Now let's talk about the persona template that I use. There are many flavors of persona templates that are out there and many of them share things in common. I'm going to share with you the ones that I have used that have made the best success that I've had with my clients. And there are three components of a good persona template, and I'm going to walk through them one at a time. The first we're going to cover in step four, which is all about demographics. So demographics is basically a basic categorization of a target population.

We want to include only the elements that matter we want to avoid extra details and we want to be relevant to the purchase of our product. More details are not better. This is not an exercise about being comprehensive of every nuance of every aspect of a person's life. We only want those items that are relevant to our business case, and the sale of our product or service. So let's talk about them. demographics.

And this is an example of the template that I use this part one, let's call it of demographics. And there are some basic items. And we're going to review each of these within this particular lesson. Before we get started, though, please keep in mind that what I'm sharing with you is only a guide, your business is unique. Your clients and customers are different your products and services are unique to Europe. And that means that your persona is going to have some nuances that are not covered here.

But what I'm going to share with you is the starting block, this is these items are most commonly captured in most of the personas that I've ever worked on over the past 10 or 12 years. But you reserve the right to change some of these out maybe you want to add some things in that's up to you. But for now, let's walk through some of the basic mechanics. So the first name and age and education kind of go without saying but it's the other Other items that get a little more interesting and these are the ones that I want to talk about a little bit more detail. So first is titled responsibility and their goals and objectives. This is about understanding where the person is in the hierarchy of their company.

Now, not long ago, when marketers were doing go to market plans, it was common to buy lists and you bought lists based on job titles. Let me caution you if you're still doing that today, your marketing program is seriously at risk. titles are much less meaning meaningful today. There are many companies that were job titles vary quite often. job titles change industry, the industry and new titles are being added all the time. What's more important is the responsibility.

What are these people responsible for? What do they charge for what's most important to them? What are their specific goals and objectives? What are they trying to achieve in the role that They're in, what problems are they trying to solve? That's much more important than title. Although I've listed title here, because we're all rooted in history.

And all of us like to know, well, are we aiming at VPS? Are we aiming at directors are we aiming at operations managers, so by all means, include that as well. But just don't limit that information. Don't limit that element of the job title, or only to your persona. You want to expand beyond that. And so capturing responsibilities, goals and objectives is a cornerstone of making sure that your persona is relevant and meaningful as we move forward.

So that's one item I wanted to highlight. Second here role in the purchase process now, there are very many flavors of personas you can create user personas, influencer, influencer personas, but the focus of this course and what Frankly, I'm most excited Sit in is the buyer persona. So we want to understand and confirm that these people are in fact within the buying process, and what expectations what engagement they are expecting. We want to make sure that we're noting that here. Now, if you want to do other user personas, the exercise is very much the same, although there are important differences that are not covered in this class. But I've always found that if you can focus on the buyer persona, elements of what you learn about the buyer will cascade to other people in the organization, whether they're influencers, whether they're users, whether they're partners, and so aiming at the buyer persona is a good example, is it a good area to focus on that will provide value even though you know that you want to engage with other influencers and users within the sales process.

Just focusing on the buyer will serve you well because that's the highest level of engagement. And you want to make sure you've got that engagement right in your messages are relevant and on target for them. All right, the next piece is their attitude. What is their attitude towards the purchase process into their job in general? Now, why is this important? Again, think every element that's in the persona has an opportunity to provide implications for what your personas should look like, and ultimately, what your positioning what your messaging are look like.

And we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But there's a reason to every element that is on the persona chart, nothing is here, just because we had extra space, everything has a specific purpose. So let's think what are the implications on attitude? If you've got a buyer who hates the purchase process? The question is, well, why do they hate it? Well, they hate it because they have issues with vendors.

There's trust issues, there's whatever they might be. You need to reflect that in the persona. And that provides an opportunity that you're going to have to address in your messaging and your go to market strategy. So just because you don't like it doesn't mean you don't include it. It's something that will serve you well, if you can address it head on. If their attitude is one of aggressiveness in their job, if they're want to be perhaps slightly lazy in their job, if they're a little bit laid back, then we want to know that too.

So here's a case in point, I once worked for a test and measurement company that wanted to cater to lab managers to sell new test equipment. And we broke their team up into two sub teams, and ask them each to identify who they thought the target persona was. And so I gave them 20 minutes to work the exercise. And one team was hard at working. The other team was kind of giggling in the background. And so I went to ask the giggling team.

I said what You know, guys, What's so funny? What's the joke? Then they said, Well, you know what we think our target guy. He's just hanging out to retire, they tend to be older, and they really don't want to do anything, that's going to shake the applecart, they just want to stay on track and don't do anything that's going to cause any disruption. And in frankly, they're a little bit lazy. Now, the other team who heard this said, Hey, what are you guys talking about?

That's not our guy at all. We're going after the guy who wants to be promoted. He's very aggressive. He's very eager, and he wants to make a name for himself so you can get promoted to have more responsibility. Now, this conversation was incredibly insightful, because in this exercise, we actually learned that there were two personas that they had to address and when we looked at who the makeup of current customers were, 80% of them fell fell into the older category of folks that some people have you is lazy. They didn't want to do anything to upset the applecart but the other 20%, the 20%, that are offered the biggest opportunity for growth fell within the other more aggressive persona, we needed to address both of them.

And they both, although the responsibilities were the same, the attitudes were very different, which meant the words we used and our messaging, we're going to have to be different to each sub category. And this was hugely insightful. This ended up driving two separate parallel marketing campaigns that went out to serve the company well, to both keep the 80% of customers happy and aligned and engaged but not challenging them too much. But yet a parallel campaign went out for the 20% that were eager to grow in their own job, and that reflected much more aggressive, interactive, compelling kind of engagement messaging. So attitude is Huge we need to capture that. And the last item here is reputation.

What are these people known for in their job, no reputation may hinge or be linked directly to attitude, or it may not maybe they these people have reputations of being a change agent. Maybe these reputations are being an analytical thinker. Whatever it is, it's important that we know because it helps us to find characteristics that will frame how we talk to these people. And we want to be respectful and acknowledge the relationship that they have their reputations, their attitudes, etc, etc. So all of these items work together to give us a high level overview, demographically, of these people and their role in the process. This is part one of our persona template that we're exploring together.