Personas are short descriptions or biographies of fictitious, archetypical customers—or more accurately, prospective customers.

The idea is to understand the wants and needs of a group of people who are among the most likely to buy your product or service. You may have only one. You may have more. Regardless, you need to understand what makes them tick. Once you do, you stand a much better chance of communicating with them effectively and persuading them to take the actions you want them to take.

So here are 21 tips for creating buyer personas that can help you focus your communication strategies and unify the efforts of marketing, sales and product management:

1. Don’t create too many. Adele Revella suggests listing the job titles of each of the personas that influence the decision to buy and then ranking their importance. This can be accomplished by considering the extent to which each type of buyer is:

• Influencing decisions that significantly impact the success of an upcoming launch, revenue goal, or marketing campaign
• Unlikely to be excited by something that is unique about the product, service or solution
• In an organizational role that the sales people do not currently engage for sales of other products or services

2. Start with what’s on the table. Along the lines of not creating too many, a good place to start is with whatever campaign or initiative is most pressing and only build buyer personas for that task. This way, you won’t get overwhelmed and you’ll be able to more quickly demonstrate the value the personas bring to the project. Choose the people your sales team is struggling to reach, the ones they’re not calling on now. Choose the buyers who have the most influence.

3. Own the persona. Begin with the most important buyers, and then assign a single owner for each, regardless of what the company hopes to market or sell to them. Create a collaborative home (such as a wiki or Sharepoint site) and encourage people throughout the company to post their observations of real buyers. The owner has the final say about what is included in the persona, but the opportunity to contribute to the effort is distributed across the company.

4. Know your audience, or know those who do. Attention Sciences says visit or speak with customers and non-customers on a regular basis. If product managers, sales managers, customer support, or others have visited or spoken with customers and/or non-customers recently, they should have good data about the most urgent problems facing your target buyers. You will want to focus on the information they collected from non-customers, as these are the people you most need to influence.

5. Create a buyer persona worksheet. Set up a worksheet with categories for each of the buyers that have the most impact on the purchase decision for your solutions. Then record any information gained during interactions with these buyers, or that you’ve learned via third-party sources, listing their pain points in priority order according to their importance to the target audiences. Include specific quotes that reflect the exact words that your buyer uses. Soon you’ll begin to see a pattern—this is the time to start to create your buyer persona profile. Include the words that buyers would use to describe their most urgent problems and the ways that buyers want to measure the success of their investment.

6. Answer this question — what prevents this type of buyer from choosing us? This is the most important question you can ask and answer in persona development. Don’t settle for answers such as “it’s too expensive” or “too hard to use” or “missing X capability”. Dig deeper. Understand why. Ask real people real questions.

7. Know what you need to know. Jason Katzenback, in his blog JohnCow, says while you may only have one persona, or you may have several, you need to know the following about each persona:

• Their background
• Their goals and aspirations
• Their problems (so you can solve them)
• Where they go to solve these problems
• The solutions to their problems
• Their daily activities (as applicable; you can skip things like bathroom visits unless they apply to your product or service)
• How you can best reach them
• What is important to them
• What kind of language they use
• What kind of images appeal to them
• What kind of multimedia they use

Be sure to develop them into a real personality. Give them a name if that helps. The more you know about your market, the easier this will be to do. And what you don’t know, you’ll learn by doing this exercise.

8. Segment your communications strategy. If you’ve got more than one persona, then you have to segment your communications strategy to target each of them. We’re trying to get away from the one-size-fits-all mentality when it comes to communications; it won’t do you any good to go through the buyer persona process and then try to shoehorn all the personas into one communication strategy. Or to shoehorn messages for multiple personas into one campaign.

9. Make sure that your personas accurately reflect the real needs of a target set of buyers. Again, from Adele Revella, when you take into account real buyer needs, using honest and in-depth insight, you’ll find the efforts of product management, marketing and sales become more unified. Product managers will look to the next product release with the question “which capabilities will buyers need?” in their sights. Marketers measure their efforts by asking “what can we do to capture buyer interest?” And the sales team asks “why does the buyer need us?”

For each persona, answer the following:

10. Read everything they read. Online and off. Set up an RSS feed and Google alert for keywords or company names that are relevant. This will give you better insight into their concerns.

