there. Ebooks for downloads. Lots of cool stuff. We're really Really excited. This has been a labor of love and should have happened a while ago, but we've been so focused on taking care of our customers, we've kind of let our own little house of cards slip. But no more. We've got a new website and I'm super excited to release it to everybody. And you're among— well, you're the second to know because Cormac was the first aside from our team. But I'm excited to let you know that it is live. Feel free to stop by, check it out, hit the Contact Us. And let me know what you think. Today's show and all shows here at Free Webinar Wednesdays are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. If you would like to stop out and check out past shows, we've done a number already on our Digital Minds book that is now in its 3rd edition, and we've got a number of other authors that have joined. If you are attending today's show live and you would like to interact and ask a question or a comment or just say, hey, please feel free to use the chat function in your GoToWebinar panel, and we look forward to hearing from you. I love doing these webinars live, other than the fact that sometimes I might step on my tongue and say something that I didn't mean to say, but that's the joy of a live webinar. But it's great to hear from the audience and to get feedback. So feel free to use that, and I'll be keeping an eye on it during today's show. As I mentioned in the little intro, just a little bit ago, we are continuing our series on our Digital Minds book. It's now in its 3rd edition, and all the way from Ireland, I've got my good friend and fellow co-author Cormac Farrelly joining, and we're going to talk about this thing called personas. Cormac, welcome to Free Webinar Wednesdays, my friend. Thanks for taking time to share your chapter with us.

Thanks, Eric. Delighted to be here.

So I'm going to work a little webinar magic and send you the screen. Cormac and I have known each other a number of years. We both serve on WSI's Top Guns. I'm not exactly sure how many years you've been in WSI. I'm just starting number 13, lucky number 13. But him being in Ireland and me being here in the States, we don't get to see each other face-to-face a lot unless it's a conference or a Top Gun, but I've been threatening because it's also where one of my favorite beverages is headquartered. And I really, really need to fulfill that bucket list of coming out and spending some time at the Guinness factory. And if I do, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hire you to be my guide and take me around and show me the local ropes. You game?

We'll definitely take you up on that, Eric. We definitely show you a good time if you come to Dublin. That's a promise.

That would be awesome. So we see your slides. If you just want to give the folks that are listening today just a little bit of background about yourself, just so that they get to know you, who's on your team, and then let's jump in and talk about chapter numero 2 on defining ideal customers with personas.

Sounds great, Eric. So first of all, thanks so much for having me on the show today. It was interesting, you know, just chatting beforehand. It amazes me that you've been running this for 10 years every week. I mean, I mean, that's just an incredible accomplishment, and there's so much great content being shared on it each week. So, uh, so really delighted to be on the show. Um, I guess background, interestingly, you know, we're— I think it's 13 years as well, Eric. So, uh, we're at the same milestone point, you know.

Nice.

And, and like you said, you know, we've kind of grown up through the, through the WSI network. I mean, we, we run, um, an agency model for WSI here in Ireland. So, uh, I've team of 6 full-time marketers, digital marketers here, and we execute projects. Because Ireland is a small country, you know, we tend to execute projects across Europe. And, you know, it's always great when we get an opportunity to catch up at global convention and kind of share ideas from the network. I guess that's what WSI is all about. So really enjoy doing that.

Amen.

Okay, so I guess just to, you know, to kick in, so, you know, in terms of the Digital Minds book, you know, I've spent a lot of time over my career, you know, prior to WSI, I was in a consulting role with BearingPoint, and, you know, I've always been fascinated with the whole kind of customer experience model, and I guess one of the challenges that we have as marketers, and especially in the whole area of digital, is that there is so much stuff out there, is that the focus sometimes is around what you can do rather than what you should do, I suppose, right? So I guess defining your ideal customer really brings it back to basics, you know, and I think there's a tendency, you know, maybe to kind of try and communicate with everyone. So, you know, sometimes you'll talk to a brand and, you know, maybe they have like a really cool product and they'll say, you know, you'll ask them, so who would like to buy that? And they say, well, everyone, you know, I mean, it's a really cool product. But the challenge is you really need to get more specific than that. So if you communicate with everyone, no one hears your message. So you really need to make it a little bit more niche and you know, to give us an idea, if you're really trying to target everybody, you know, you're not really getting your message across. So, as an example, in the book, when I wrote this chapter, what struck me as an example of great marketing was Airbnb. So, you know, like yourself, Eric, you know, I travel a good deal and I don't really— I'm not a huge fan of hotels. So, you know, for me, you know, let's say I'm going to visit a client or I'm going to a conference. I love going to an Airbnb, and it really gives me an opportunity to set up like a temporary office there, for example, right? And maybe I'm spending a couple of days. So one of the challenges though with Airbnb for me has always been that it was kind of two things. One is Uh, you know, you kind of get an idea of the place from the pictures, uh, but you don't really know till you get there what the setup is going to be and if you're going to have a work desk and things like that. And the other thing was that, you know, you can't check in most of the time until, until 3 PM. So, um, what was interesting was I received an email from Airbnb, and the way they wrote the email, it said, hey Cormac, um, you know, we understand that you travel a lot for business and that you're based in Ireland. Okay. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking, okay, so they, they know that about me because I have a profile obviously set up within Airbnb. But what was interesting was they said, um, you know, we know that it's a challenge when you go traveling that, you know, uh, you know, maybe you want to set up a, an office and have your laptop and all of that working. And, you know, maybe you don't know which of the Airbnb locations offer that as a feature. So we've now introduced a new feature that allows you to include that in your search, right? So for me, I really got the impression that Airbnb were writing directly to me. They understand my problem and they're trying to fix it for me. Now, the reality is probably thousands of professionals all over the world received that same email that morning, but they had the unique ability of just making it very, very specific to me. And that's a great marketing experience, right? Because the message was very, very specific. And of course, I've been a huge advocate of their service ever since. So, you know, so that's kind of like an opening gambit on us. And—

