Speaker 1: Welcome to Web Certain TV. I'm joined today by Martin Chorosky, Head of Content Marketing for EF, a provider of English language training all around the world. We're going to talk today specifically about personas. So thank you for being here to talk to us about this because it's clearly a very important part of content marketing and something that's used quite a lot. But just to get us started, for those who maybe aren't sure, what exactly do we mean by the term persona?

Speaker 2: Sure. It's definitely a big portion of the content marketing. So what we mean by persona is the buying persona. That was almost always referring to the buying persona of your potential customers. So it's essentially a representation of your target audience with its own characteristics, motivations, struggles, anything that comes with describing your customer or prospect customers.

Speaker 1: So why are they so important and how much of an impact do they make on a content strategy?

Speaker 2: The important, in a way that's, if you look at it from that point of view, we're all unique and then we all have our own habits, our own characteristics. And then if you're trying to reach a specific person, you should be specific also who the person is to make sure your content is relevant to that specific person. That's why they're important. They don't have to just tick them off the box because someone will tell you, but essentially it's just important to know who you're trying to reach. So your content is more relevant and so it's got a much more powerful message included.

Speaker 1: It can help you really target, make sure you're targeting your content in the right way. So where should people start when it comes to developing personas? Is there any processes you can recommend for picking out who these people are?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. So first of all, I would definitely recommend looking at your own current customers. So looking at essentially anything to do with customer development or customer research that could be just conversations with them. So try to schedule 20, 50 minutes, a 50 minute conversation with them to find out what those motivations are, what they struggle with, why they purchase, why they haven't paid per purchase, if they would sort of just try to get to know them. And once you know that person you're trying to target, then you kind of start to understand like what this person really is and just so you can make sure that your content is resonating with them. So by speaking with the customers, you have a much clearer sort of picture in your head essentially who you're trying to target. Another way to approach it is to look at the surveys. So just if you have, depending on your database, you can survey your existing customers or the prospect customers and try to answer the questions about anything to do with the challenges, struggles, motivations, goals, aspirations, problems, issues, anything to do with the trigger that will actually trigger their emotions and the way they consume content towards the end. So that will be a good starting point. You could also look at the sort of aggregated demographics data. So potentially using any tools that will give you some sort of demographic information as well as any sort of more interactive ways of collecting information like polls or quizzes or anything that will just try to get more from existing customers. What we did recently essentially is we've just been running in simple questions on the website asking them, what are your challenges? Essentially you've been surprised what people answer. So there's some tools that will help you out with defining

Speaker 1: that actually. Yeah and probably maybe give you some, like you say, some surprising answers that you maybe wouldn't have considered. Yeah. And then once you've kind of got this information, maybe from these various sources, like you say, you've kind of built up a list of maybe what the key issues are. What then should you do with that information? How do you build that into a persona

Speaker 2: itself? All right. So once you have that information you should structure them. Just try to put the face behind it. Of course the person, the persona you're trying to to create is fake. It's not the real person. But try to make it as real as possible. So essentially you can put the names behind that person. You can put them on some PDF formats and just print it out. Have this in your planning sessions. Have that somewhere visible. It will always be there. And essentially just trying to have it very clear, you know,

Speaker 1: who's that person you're trying to target. So almost give them a personality and make them a real person in your, at least in your own organization, so that you can actually work towards targeting them. And then obviously we're talking internationally here. So how does this work for personas? Can the same personas be applied across multiple markets or do you need to really create individual ones

Speaker 2: for each? So depending on the product you're trying to sell, there might be some similarities, you know, between the different markets. But what we found is you should really sort of dive into local specific personas. That works best because there might be like many differences that you might be skipped when you just create one global one.

Speaker 1: Yeah, there's always the cultural factors and the different local factors that'll come into play. And are there any common differences then that occur between markets, particularly maybe the

Speaker 2: work mentioned? Okay, so the main difference is definitely the language. So that's kind of the main difference that we got. We do see that like that could significantly impact that, you know, that persona, the way they consume content. The other sort of the common one is the demographics as well. So, and also economic situations, different countries. So what we might find is basically people are more sophisticated in more advanced sort of countries. So essentially person in Middle East will be different to the person in Germany, for example. So those have different motivations depending on your product. But essentially what we found is those should be factored in when creating a persona. So economic situation, the demographic situation, languages, and also usage of the web essentially. So what we found is, you know, someone from Mexico will be using the web different way. So potentially they will need less sophisticated content marketing programs than the person who's probably more skeptical about it

Speaker 1: in more developed countries. And I guess also the channels that people use and the way that they like to do, read their content or consume it is different. Yes. So then once you've got these personas and they're printed out and in your office with you, you know, how should you be using them throughout your content marketing project? Sure, the main reason of

Speaker 2: using them, the main sort of usage is when you develop your content and the planning stage. So using them as a guiding principle when creating content. So when you look at, oh what should we, you know, what should we create now? Essentially just look back at the persona, this person will, you know, resonate with that piece of content. So essentially on the creation stage you should be thinking about them, not just coming up randomly with some subjects that will never

Speaker 1: resonate with people. Yeah, so it's very much about keeping them at the center of everything you're doing and making sure you've got them in mind. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, that's great. Thank

Speaker 2: you.