The Importance Of Creating A Meaningful Persona (And How To Create One)

Hello! In the last lecture you learned how to harness the power of emotion to write sales messages that a mind bendingly persuasive. Now before you start flexing those emotional muscles we need to rewind a little and get to know our reader So in this lecture you're going to learn How to create a razor-sharp customer persona, three sneaky tactics for getting inside the minds of your customers. And I've got a bit of a Bonus Mission for you. Well, I'm going to show you how to shape your copy to hook your ideal customer. Once you've created your persona this is super handy. So let's get started. Let's imagine you sell grass seed and your target audience is golf course green keepers. You need to make up a fictional customer. Let's call him Phil. Phil is 42 and married with one daughter. He's head greenskeeper at a well-respected golf course. Now you can picture Phil you can sell better to him but let's go beyond the typical demographics of age and gender and job title. What we need to do here is step into his world. What are his challenges and pain points. What are his dreams and goals in life and work. The answers to these questions will help you understand what motivates him to choose your products. So here are three sneaky tactics you can use to get hold of this information. Number 1: Social media People use social media as a forum to gripe about problems they're having or boast about successes and swap knowledge. So go to networks like Facebook, Twitter and Linked in and run a search for your target audience. What are people talking about? What do they like or dislike about products or services like yours? Delve into groups, listen and follow relevant hashtags and you'll get an instant window into the minds of your customers and what they truly want from you. Tip two: check out review sites like Amazon for comments about products like yours. Scroll through the comments on industry blog posts, relevant videos and articles. And again lookout for what people are talking about. What are their challenges? What are their expectations? What do they want more or less of? These are the things that are going to help you build your persona and also that you can address in your copy. It's all extremely useful intel. My third tip is to actually go out and talk to people. Talk to your colleagues, your peers, your sales teams and, of course, if you can your existing customers. Can you see any patterns or recurring themes in the kinds of questions they're asking. If you have a genuine interest in finding out what niggles people it really helps you get under the hood and really helps you develop a good understanding of your target customer. And if you don't have customers yet you can metaphorically come up with your customers' responses using your persona. OK it's not perfect but it's better than guessing. Copy power-up: Use the language of your customers as you're doing your research. Make a note of all the memorable messages you come across using the exact words and phrases of your customers. Not only is this going to make your writing more vivid but it's going to help to gain your readers' respect and trust. People don't want to be spoken to in technical jargon or marketing language. They want to be spoken to like real human beings. For instance nobody said: "this auditing software is a groundbreaking solution to our internal procedural and operational compliance needs." But they might say something like: "We don't dread auditing anymore. This software makes compliance easy." So use these real statements in your headlines, in your body copy in your calls to action because it makes your writing a lot more effective. OK my friends time for you to complete a Copy Mission. What I want you to do is have a go at choosing your own audience. Choose a field that you'd like to write for. Maybe one that you know already and make up a customer. Pause the video and think to yourself who's the ideal person that will want to buy my product or my service. Write it down. Find a free stock image of what that person might look like and I'll join you back here in a second. OK now you're ready to imagine yourself in his or her shoes. Use this guide to build your persona. You might have some information already about them or you might want to use one of those three tactics that you've just learned or all of them try to fill out this form as much as possible. OK. You might not find everything but do your best. You can always download this grid by the way. This template is in the resources section if that's easier. Pause the video now and have a go. I hope that was a useful exercise? Trust me when I say that just by doing this, just by filling up this grid you are way ahead of most other businesses and copywriters because most people don't even come up with a persona let alone going to the effort of creating a grid like this. So congratulations! Here's a quick copy power-up tip for you. Now you've got your persona in mind. Print it out and pin it onto the wall so that you can glance at it every now and again. This will help keep your copy consistent so it always clicks with your reader. Here is a super polished example from American Express. Please don't worry if yours doesn't look like this, it's just to give you an idea. OK, so now you've got a really good persona you can use it to hook your customer like a freshly landed salmon. Let's go back to Phil our golf course greenskeeper. So you read somewhere maybe on a Facebook group, while you were doing some research, that he's struggling with patchy grass, the course is looking ugly and some of the players are complaining. Now if Phil is driven by pride perhaps you learn that he's entered some industry awards – you might write a headline like this: "Create camera-ready turf that outshines the competition." However, you might discover that Phil is paid on performance so maybe his pay is based on increasing new memberships to the club. So you might write a headline like this: "Boost club memberships with grass that delivers year-round playability." Maybe you learn that the club is reducing its costs and Phil is massively overstretched. He's got too much to do and not enough time. So you could write a headline like this: "Cut maintenance time by 50 percent with a faster growing grass." All of these headlines are selling the same grass seeds and they're all targeted at golf course green keepers, but as you can see the better you know your customer the better you can use the right words to appeal to their emotions and to hook them. I hope that gives you a good idea of how to shape your copy so that you can better appeal to your target customer. OK, let's quickly recap. You've just learned how to conduct research to create a strong realistic persona. You've learned how to write more compelling copy using your customers language and you've learnt how to frame your copy once you've created your persona for ultimate persuasion. I really hope you enjoyed this lecture and now feel confident about creating personas. You're well over halfway into the fundamental section so please pat yourself on the back because you're making excellent progress. Now if you've ever wondered how some copywriters manage to inject a little extra magic into their words, this is it. In this next lecture, I'm going to show you how to make your reader feel like you're in the room. Just having a nice chat with them and making them feel a bit special. So I shall see you there!