11. Attend seminars. Go to the seminars they go to and interact with them. Go to keynote sessions and listen to what they say, then pick up on those topics that interest you as well and approach people at breakout session. Engage them in conversation about what you just heard.

12. Monitor conference topics. Track the topics that are being presented at conferences, who’s presenting, what they’re speaking about. Get on the mailing list. See the word choices they use. How are they presenting these topics in ways that are compelling to drive people to attend? Realize that the people you’re trying to reach don’t have the same level of knowledge you do, so this is a great way to keep in touch with the level of interest and knowledge they have on your topics.

13. Don’t build self-serving personas. Be careful not to build personas that are overly enthusiastic about your products and want to buy them. They’re lovely ego fodder but they may not be real. Plus, they’re not the people you most need to reach in your selling. You need to reach the people who are most critical of your products and company.

14. Talk with sales people. Good salespeople go into a sales call and listen, more than they talk. That’s how they discover the most about a buyer’s concerns, issues, priorities, resistance points, and who is going to be involved in the buying process. This lets the salesperson create a tailored plan for winning the account.

15. Don’t rely too much on salespeople. Salespeople listen for what’s going to win them business. They’re not listening objectively. Also, they have a narrow scope of vision and are thinking about a couple of accounts or topics they’re focusing on. They’re not looking for patterns, they’re looking for individual cues. For that reason, they may not be advocates of personas and will insist that every customer is unique. Your goal is to try to create groups of buyers who will respond to your message.  Lastly, even the best salespeople don’t always know how to talk to all buyers or all those who influence the buying process.

16. Gain information from win/loss analysis. This is one of the most useful ways to create effective buyer personas. Talk to the people who’ve just chosen you and talk to the people who didn’t and find out why. Learn what you could’ve done better. You may find out that there are perceptions that aren’t even true. Or that they’re things that product management must address. Ask the real buyers. Don’t get it secondhand from the salespeople because buyers may lie to them about the real reasons they did or didn’t buy, or the salespeople may give you biased answers that lean toward things they want you to change.  Find out:

• What capabilities are most important to buyers?
• Which attitudes prevail among deals you win and those you lose?
• What process did the buyer follow to make the purchase decision?
• Which resources did the buyer consult during the decision process?

17. Use your website to capture persona info. Use landing pages to measure and improve the information you have about buyers based on real data on how people navigate through your site. Use dropdown boxes under general headings that offer customer-service style questions, such as “How can we help you?” and allow users to pick the situation that best fits theirs. You can collect a lot of data on buyers this way.

18. Conduct interviews onsite, by phone and at conferences. Yes, it’s the most difficult but it’s the way you can get the most fruitful information. If you’ve been doing the other things on this list, you have enough credibility to call someone who attended a conference but hasn’t bought your product yet and ask them to spend 10 minutes answering questions about which topics are of concern to buyers and why. If you can convince them you’re not in sales, 3 out of 10 people will talk with you.

All of this will enable you to align sales and marketing with buyer personas. You’ll learn:

• Which buyers will be receptive, and which will resist
• What is keeping buyers awake at night
• Why this problem persists
• What, specifically, will improve after they buy
• What criteria will this buyer use to make a decision where buyers go to get new ideas and information

19. Know the difference between customers and buyers. Customers who already own your product are now focused on user criteria—aspects of the product they do or don’t like—instead of buying criteria, aka, what led them to make the purchase.

20. Test the strategy, not the persona. Buyer personas are a tool that you use to build messaging strategies, product strategies and sales strategies. Your objective should be to measure everything you do. Test, measure and refine your strategies and use them to provide  feedback  for refining your personas.

21. Know that personas are a tool. They will never be perfect. They require updating to stay accurate.  It’s an ongoing process to keep them sharp and precise.

You’re looking for an extra income stream and your persuasive writing skills are the way to earn it.

You come up with great copy and lots of ideas to go with it. You do direct marketing. And/or branding. And/or the social stuff (Twitter, Facebook, blogging, the Next-Big-Thinging) . What you write is less important than how you write.

For you, writing copy isn’t just about making a buck. It’s about an insatiable curiosity about why people do what they do and how you can (gently) persuade them.