Well, and the one comment on that, and I noticed we're not in presentation mode yet, so I just want to give you a reminder. I know we're all excited, but if you wanted to hit presentation mode, Um, for full-screen experience.

All right.

There we go. Um, but that very same Airbnb that went to you because they knew that you were a business traveler, if someone else travels with children and they typically use Airbnb for vacations and they need to have, you know, a space for kids to play or a playground, that email probably went out to different segments based off of, you know, children present. Or maybe I like to travel with my dogs, maybe there's Airbnbs that are pet-friendly. Um, because we have 4-legged children. We don't have the 2-legged kind, which are a whole lot less expensive. They don't have to go to college or drive cars, and you pay for insurance. But it's that concept of understanding who your audience is and making sure the message resonates. So, Cormac, you think that they're talking right to you, but they're just doing a good job of picking out your persona and making the message as relevant to you as possible.

That's exactly right. And the reality is, right, that I am also a potential customer for Airbnb in my personal life, right? So if I'm traveling, you know, maybe I am traveling with my wife and my kids, I've got different set of requirements. But what's interesting is they don't mix it, right? You've got to know that that is actually a different persona type. And when I'm traveling for business, that's kind of what I'm thinking of. And when I'm traveling off for vacation and holidays, I'm in a different mindset. And effectively, I'm a different customer. So So you don't need to mix it. Your marketing, I think, will be better if you can make that distinction and message accordingly, right?

Beautiful.

Cool. So, you know, and it kind of, if you want to, you know, bring it down to brass tacks, is, you know, our jobs as marketers, you know, we're spending a lot of time figuring out what we should be doing, you know, how should we be communicating with our customers, and really, you know, our job is to understand how the customer wants to buy, okay, and then we want to help them do it. Okay, now it sounds easy, but I think personas are a kind of a conduit into it. And it's interesting, like marketing, I think, has stolen a lot of concepts over the years from things that have worked well, but the whole idea behind personas was actually developed by a software engineer, okay? And it was really used for helping people to build good software. So the chap was Alan Cooper, and it was back in the, back in the '80s. And the idea was that he wanted like a really good user experience for people who were navigating through software applications and things like that, right? So marketing really kind of stole the concept and And, you know, they use it now to build kind of these buyer personas. And a buyer persona is, it's like a fictional representation of your ideal customer. And, you know, to give you kind of an idea, I'm just going to flip through a slide here. Just bear with me a second till I get to the right one here. Okay, so like kind of we've been talking about, you know, you've kind of got to see your faces in the middle, which is, is really somebody who's trying to market to everybody. And then you're, you're, you're really trying to visualize, uh, who your buyer is. So, you know, you know, is it, for example, um, you know, a working professional who's kind of maybe in her, you know, mid to mid to late 30s over on the left-hand side? Is it somebody who is, you know, maybe a pregnant lady, for example, who's got different expectations? The bustling family down here below who are around the table? You know, maybe it's the market, you know, often regarded as the silver market, who are maybe empty nesters. So it's important to kind of get a picture behind who it is you're trying to market to, and then The mechanism that we use to try and get a little bit deeper behind the person is to use this concept of an empathy map. Okay, so the quadrant in the middle is that we're trying to, you know, give the person some kind of background characteristics, you know. So it's kind of, if you're trying to market to someone and you say, well, we're trying to, you know, market to You know, females aged, you know, between 35 and 40. You know, da da da da da. That's a harder ask than it is to say, you know, we're trying to market to to Jennifer. Jennifer is, you know, a mum of two kids who are at school-going age, right? So so so now we've all got an image of who this person is that we're trying to market to, and the focus then is on. And we're using this to try and, and generate our marketing messages. So we want to know, what is it that, that drives Jennifer when she's making a decision? You know, what is the sort of information that, that they want to know? And more importantly, what is it that they don't want to know? Because what often happens is when we're creating our marketing messages is, is, you know, sometimes, like, let's say it's a, it's a software company. you know, and, you know, we're all on these different email newsletter lists and the marketing company and the software company sends out a message that says, oh, we've just announced this new feature and isn't it fantastic? And that has been— that message is all oriented around the software company rather than around the message that the customer wants to receive. So it's kind of key to get that balance right. It's also very important to kind of understand what it is that keeps the person kind of awake at night. So we kind of talk a little bit about You know, what their pain is, right? And it's trying to get to the bottom of that. What is it that's— what are the problems that the customer has that maybe our service or product can solve? And the flip side of that is the gain. So what is it if somebody started using our product or service? How would they kind of— how would either their personal or their work life improve, for example? Okay, and then that leads us into our whole USP. So we're trying to see is what is our unique selling proposition? Why, knowing what we know about Jennifer, why would they buy from us and not somebody else? So the key is, as we kind of go through these questions, right, is that there's— and, you know, people conduct this exercise differently, but when we're doing this with a client is we use this kind of concept of Post-it notes. So it's a collaborative experience where you get, you know, in an ideal scenario is you get somebody from the marketing department, you get someone from finance, someone from customer service, right? And you have somebody who's facilitating the session. And if you can, you get a customer in there as well. And you start kind of asking these sort of questions and coming up with the collaborative answers on it. And the idea behind it is that you're ultimately trying to create a digital persona. So you want to try and condense all of this information that you've gathered, and ultimately, um, if I just flip to the next screen here, uh, let me see if I get to the output. Here we go. Here we have a digital output of the, of the target persona, and, and now we actually have something that we can we can take into our software applications. Because I think the things that you mentioned earlier on, Eric, and, you know, my example about Airbnb, you can't do them at scale unless you've got some sort of marketing technology to help you do that. And I think one of the failure points on the whole persona building concept is that there isn't a follow-up, right? So some companies get it and they know, you know, there's no point in us investing a whole bunch of funds and finances in marketing if we don't do the persona build. So they kind of get that bit, but then unfortunately the output that they get from the exercise sits on a shelf and gathers dust, right? So really where it's successful is that the information that's gathered in this process is then fed into your CRM system. So You know, I think I'm sure, you know, most people on the call would be familiar with the concept of having your contact records. You know, if you're an organization that has sales leads coming in, you know, so I'm kind of, I'm really talking kind of B2B, I suppose, at this point. And your sales conversations and you have sales contacts coming in, you're most likely storing them in a CRM system. But where, where things really, really start to happen is where you can connect, um, the, the personas of your ideal customer to the leads within your CRM system, because then you can start marketing to them differently. You have a concept of segmentation and you're able to market to them differently. Is that making sense?

