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It’s Not About the Tea: How to Make Buyer Personas That Really Satisfy
POP QUIZ!
From your perspective, what persona makes more sense:
- For the past ten years, Jill worked in an advertising agency in the city. She’s a single mom with two kids that are at the age of fending for themselves. At 38, Jill enjoys going to book club with her friends on Tuesday but is usually glued to the computer reading up on the latest trends.
- Annie has worked in graphic design for 5 years. Her company doesn’t have a specific team dedicated to marketing so they asked Annie to take charge. Annie needs to understand social platforms, e-commerce, and retention tactics by next month.
Personas make targeting our audience a gazillion times easier. But if you’re doing it generically then is it really helping? Proper personas involve relevant demographics and psychographics as well as the deets that get your consumer to whip out the wallet.
Content Marketing Institute is taking the lead on this one.
- Killer buyer insights. Nominate the friendliest person on your team and get them to interview those who have and haven’t bought your product. A little cake never hurts so don’t forget to offer incentives. And, get dirty! You want the entire story, from why consumers start looking for a solution to why they chose your brand. Here’s 5 of 9 Q’s, just for you:
- What triggered your decision to search for a solution like this?
- What results were you expecting and hoping to get?
- What was your personal role in the final decision?
- Who else impacted the decision?
- What was the overall process of making the decision?
- Ask internally first. Don’t ever count out the people you work with, specifically those at the top in sales. Be thoughtful about reaching out to co-workers, but also make it apparent that you need genuine answers. Make it painless, get better responses. You can wipe the sweat off your brow, CMI provides an email template for you to use.
- Buying insights lead to a content marketing win. You know you have a good looking funnel when you actually know the thoughts of consumers from point A to point Z. These insights can also help you create ahhh-mazing content, plus help you directly address any resistance.
Don’t just settle for tea. You guys know what to do…
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13 Simple Tools for Creating Animated GIFs, Images, and Videos
Marketing in 2018 requires a heck of a lot of knowledge. You’ve gotta be a writer, a designer, a video editor, a strategist, a developer, there’s just a lot that goes into marketing. But ain’t nobody got time to become an expert on everything.
That’s why Hubspot wrote this article about 13 tools to help you easily create engaging visuals.
It’s Friday, kick back, and take some time to learn a new tool or two. Your boss will thank you later (and if she doesn’t, tell her to take it up with us).
Without further ado, here are a few (mostly free) tools to create GIFs and other visual media:
- WhatFix lets you quickly create a process flow that can show users exactly what steps to take on a website. It’s like one of those walkthroughs you see when on-boarding with a new SaaS, but way easier. Best of all, it’s our favorite price: $free.
- GIFBrewery is unfortunately for Mac only. It allows you to create GIFs from your videos. Easy to use and only $4.99. Hard to beat.
- Gyazo is another free tool. Technically its made for screen-capturing, but you can easily use it to create GIFs. Here’s a GIF that Hubspot made with this tool by screen-capturing one of their videos.
- Recordit. Need to create a simple screencast GIF? This is the tool for you. All you gotta do is have it record what you’re doing on your computer, and it’ll put it into GIF form for you.
- GIFDeck if you wanna create a GIF from a Slideshare presentation, this tool has you covered.
- GIFYT is made specifically for YouTube. It quickly creates GIFs from YouTube videos. All you gotta do is drop the Youtube URL in, select the time period that it should capture, and bada bing, bada boom, it does the rest.
- PowToon has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s still simple to use. This is an animated video creator that just about anyone can use. It’s got templates, characters, objects, layouts, backgrounds, and anything else you’ll need to create a story.
That’s 7 of ’em. Still 6 more to go.
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Nomophobia
Familiar with nomophobia? We’re gonna bet you are. It’s the fear of being without your mobile phone. And it sucks.
You know the feeling, walking down the street, you do the pocket check and don’t feel your phone. You start to panic, your palms get sweaty, knees weak, arms heavy, there’s vomit on your sweater already, mom’s spagh…wait…this isn’t supposed to be an Eminem song.
Back to the original point. French telecom company, Orange, created an ad that perfectly captures the feeling of nomophobia. Without your phone you feel like you’re stranded on a desert island. What if you get hurt? How will you get food? It’s a terrifying world and one that we don’t recommend.
Either way, Orange’s newest ad is sure to be a hit.
“If your stories are all about your products and services, that’s not storytelling. It’s a brochure. Give yourself permission to make the story bigger.”
Jay Baer
