5 Things Most Marketers Miss - Part#1

I started writing this article about a specific topic -persona mappinng and the things that I constantly see being missed when I see marketing strategy plans, social media strategy plans and watching other marketers talk about ideal client profiling.

As I started typing, I realised that there are common missed strategies that I spot across the entire marketing spectrum so I decided to write a series of blogs for each area which I'll tag in my blog tags as [5-things-marketers-miss].

Let's talk about Personas

If you've attended one of my marketing workshops, you'll be famililar with the term 'persona mapping'. But if you haven't, I'll explain briefly. Persona mapping is the methodical process of identifying the differences between your perfect customer and the rest of the world. If you do this process right, you'll unlock the following benefits;

You'll have a clear set of demographics and context attributes in which to use in your advertising audience targeting and in your copy targeting.
You'll never run out of ideas on what to write, post, video or talk about in your content
Your content and ads will hit home and create stronger engagement, which will lead to more customers

What is in a Persona Map?

If you've attended university or read books on this, you'll have been taught that your persona (or ideal target customer), will have the following in it;

Demographics; age, gender, country, city, relationship status, income level
Interests; hobbys, sports, fashion,
Occupation; where they work, title, industry
Life status; home-owner, renter
Channels; Facebook, Spotify, Radio, TV
Personality; Actively Social, Loner

This list goes on and on and while some of it is useful, is is the same stuff that everyone is using. All of your competitors have mapped out their customers like this so you'll notice that a lot of their content is the same.

A tiny bit more of an advanced method is where a marketer will outline a persona-story. They'll document the day in the life, or the week in the life of the target customer along the lines of "Mary is a homeonwer based in the suburbs of Boston. She wakes up every day and does yoga before her two children get out of bed. She listens to truecrime podcasts on her iphone whilst preparing breakfast...."

None of the above are wrong, but when mapping your ideal customer, there are many more aspects that can be examined that will help with your marketing.

So what is missing?

1 . Psychographics

Demographics tell us what our customer is, psychographics tell us who customer is. Successful marketing is more about psychological persuasion than it is about anything else so we need to map out what is unique and special about our favourite customer. Here are some starting points;

Introversion vs Extroversion - are your clients typically people who love being with other people, center of attention or are they more happy and safe when they're alone reading a book, cat curled up on their lap? Where do they fall on this scale? (Tip: if you want to be a successful marketer, take the time to learn about the different psychological profiles)
Socialisation Habits - do they frequently go out and why? If they socialize a lot, then your content should lean towards serving their 'why'. If they prefer to stay at home, then again, ask yourself why.

Good pschographic mapping is less about trying to manipulate people and more about presenting empathy with your customer.

When you nail your psychographics and connect your messaging to it - your target customer should get that first-date feeling that they are the only person in the room

From a recent workshop run by Stu

2. Frustrations

The easiest but arguably most important thing to add to your persona mapping process is your customers frustrations. To do this, you want to break down your customer's life into three areas;

General life frustrations
Frustrations specific to their demographic / psychographic
Frustrations that your product/service solves

Frustrations should simply be brainstormed onto a list written in the voice of your customer (I tend to use a Google Sheet for this) and when you brainstorm, do not overthink it, just list stuff.

Here's a super basic list based off our 3 areas;

1. "I swear, traffic on the way to work is getting worse every day"

2. "Being a Mum is much harder than I thought, I'm always so tired!"

3. [skincare clinic service] "My skin seems to be so senstive in spring, I'm not sure if its allergies or something?"

3. Fears

We all have fears. We all have our own unique ways to deal with our fears, but there is no such thing as a truly fearless person. Fears are well known to be one of the most powerful drivers behind behavioural change and marketing is designed specifically to do one thing, to change behaviour/s.

When we are imagining and brainstorming our customer's fears, it can be helpful to review their frustration list and think of the negative outcomes that trigger the frustration. Again, fears can be categorized into the same three areas;

General societal fears
Fears specific to their demographics / psychographics
Fears that are a result or related to the frustrations

When writing your fear list - again try to use the inner voice of your target customer. Your list of fears is going to be a lot smaller than frustrations and that is fine. Here are some examples;

1. "I'm worried that the economy is going to tank and that we'll lose the house"

2. "Dating is impossible these days and I'm going to end up alone"

3. [See frustration 3 above] "I can't leave the house with my face looking like this"

I want to say at this point that Fear listing is NOT about fear-mongering. It is about creating a deep empathy with your customer and understanding their 'why factor'. A good marketer always understands this and serves them.

An in-ethical marketer uses cheap fear-mongering to shock and trigger their target customer.

4. Aspirations

Who does your customer want to be? All of us live inside our own heads and most of us have a set of private and public aspirations in life. We are all cosciously and unconsciously planning a life journey that includes our very own vision of what a happy and fulfilled life might look like. If we take each of the mini-destinations in our imaginary journey, we can write down a list of aspirations.

Immediate / Surface level aspirations
Long term / Deeper aspirations
Abstract / Spiritual aspirations

Here is a basic list for a small business owner persona (you might even relate to some of them) ;

1. "I would love to have more money in the bank account"

2. "My goal is to be have six staff and a full time manager within the next two years"

3. "I need to sort out my work/life balance so that I can feel happier about all of this"

By the time you have gotten to the aspiration part of your persona map, you will probably be more connected than you've ever been with your target customer.

The beauty of this is that now, the time when you are feeling the most connected to your customer is the perfect time to write an instagram post, an email or to send a DM.

When I coach clients, I remind them to go back to their persona map frequently and read through it and add to it. This brings your mind to a place where doing the creative part of your marketing becomes much easier.

5. Buying Context

We are going to switch gears for this part of our persona map. The steps 1-4 are designed to get a deep empathy with our customer and help you really unpack who they are and why your product or service can help.

This last part unlocks the when you can help the most.

A super-common frustration with small business owners when doing marketing on social is that they get a lot less results that they anticipate. One of the main reasons for this disappointment is that their expectations are based on the wrong mathmatical equation.

Take the following example;

Gerald is a lawn-mowing contractor based in a well healed suburban area. His research has shown him that there are 800 households in this target area and most of them do not mow their own lawns. He decides to do a flyer drop as well as targeting some posts into the local community groups. He spends a few weeks agonizing over the copy and then starts posting and sending flyers out.

Gerald gets two new leads in two weeks.

So immediately Gerald looks at the cost of his 'campaign' and see's this as a complete waste of time and money. The problem is, his math is missing buying context.

Let's break this down...

Number of Housholds in Area: 800 (total marketplace)
Number of Households Who Outsource Lawncare: 650 (total addressable marketplace)
Number of Households Who are Frustrated with their current lawncare: 20 (target market)
Number of Households Who Are Ready for a New Supplier: 6

The numbers above are typical for a lot of industries and the key thing missing in most people's minds is Buying Context.

If you are Gerald, what you want to do is to talk to each of your customers and ask them the following questions;

a. Prior to reaching out to me, what was your situation?
b. How did you hear about me?
c. What specific thing in (b) made you decide to call?

An example that Gerald might get from this is as follows;

a. "We moved into the area as the schooling is better for our growing family"
b. "I didn't know anyone in the area so I actually asked my neighbour Harry"
c. "Harry had one of your business cards on his fridge and gave it to me. He said you were always clean and tidy"