Absolutely. And a couple of questions for you, because we've done a number of persona exercises in the banking space because most people that participate in Free Webinar Wednesdays, although I don't think I've mentioned banking yet. So we're, uh, 19 minutes in and this is my first banking reference. So kudos to me, I guess. But we've done this for a number of banks, and when we get the bankers together, I've seen— and you probably have seen it when you run this for your clients— there might be different ways people would go about that Post-it note process. We've seen some instances where a designated leader will either be appointed or kind of just resonate with the group and everything runs through him or her. And he's the writer. And I say he, because that oftentimes is the— somebody male takes the lead.

Yeah.

But everything runs through them and they write everything. And then we've had others, which is more of what was like when we did this, um, at an event where everybody just grabs a sticky note and you're like throwing elbows and hip checks because everybody's just doing their own thing. thing and throwing stuff up, and then you discuss afterwards. So it's more of just a free-for-all brainstorming session versus an organized collection of thoughts. Have you found one works better than the other, or maybe some observations on where pros and cons are with either of those strategies?

Yeah, I think my preference is, you know, the organized collection of thoughts, the latter one, right? Because I think you— it gives the— it gives more structure to the process. I mean, the reality is it's difficult, and this has just been our experience, is that it can be quite difficult in getting the right people in the room. Okay, so—

Sure.

And the right people, you know, it includes, you know, some of the busy C-level executive types as well. So getting the diary together, you know, what we usually find as we do this sort of process is you're probably looking about a 2-hour window. And if you don't have it facilitated and have a decent structure behind it, I think what can often happen is that you don't have time at the end to kind of get everyone on board and kind of get some sort of a level agreement. Because, you know, I think what can happen is— or what you don't want is, I guess, is the facilitator or the person running the workshop takes all this messy output at the end and actually miscalculates, right? And the digital output that they create isn't actually a good representation of what the workshop was about. So that would be, you know, so I think nearly that and also giving the kind of attendees a little bit of a heads up as to what the process is going to look like so that they can kind of be thinking about it and that they get it. Whereas if they go in cold, you don't want to obviously limit the brainstorming, but I think if, if, if the people attending the workshop have an idea as to what they're going to be expected to do, it helps, it helps make the process a little bit quicker and smoother.

Cool. Good. And then one other question. How do you determine who to start with? So do you go into your existing customer list and find out who your most profitable clients are? Do you figure out where you really want to grow your business and speculate over where you want to go? Because there's only so much time, and if you've got 2 hours, you can probably get through maybe 1 or 2. Where do you prioritize and who do you put at the top of that list and then work your way through?

That's a, that's a great question, Eric, you know, and, um, you know, I'm not sure I have the definitive answer on it. But for us, the way that we like to do it is to send out a questionnaire to the executive team and whoever we think within the organization. I mean, we need the client's input on this as to who they think should be involved. But our view at that questionnaire stage is to send it out as wide as possible. So you're getting lots of different input and you're asking that same question is, who is our ideal customer? Or who do we think our customers are? Or who do we think our most profitable customers are? And you're asking that same question of people who are looking at things from a customer service point of view. So they're thinking, oh, well, this particular customer type tends to be more of a pain in the you-know-where. And you know, they're difficult to—

We'll keep it PG-friendly, don't worry.

