Step six is about psychographics. And these are the things that we want to use to create an emotional connection with our target persona. We want to capture things like their affinities, their behaviors, and look at their past purchase behavior. So as before, this is the third part of our persona template, the first part being demographics, the second part part being where they work. And the third is why we think they're a good target. And there are several items that I'll walk through briefly.

Again, this is just a generic template. Your persona template will be unique and different for your business. But let me just go through some of these basics. First is capturing the problem that they are trying to solve? This is critical for any persona. Without understanding the personas problem or the opportunity or the issue that they're facing.

We're going to miss a fundamental connection. So we want to focus assign them, not your product. Remember, the hero of our story is the persona, not your product. And here's another example, when a carpenter goes into hardware store to buy drill bits, is he really buying drill bits? Or is he buying perfectly drill holes. So one is a particular product, the other is an outcome from the product he buys.

And carpenters really don't care what the drill bits look like. They go through a bunch of drill bits in there in the process of building a house, but it's the aspect of Bill drilling a perfectly round hole. That is really the outcome they're looking for. So when we think about the personas problem or issue or opportunity, we want to think about the same things. It's not just that a tangible, tactical thing they're buying. There's some business outcome, and it is critical that we capture this in their persona.

Another element is focusing on their balance. What do these folks really care about? Because if we can show affinity towards those values, if we can show a connection, we'll form a stronger bond. So these are elements such as trust, growth, achievement, accountability, etc, etc. and if we can somehow weave in these words, or the implication of these words into our persona will form a stronger connection. Another element in this is almost the flip side of values is the notion of fears.

What keeps these people up at night? Now, I'm not talking generically like I'm afraid of spiders, but from a business perspective for aiming at a b2b persona, what are the fears they care about? Are these fears such as fear of failure, fear of a product process or purchase process taking too long, a fear of making a bad choice. There are a number of these things that feed into the emotional decision making process. And as I think we all kind of realize in our own experience, there's a lot of logic we can put into weighing options in and logically deciding which product might be better for any particular purchase. But at the end of the day, when we finally make that decision, emotion plays a key part of that decision making process.

And that's why it's important that we understand what these people fear, both in terms of the business outcome that may be at risk, or the process they're going through. And these fears might be professional, they might be personal, but it's worth having that thought process of considering what these are is we're figuring out the final elements of our persona. Another aspect of this is what I call pet peeves. Now, this can be pet peeves about the buying process, or maybe there's some other dimension They don't like, you know, what do these people really hate. And here are some examples that sometimes come up in the purchase process. These people might actually hate slow moving vendors, they might hate paperwork, they might hate having a lack of information, or vendors who don't apply time and energy to understand their business problem.

There can be a number of these things. And again, is similar to thinking about what these people fear what these people value, if we know what they hate, what they really get disappointed about in the purchase process or in the application or use or implementation of your product. Then we can address those head on we can ensure in our positioning in our messaging that we can address these pet peeves these fears and these values, again to drive a stronger emotional connection with the people that we're aiming for when when our ideal target market right presents. Let's talk about information sources. Where our persona gets information is incredibly important whether they get information from word of mouth around the watercooler. Maybe they get it from industry analysts, maybe they get it from editorials.

Where they get the information is incredibly important for us because we're one of going to want to aim our go to market strategy to interact with those information sources, and in fact use them to our advantage in channeling our information through them to get to our target personas. So it's very important. We understand that both in terms of the physical personalities that might be involved, as well as the tactical media that might be used, whether it's a written form or an oral form. And the last item here is one that is gaining more and more popularity, but is also often misunderstood. And this is SEO search terms. Now a lot of times search engine optimization is treated as an isolated byproduct of marketing.

And that those, the management of the website, the management of search engine optimization isn't included as part of the persona. That's a mistake. Because the words our persona uses to search their business problem, their business issue, those business opportunities are words that we should capture verbatim in the formation of our persona. Those if those words reflect the language that our persona uses, we should use that language to and we should capture that within our persona template.