Because writing is your passion, you don’t need to be hovered over. You’re a self-starter. When presented with deadlines, you say “Hi, deadline! Nice to meet you, as always.”

And you don’t flake out. Ever.

If this is you, I’m hoping we can help each other.

Because my business is growing. And growing. And… Well, you get the idea.

I’m constantly working with smart people on interesting copywriting projects and want to keep doing so. But I can’t do it alone.

That’s where you come in.

I’d like to collaborate with you.

You’ll get a flat fee for each project that you can count on like clockwork.

I’ll handle the client, strategy and marketing stuff. Your only job will be to write (and self-edit). You’ll write websites, blogs, postcards, case studies, lead-generation emails, video scripts, landing pages, and more.

This could take 10 hours a week of your time, more or less. I’m open. If you are too, contact me.

1. You have to be vain. Vanity is not a bad thing. At least, not in the proper dose. Advertising and vanity go hand in hand. It’s why you see so many beautiful women and hot guys working in advertising. It’s why you’re willing to spend an hour watching Don Draper be a likeable asshole.
2. The definition of vanity is changing. Used to be, there were the beautiful people and the ugly people and some middle ground where celebrities like Mick Jagger and Sandra Bernhart occupied. But Andy Warhol (also in that middle) was right. Everyone is getting their 15 minutes of fame. So the face of beauty is changing faster than ever.
3. Everyone knows what sodium lauryl sulfate is. And why parabens are not good things. Sure, it’s wealthy white women who know it most, but a younger generation is growing up with that information available everywhere. Teens are turning green. And when they become 20-somethings, spending their hard-earned, adult cash on cosmetics, the definition of beauty will also include knowing what goes into the products you’re using.
4. No one cares what sodium lauryl sulfate is. They know what it is, but they don’t care—at least not as much as they do about looking good. So the winning brands will be the ones that give them both effectiveness and good looks. You can’t work less good.
5. Tell your color story walking. The beauty industry owes its lifeblood to telling a good story. That seasonal take on colors with its catch phrases and dreamy imagery sells pretty powders again and again, economy be damned. And now, since everyone has the ability to tell their story, they are. We’re pitching the written word back and forth at an alarming rate. Something on the order of several billion pages per day, according to Google. So if you want your story heard, not only does it have to be a good one, it has to be where the people who want to hear it are. That means online and off, on desktop computer and mobile phone, 24/7. The message is the medium is the message. The winners will be as sensitive to this as a good cosmetics saleswoman is to your emotional yen for a new lipstick.
6. Your compact will be WiFi. There is a marriage of beauty and technology waiting to happen. No one has yet to do it well. The avatar experiments and “your face here” apps are flawed failures and serve to make women feel less pretty and not involved. But we’re getting the hang of this tech thing. The time is ripe for beauty to release the killer app.

Idris Mootee’s Presentations on SlideShare
(tags: brand_strategist branding)

A Top Team Is Key to Growth – Entrepreneurship.org
(tags: entrepreneurship management entrepreneur)

What would make the strongest case for a large fiscal stimulus package – - upwards of $1 trillion for infrastructure, energy, education programs, and for aid to the states, for a new electric grid, for the building of hospitals, schools, for improved water and sewerage systems, for the biggest build-out in the United States since the Great Society?

Investors could probably think of dozens, but economist David H. Wang has a compelling one: the condition of the U.S. consumer himself / herself, or what Wang calls the “consumer’s dilemma.”

Has the U.S. economy changed?

Now Wang proceeds with the assumption that the U.S. consumption-based economy will largely continue. If one disagrees with that premise, then Wang’s thesis is moot, and we then also have a different U.S. economy that will require very different prescriptions to achieve sustainable growth.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that the consumer-based economy – - one that historically has accounted for roughly 60-65% of U.S. GDP – - is not going the way of the Edsel. That creates Wang’s “consumer’s dilemma.” Namely, the U.S. economy requires the consumer to spend (buy things) to grow at capacity, but consumers have already consumed at too high a level for too long – - in some cases saving nothing at all — and hence many will now increase their rate of savings to begin to make up for their many years of inadequate savings.