In Ireland and in the States, right? So—

No, you can say you-know-where. That's okay.

I'll allow that. You don't have to bleep me out after.

Hey, I've said a lot worse on this show, so don't you even worry about that. All by mistake, of course.

Right, right. But, you know, I mean, customer service look at things like maybe they're a very costly person. They might be high revenue earners, but they're very costly to support. So that's a factor. So I think what's kind of nice about that is that, and you send it by questionnaire, people don't feel kind of intimidated about sharing that sort of information. So, so then, you know, what, what we'd normally do is we'd kind of sit down then with the, with the stakeholders prior to the persona workshop and say, look, this is the data we've collected from, from all of the people in your, in your, in your organization who has something to share on it. And, and, and now we've got some decisions to make. So that's, you know, and then, and then I guess it's, it's, there's a kind of an amount of consensus building, because I think all of the points that you said are valid. You know, it's like, so, so what What happens, you know, should we be targeting our most profitable? And it's not always that, right? It's about who is the target customer that you think kind of gets it when it comes to your product or service.

Right, right. Well, I know when we've done this for some banks, they've had— in the banking industry, it's called an MCIF. It stands for a Marketing Customer Information File System. And that will take a lot of the financial data and it'll prioritize the profitability. And you've heard of the 80/20 rule, businesses kind of live by it, but 80% of the profits are generated by 20% of the customers. So you find out based off of that analysis what that 20% looks like. So there's oftentimes a desire to start there, but we also know that the millennials and the next digital generation might not necessarily be the most profitable customer segment. But that's really where the future of the bank or the organization is. And so they might need to kind of look away from profitability, but look at longevity and survival and say, but if new customers aren't coming in and we're not cool and hip with all the things that the millennials and the younger generation like to have, we may not be able to sustain a customer base over the next 5 years. Because they're going to go to all of the other services that are doing the cool new stuff, and we're not doing it as a traditional bank or law office or dental, you know, office, whatever your business is.

So, right.

I think just having that discussion and understanding the nuances of who you select and why is probably more important than who you select, as long as you know why you're selecting them from a strategic perspective. I guess that's maybe what I'm trying to get across.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's a valid point because, I mean, this, this is an exercise that, you know, you need to do if you're a startup, for example, as well, and you may not have that nice rich source of data to rely on. Or it could be a new product or service that you're thinking about branching out and doing, right? So, and it still stands, you know, I mean, because, because I'm often asked that question, you know, because, you know, I suspect on the call there's probably a mix of larger organizations and maybe there's some kind of smaller companies as well. And sometimes the question is, what size companies need to do this exercise, right? And the reality is that size in this case just doesn't really matter at all. The way I like to say it is that if you can't afford to be wrong in your marketing, then you need to do this exercise, right? And the affordability to be wrong is a different physical dollar number depending on whether you're a small company or a big company, but the relative piece of it is the same, right? You know, if you spend $50K as a small company, that's a big proportion of your overall kind of budget, right? As opposed to several million as a large company. So it's the same thing, you know, I think it's, if you want to get a bigger bang out of your marketing budget, you need to do this exercise.

Yeah, there were a lot of tweetable, uh, tweetable moments in that last statement. If you can't afford to do your marketing wrong, or I don't, I don't know what you said, but it sounded really good. I'm like, oh, I wish I could tweet that right now.

'Cause what, what did I say?

Would've made a good hashtag.

I think if your company can't afford to be wrong in your marketing, then you need to do this. Then you need these, these buyer personas.

Nice. There you go. Tweet it out, everybody.

There's the tweetable moments.

Okay. There's a tweetable moment. We got one.

So, um, so, so talking a little bit about, you know, we were, uh, talking about how you kind of do the exercise, and we, we kind of, you know, kind of showed, um, or I think we were about to show this anyway, the, um, the physical wall charts. That's how it actually looks, um, uh, when, when we do it as a, as a face-to-face group. And what was interesting about this, um, You know, we started doing these exercises a number of years ago, and I kind of liked the idea of doing them face-to-face because there's nothing better than the interaction and the brainstorming that happens in a, you know, in a boardroom, and you put these wall charts up and you really kind of get the conversation going. But we started to think, you know, that's a little limiting because, you know, we talked about getting all of these people together, and I'm sure you're finding it the same, Eric. You know, it's much more normal now for companies to have their key people distributed all over the place, right? They work remotely, they work from home, and sometimes that's just adding an extra layer of challenge to get everyone in the same room, you know. So we started thinking about how we could do this virtually, right? And I know, Eric, you're a big tech guy, right?

So I, I'm always up for a gadget.

Yeah, I might be up for a little piece of tech, you know. Oh yeah, uh, so it's gonna cost me money though, isn't it? Yeah, it will. Uh, so, um, actually this is a free tool, right? Uh, but there's always a gotcha, you know. You do your first few, of course, you gotta go, uh, onto a, onto a paid plan. Um, but, uh, the tool is called Miro, and I'm gonna try— I always worry about doing kind of real life stuff because sometimes it goes wrong, but, uh, let me just pull it up here on the web. Is my screen still showing for you, Eric?

Yep, I see Miro. I'm getting really excited now.

