Another day, another debate about marketing personas. This time about the entire pros and cons related to marketing personas.
Marketing persona research can cover fascinating information, like the risk tolerance, price sensitivity, ambition, and tech-savviness of each persona.
But these details had no application in their marketing activities. Basically, all that different personas wanted a payment system that can nail all the basics that would make it excellent:
- Has buyers trust.
- Makes checkouts easy.
- Works with merchants’ existing systems.
- Is not too expensive.
- Helps manage fraud.
- Has good customer service.
You don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollar to know this, right?
It can be helpful to answer these questions about your customers:
- What do prospects stress about? These are the pain points you can play within your ads.
- Where do they look for solutions? This will tell you where to reach them.
- Which alternatives did they try and why did they fail? This will tell you how to position yourself against the competition.
- How do they describe success? This will tell you about their desires and it’s what you must use in your copy.
- What are they nervous about? These are the objections you want to address.
You can discover this information by interviewing people that have recently signed up for his service, as well as the services of your competition.
And ask them the following questions:
- What were you hoping to do?
- Why is that important to you?
- Where did you look?
- What else did you try?
As this may seem like a shortcut, these questions should still be used to identify different personas. The problem is not that personas do not work. But sometimes marketers are asking the wrong questions.
You don’t care if an individual works in a bank or in a department store. What you care about is what good or service they want to buy – and, more importantly, why.