So Miro is this tool I'm talking about. Just, just Google it and you'll find it. And what we did is, is I guess you can see the similarity, right? So Enda on my team did a great job of kind of taking the paper chart that we used to use. I think that was— I'm sure the sizes are different in the States, but it's a I'm gonna curse again. It's a big-ass chart, right? It's pretty busy.

Oh, now you stepped over the line.

Okay, I'll dial it back. So, um, uh, when, when we go into the software, you can see this kind of looks the same. And, uh, if I, uh, bear with me a second, it's gonna make it bigger. So I can, I can basically have all my personas on this one chart, but then I can kind of zoom in Um, and I can take kind of, you know, we talked about the importance of kind of naming these people, so I can, I can get, get their, their face pic here. I can kind of start moving that around. And then similarly to what you do in a, in a physical environment is you would, you would get the Post-it note and you'd put it on right, right on there. Okay. And, you know, you'd say what they want to know, um, you know, kind of price, for example, you know. So you'll start filling this out, but what's kind of nice about it is you can, you can still have that same kind of tactile thing that you had when you did it face-to-face. And you can even— I mean, we like the idea of kind of changing the color. So if a Post-it— what used to happen, and this I guess doesn't happen so much in the digital one, in the physical room the Post-its sometimes don't stay where they should be and they fall off, right?

Right.

So you can have that idea that you have different colors for the different boxes. And work through it this way. So we've found that that's kind of pretty nice. It is an interactive web board as well, so you can actually have people logged in and they can take control of the mouse and, and start moving stuff around. So we've found that pretty nice. And down at the bottom here, it lets you know where you are. You know, you've got a little kind of a zoom in, zoom out chart, so I can kind of move my way around.

Nice.

So just thought I would share that with you.

Cool. All right, I've, I've been known the last couple of trips when we've done this is I've got a big 60 by 30 inch— I don't know what that is in centimeters for you Europeans— but a big 60 by 30 inch plotted collection of persona sheets that I roll up and use as a carry-on when I hit on the plane. And then I fix that with a bag full of sticky notes that I shove in my luggage so that It's probably a little bit easier to travel with because it's just a web page.

Right, right. Well, exactly.

Yeah.

So I still think there's, there's something kind of nice and tactile about the physical thing, but this isn't a bad replica. So, uh, you know, right, virtually, right, your thing, it does, it does get you, get you through it, you know, for sure. Um, very cool. So yeah, so a couple of other things just to kind of maybe point out is, um, You know, just before, I wanted to kind of spend a bit of time, you know, talking about how we kind of, you know, bring this information into our kind of martech and how we use it to nurture and so on and so forth. But just before we do that, one of the things that I wanted to talk a little bit about is this kind of concept of persuasive intersection. Okay, so Often what happens if we don't go through this process is companies, and I'm just saying we because, you know, let's say we're the company, and, you know, what most of our marketing messages consist of is what we want to say to the buyer. So it's about we've got to get this message out, and what often happens then is, if I use the kind of the software analogy again, is is the product development team are hugely excited. You know, they spent all night up, you know, having cold pizza and tons of coffee to, to finish a new release. And now they— the first thing they want to do the following morning is get on to marketing and get that post out there to talk about all this cool new stuff that they've done. So, so that's really about what they want to say to the buyer. Now, the buyer doesn't really care about your software, and I hate to break it to you, but they don't. You know, they care about How are they going to meet that deadline with their boss in the afternoon? You know, intermeshed with how are they going to tell their wife that they're not going to be able to pick Johnny up from the football match because they've got all this extra work to do, right? That's what's going through their mind, not your software. So doing this exercise allows you to kind of come up with the optimal marketing message, which is the kind of the intersection of the Venn diagram here. Where it's, it's, you know, it's important to think about, you know, what your product or service offers, but it's more important, um, to try and match that to, to what it is, you know, your, your customer's pain points are or what, what it is that they, that they might find interesting in it. So that's kind of something that's, uh, that's important we don't lose sight of.

Absolutely. Well, to go back to your Airbnb, they might be super, super excited about this new feature that talks about desks and Wi-Fi accessibility and ease of use for the business traveler. But if I don't travel for business, that's not what I want to hear. So you've got Airbnb on the left, and if it's not the marketing message that needs to resonate, don't send it because you might either get ignored or worse, alienate or offend or cause them to disengage, and then you never get a chance to tell them what they really do want to hear. Which is the next cool thing that gets announced about kid-friendly or pet-friendly, which is what I really want to hear about.

Right, right. No, absolutely. No, that's, that, that's, that's so true, you know. So, so maybe then we just kind of take it on then to, to the next level, which, and I think this is, is the holy grail. It's, we kind of mentioned the CRM, right? But I'm just gonna Put this in slideshow for you. You know, I spoke about how a lot of companies, you know, do a really good job of getting as far as going through this process, and now they've they've got a good sense as to you know what their customer wants and doesn't want, and and the sort of things that they should be communicating with them, right? So that's all good. But but then it just sits there, and they continue to send out email blasts. that are the exact same to everyone. So they're sending the, you know, the business— if it was Airbnb, you know, the analogy would be they're sending the business traveler the exact same email as they are the, you know, the person who's going on vacation. And, you know, the reality is that doesn't work. We're back to the very beginning again where we said, you know, if you're marketing to everybody, you're talking to no one, right? So the missing link is connecting the personas into your marketing CRM and then ultimately the website. So, you know, I guess, you know, just throwing out some names of, you know, partners that we work with with WSI. So we obviously partner with HubSpot and we also partner with SharpSpring. And they're two, I guess, they're marketing automation. It sometimes gets a bad rep, Eric, right? Because people think of it as being kind of automated and things like that. I think it's more marketing enablement than it is Automation, right? But I guess that will be the right category, would you think? Marketing automation, that's what you'd call it?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's the, that's the challenge with all of this. And I was gonna ask you a question towards the end, but maybe we can talk about it now. There tends to be in the world of digital marketing, and now that we're talking about personas and knowing people and personalizing content, is there a concern that you've ever come across where people are just like, yeah, this is just too creepy? And we don't wanna do that because they might have gotten something that, and in my opinion, somebody takes it too far and a business does it the wrong way and they spoil it for everybody. But hey, Cormac, we saw that you recently visited our website and read 6 blog posts and downloaded a PDF.

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, let's talk, you know, that might be known to you through some of the marketing automation and it could be captured in a persona. But I think we have to also think of the human element, and we don't want to completely freak consumers out that we know as much as we know, or we might cause them to crawl in their hole and suspect everybody is trying to really, really know them at a more intimate level than what they're comfortable with. So has that ever come up in your conversations?

Yeah, you know, I've had some really interesting conversations. A psychologist that I know called Natalie Natai, and she does a lot of work for BT, British Telecommunications, right? And, you know, they're big in the kind of media space and so on and so forth over here. And so her whole concept is around the psychology of persuasion, and to a degree, marketing's a little bit like that, right? Where We're really trying to, in its most alien form, is we're trying to convince people to do things that maybe they don't want to or hadn't thought about doing, right? And we'd like to, from a more noble point of view, think that we're trying to persuade people to do things that will make their lives better. Okay. I prefer to go with that one because it sounds nice.

Absolutely.

But with Natalie, you know, the point that she had made to me was the challenge with technology is that you're able to do an awful lot of stuff. But the mistake is that just because you're able to do it doesn't mean that you should, right? So in your example there, you know, is it possible to find out the IP address of the person and match up what they did, you know, what they had for dinner that night and, you know, what they had for breakfast the following morning? Yeah, you know, we're starting to be able to paint a really kind of solid picture of what people are doing when they come into our kind of digital worlds, right? But that brings responsibility. So, you know, it should not be the case that, you know, like, let's say it was a B2B environment and somebody hops onto your website, that you phone them and you say, hey, I see you're on the pricing page, you know, click.

Yeah.

Right. I mean, that is not something— I think back to the persona building pieces. If you look at those quadrants and you say, what is it that they want and what is it that they do not want? In my mind, that fits completely in the that's what I don't want bucket. Okay. And it's not really helpful to them.

Right.

So I think the information should be used to draw a picture that allows you not to annoy the person. Like, I mean, I see this from a customer service point of view. You know, if somebody gets to your website, they've filled out a form. and they've gone through some sort of a rabbit hole of exchange, is it acceptable then to use the information that the customer has provided to help facilitate the next step of their journey and give them a good experience? Well, the answer there is yes. But I think it's different when you're using it to try and, I suppose in some ways, you're nearly showing just how clever you are and how you've pieced it together.

Right.

But, but I do, I, I go with your first, uh, observation that it's just too creepy.

Yeah. So sorry, I didn't— a little tangent there, but, uh, I knew that was on my list and I thought that was a good one.

Yeah, so that's what this is about, right? And, um, so, so looking at this kind of screenshot here, this is actually from, uh, our own, uh, agency setup, uh, within SharpSpring, right? And, you know, we, we, uh, we have, um, 3 different personas. The one at the bottom has just kind of fallen off the page there, but we have marketing directors. Okay, so these are people that we think will be interested in talking to us about our digital services. We have a managing director who is typically somebody who heads up maybe a company that does not have a marketing department. So maybe they're more like on the industrial side or something like that. And then we have a VP of marketing as well. So we went through this exercise ourselves and we named them and we put a picture beside guide them and so on and so forth. And once we did that, the, the information from the, from the wall charts was actually, you know, literally imported in and set up within, within the CRM itself. So now when we look at all of our contacts, we segregate them according to this information. So, you know, we can kind of tell that, um, you know, for example, there are 33 Amys in our sales database that we can talk to. There are 71 Davids, right? And the, the idea is that, um, uh, we should use this information to talk to them a little bit, a little bit better, right? And here's an example here of, um, a landing page, right? So one of these 3 personas might arrive at our website And they're all looking generally for probably like, I mean, our focus area is around digital strategy and consultancy. So we're kind of hoping that that's an area we can help them a little bit with. But they need to be kind of approached a little bit differently. So like the business owner who's an entrepreneur may not be that marketing savvy. So, you know, we'd need to address that person a little bit differently than we would The VP of marketing. So this kind of technology allows us to— if you look here at kind of the various personas, you know, Jim, Brad, Maria, Mike, we can actually write a different piece of text on the page. So the text on the page changes dynamically depending on who it is that's on the website. Okay, so the idea is that that gives a more personal experience, and that extends also to, for example, to emails. And, you know, one of the questions that we often get asked is, well, hold on a minute, I mean, it's hard enough to write content. I mean, that's usually a stumbling block for a lot of companies. But now you're saying that we have to write content for all these different personas? I mean, where are we going to find the time to do that? The reality is that's not the case. Your, your message is usually pretty similar. You know, it's like the— what's the core aspect of what it is that you do? But what you can do is you can top and tail it so that you're reaching out. And I'm, I'm saying, you know, hey Eric, you know, uh, you know, having worked for many years in the banking industry, uh, you know, this— I, I understand that you're interested in X, right? And then I go on with the information that's similar for everybody else. So it's really just having the option to Um, to massage the messages a little bit so that they resonate better and the persona really feels that they're being spoken to.

Absolutely. Well, and in the screenshot, you've got that little pink area with the, with the customization. Um, Jim, who might be the business owner, the paragraph just simply leads off as, as a business owner, whereas Mariah might be the marketing director. And you could say, as a busy marketing professional, and Mariah's concerns and pain points as a marketing professional of getting stuff done and the tools to use and all the different directions and the squirrels she could chase are different than Jim's, as he's responsible as the business owner of driving the direction of the company and maintaining relevance and producing a profit for, you know, sustainability.

Yeah.

They, at the end of the day, want the business to succeed, but they're both approaching it very differently. And just that one little paragraph can make a tremendous difference in getting the message, the rest of the message read and resonated, which could be exactly the same for Jim and Mariah. It's that opening paragraph that just pulls them right in.

That was absolutely, that was perfectly articulated. I mean, I think that's exactly the case, Eric, you know, and it's about, you know, resonating with them up front so that you're kind of capturing their attention so that they're more interested in continuing to read what you have, right? So that's the kind of key. And I think, you know, it's the missing link in a company's content strategy, you know. So what often happens is the content strategy comes first and, you know, what they're trying to do is write content about what they think they should be writing about.

Sure.

Whereas if you start with the buyer persona element first, as you go, well, we actually know because we went through the exercise. We know what the person wants.

Yeah.

And let's now use that when we're crafting our marketing message. And the same thing works for, you know, if you think about it, it works for ads as well. I mean, I mentioned that lady Natalie Natay, who's kind of in the business of the psychology of persuasion. That same concept can be used for, for ads as well, right? Because you don't advertise to everybody the same way, you know. If you've got these different personas, you know, you can run kind of campaigns that are a little bit different, right? So, you know, in the example on the screen here, you know, you might have an advertisement talking to Jim the business owner, It might be the same graphics or it might be, you know, it's not like you're going and doing something completely different, but maybe some of the messaging on the ad is different depending on the persona.

Right. You mentioned ads and a lot of what we've been talking about thus far is, okay, leveraging the persona for your email or leveraging the persona for your CRM or leveraging your persona for your own landing page. But talk a little bit more about, now that we know the persona, going into a Facebook or a Google or LinkedIn and leveraging those personas, maybe like what the psych— psychologist or psychiatrist— psychologist. Yeah, yeah, the gal that does psychological experiments on the purchase buying, whatever. But you know what I'm talking about. So she may be doing different persona advertising to get it in front of you, and that will help you spend your advertising budget much more efficiently and effectively.

Right. You know, so, so, you know, you're looking at— I mean, you can take this to a, to a very detailed level where you start looking.

Oh sure.

You know, whether you're kind of like a, you know, a persona that that's more introverted than extroverted. So, you know, what sort of characteristics would you be more keen to purchase from, you know, if you, if you put that in the, in the adverts. But even if you keep it, you know, fairly straightforward, like, I think, I think the, the, the whole point of this is to make it fairly consistent and fairly repeatable. So if you've got maybe 3 personas in, in your company, and I think that's probably a decent number, Your goal is not to create a new persona for every variant, you know, because you're gonna have, like, if we look at Jim, our business person, there's different varieties of Jim. But what you're trying to say is that generally, you know, the characteristics are fairly similar. So let's say you have 3 personas.

Sure.

And what you're doing is you are making sure that your content boxes are ticking each of those as you do them. You're kind of saying, okay, Let me read this page. You know, what am I saying to Jim? What am I saying to Maria? What am I saying to Mike? Right? And you're getting that down. And then the same thing, you're backing it up a level because, you know, I suppose effectively all you're doing is in an advertisement is a lot of the time anyway, is, is you're, you're summarizing that content so that the persona will click on it and come and read what you'd written in the first place. So I think it can bucket itself very nicely where when you're creating your campaign, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's Facebook, and you're trying to, you know, match the creative that you put together for the ad with the audience segmentation. So, you know, it may not always be exactly like you'd like, but, you know, I mean, these platforms, as you know, Eric, you know, are getting very, very granular now. I mean, especially LinkedIn, you know, in terms of being able to go right after, you know, a particular— I mean, in this example here, we're talking about architects and plant managers. I mean, you can actually go into LinkedIn and pull out all of the architects in Dublin and go send them a message, right? So, um, yeah, so it's absolutely possible to make sure that your ads are relevant to that particular persona type.

Perfect. Yeah, well said.

All right, good, good, good.

So, so I just looked at the clock, we've only got 7 minutes left, and, uh, time flies. I told you it would.

Yeah, but it does, it does.

This is, this has been a lot of fun, good chat. So what, uh, what do we still need to talk about in the last few minutes that we've got remaining?

Well, the, the last thing I suppose to wrap up on is, is the question I often get asked as well, is, can this only be used for B2B? And I guess without making your head hurt, I think when we look at this persona building exercise, people generally gravitate their head towards B2B because it seems to be more practical. And the reason that it is, is because it's a considered purchase, right? So, you know, in the book I use an example of a chap called Rick, right? So Rick is the CEO for a plant hire company, right? So if you can visualize Rick for a minute, he's trying to sell his equipment into all of these sort of construction companies that are building. They have sites everywhere, and he's trying to get his cranes and his diggers and all those sort of things onto those sites. So as a kind of a busy professional, you know, Rick is, is, is definitely like a B2B environment, but you can actually take that same guy Rick and, you know, maybe take him in onto a kind of a private scenario where he is rebuilding his own house, right? And he's trying to get quotes in and so on and so forth. And in fact, although he runs quite a busy organization and he's obviously making sure that, that he makes the right decisions He's probably going to invest more time and energy on his own home because it's personally important to him. So, you know, one of the things on this persona evaluation piece is sometimes it's not the business things that are forcing the issue with a person that you're trying to define. So it's important to remember that, that it's a bit like the Airbnb example. It depends on the situation that they're in, you know. So for me, am I traveling or am I going on vacation?

Yeah.

But if you extend that one last step, Eric, right? So this chap Rick, right? He's running the busy plant company. On his way home after a busy day, he's going into the store and he's picking up a pizza for his dinner, right? That is not a considered— it's not a considered purchase. Like, he puts very little effort into deciding on what that product should be, right? Compared to—

Right.

you know, what sort of construction companies will be willing to buy his plant equipment. So I think it's important to remember that this process works best when it's a considered purchase. Now, to close on it, what I'd say is sometimes even on a B2C basis, like we do some work for food companies, you know, and they sell a product that's maybe $5 in the store, If the food company does something that is kind of different for the person, like let's say for example they're, they're gluten intolerant and your product solves that problem, well then suddenly now you're raising this $5 purchase to be something that's a little bit more considered because now Rick is in the store, he's got 2 canisters in his hand, and he's gonna pick the one that's gonna solve his gluten problem. So it's about still understanding your customer, but just spending, you know, a little bit more time figuring out where it is that you're different.

Yep. Well, I think, and oftentimes when we talk with marketing folks and business owners and, you know, the bank executives, the heads spin because they feel, you know, there's so many decisions and there's so much more competition. And the answer is, yeah, I can't make that go away. The only thing that we can do is either try to win the lottery and you take home a big paycheck and you don't have to worry about it anymore.

Yeah.

Or you figure out ways to use the tools so that the gluten decision creates a top-of-mind awareness because they've seen something in the past, or somebody needs to buy a house the bank or the mortgage company or the credit union is top of mind. And that's only going to happen in today's hyper-intensive, very cluttered world if you use tools to cut through that. And, you know, 10 or 15 years ago, there were different tools to do that that don't work today. And 10 or 15 years from now, those tools will be different from what we're using now. But the reality is You kind of have to accept it and kind of move with the times. And, you know, they say if you're not moving forward, you're moving backwards. And, you know, today's digital world, that's really personified. I know it doesn't mean that you're always the one that's giving the best news or you're always the favorite person, but at least you're, you know, for those that want to be able to remain relevant and to cut through that, This is one of the very important things that likely is going to need to get added to their to-do list, or it's going to get even harder to cut through that noise and to gain the customer and the prospect's attention.

Exactly. I think what they say is, you know, if you bring the kind of customer element into it, you know, it's about creating empathy with the customer. And so Jonathan Middenhall, he's the CMO of Airbnb, You know, he says, you know, amazing things will happen when you listen to the consumer. And I think that's the truth in this, you know. I mean, we can all, we can all learn a lot from that as marketers, right?

Cool, good. Well, this has been incredible, Cormac. Thank you so much. To wrap it up, folks interested in following you or maybe seeing if you're up for giving out other tours of the Guinness factory, how would folks— what's your preferred way of Although just make sure you don't book anything when I come over because I want you all to myself. But for anybody else, what's your network of preference or what's the best way to get in touch and connect with you?

The best way to get me is on LinkedIn, Eric, I guess, you know. So just look for Cormac Farrelly on LinkedIn and you'll find me that way.

Excellent. Good deal. Well, that concludes another awesome show. Cormac, thank you again so much for being part of it. I do want to let everybody know, probably the next couple of weeks, at least for sure next week, we are not going to have a show. I've got some travels and some meetings planned, so we're gonna take a pause, but we'll be back with more of the wonderful book chapters and more of the awesome authors. And I kind of like these from a personal perspective because it gives me a chance to catch up with my WSI buddies and, and buddyettes, which is the female version of buddies, across, across the globe, literally. And it's been a lot of fun. So thanks everybody for joining. We hope you enjoyed the show. Keep an eye out for the recording coming soon and share it with friends and colleagues. And we'll be sure to follow you, or you'll be sure to follow us, over at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So until then, have a great week everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Eric.