The Conversion Scientist ARCHIVE™

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Personas Can Mean Bigger Online Projects

August 26, 2009 on 9:52 am | In Developing Personas | 1 Comment

The power of fake people

Imagine your most important customer, let’s call her Melissa, walking into your meeting room and laying the law down to your manager, telling them exactly what she wants from your Web site.

Now imagine that she’s not just your most important customer, but a representative of hundreds or thousands of your customers. Would she be able to change minds and influence decisions?

This is the power of Melissa. She is your Market Segmentation Study personified. She is your analytics report in a skirt. She is legal counsel for your creative team and a force to be reckoned with.

Melissa is an example of a persona. She represents the desires and fears of a large number of your prospects and customers in the most human and compelling way.

She isn’t real, but she will seem more real than any chart you can concoct.

Why Personas Have So Much Power

Roy H. Williams puts it best.

"Your business has three or four customers living at thousands of different addresses."

Get to know them and they will lead you in the right direction.

Personas provide three power points that will help you focus your marketing and advertising dollars, and justify more spending.

You can Relate to People More Than Data

Melissa has a name, a face and a story. She is the perfect age, has the right income, and the ideal home environment to represent large numbers of your customers. With each little decision that marketers and business people make each day, you can ask, "What would Melissa do?" Each time you’re asked to make changes to your messaging, media, or offers, you can ask, "Would Melissa want this?"

You will relate to her as a marketer, manager, owner, CEO, Vice President or agency. This means better decisions, defendable positions, and consistent execution. Melissa is good.

Personas Create Consensus

The process of creating personas must involve anyone who would "know" Melissa. She is the personification of data, sales experiences, product research, customer support calls and personal experience. To make her whole, you must involved these functions in her creation.

Then, when budget time comes around; when knee-jerk initiatives seek to copy a competitor; when programs are proposed that are questionable, everyone will remember Melissa when you invoke her name.

Personas Turn Your Focus Outward

In any organization, it is easy to turn inward; to focus on the next product or the next campaign. Too many marketing conversations begin, "How can we get our message out more?"

Melissa changes the conversation.

"What could we do to get Melissa interested faster?"

"Why isn’t Melissa visiting the site?"

"What does Melissa need to know to go ahead and buy?"

These questions are fundamentally different. They are outward looking. Everything from strategy to copy to design will open to Melissa like a flower, and she will react.

The Key Components of an Online Persona

I’ll be covering the key components of an online persona in my SXSW Panel, provided you vote for it and it gets accepted.

I’ll also show you some of the decisions personas have influenced for my clients.

Give the panel idea your vote and then attend SXSW Interactive 2010.

Science by Email

Relate to Four, Connect with Thousands

December 9, 2008 on 8:43 am | In Developing Personas, Effective Copy, Humanist | 1 Comment

You can connect with thousands of visitors to your site by understanding only four of them.

Communicating is connecting. If you’re communicating successfully, each of your readers will feel that you are writing directly to them.

I’m going to introduce you to a method of writing that will forge strong connections with your readers.

You will understand your readers when you understand the four “Modes of Persuasion.” Every visitor fits into one of four modes, and, as will see, each mode describes a different way of connecting. If you can master each of these modes, you can effectively draw anyone closer with your words.

 
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The Four Modes of Persuasion

Each of your visitors will come in one of four modes: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist, or Spontaneous.

COMPETITIVE visitors are looking for information that will make them better, smarter or more cutting-edge. Use benefit statements and payoffs in your headings to draw then into your content.

METHODICALS like data and details. Include specifics and proof in your writing to connect with them.

HUMANISTS want information that supports their relationships. They will relate to your writing if you share the human element in your topic.

SPONTANEOUS visitors are the least patient. They need to know what’s in it for them and may not read your entire story. Provide short headings for them to scan so that they can get to the points that ore important to them.

When you understand that every visitor consumes information differently, you can build empathy with more of your readers. In time, your content will appeal to a wider audience making your Web site more enjoyable and accessible.

We’ll be talking more about the four Modes of Persuasion and how this knowledge can be applied to your Web site at The Conversion Scientist. Don’t miss a post.

You can learn more about these four Modes of Persuasion in the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Brian and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Photo courtesy konr4d via stock.xchng.

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Zero Steps to Copy That Will Make Visitors Stick

December 3, 2008 on 4:13 pm | In Audio Available, Competitive, Effective Copy | 1 Comment

A good writer can create images better than a graphic designer.

Whenever we design a Web site, we inevitably ask our graphic designers to give us three comps. Then we, the completely unqualified non-graphic-designers decide which one we “like” best. We might even ask a number of our equally unqualified colleagues to tell us what they think.

Then we pay a copywriter a fraction of what the designers get, and ask them to write the copy for the site, knowing full-well that when we get it, we’ll revise it until every ounce of color, every animating metaphor, and every shred of a story is squeezed out onto the ground in a pool of red ink.

A good writer can create images and convey meaning better than a graphic artist because the writer has the richer toolset. Put down your red pen. Trust your copywriter.

 
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Be Bold and Your Visitors Will See You That Way

If you’re designing a new site or refreshing an old one, it’s time to be a little daring.

Tell the designers to hold on until you’ve completed the copy. They’ll look at you like you have an arm growing out of your head.

THEN, start interviewing copywriters. Tell them that you’ll pay them to develop three different versions of your Copy Body, the document that contains the text from which you will take your copy when writing headings, text, offers, emails and any other Web-based communications.

The interviews will be short. You’re looking for a certain reaction.

When you present this proposal to the right writer, their eyes will flash. A smile may creep across their face of its own will. Be careful, though. If they say “You’ll pay me?” you’ve gotten a false positive. You want to choose the writer who feels that you’ve just opened the door their a cage of mediocrity.

If you let them out, they’ll take you with them.

Be very clear about what you’re trying to accomplish as a business and what your visitors are trying to accomplish. Give them a set of personas if you can.

Take No Steps

Once you have your three copy “comps,” do not allocate time to have the writing revised by a committee. Do not attempt to combine the best from each. Do not seek to insert superlatives that declare you the “leader,” to be “unique” or “innovative.” If you have to say it, it ain’t true.

If you have the right writer, one of your choices will be far out, one will be written in business speak, and one will be somewhere in between. Throw away the one written in business speak and consider the remaining two very carefully.

Select the copy body that best illustrates your value proposition, the one that captures the essence of your company without stating it. Look for metaphors that can be applied to a variety of your benefits. Seek a story that can stitch every page together into a coherent theme.

Then fix the inaccuracies, and leave everything else alone.

Does this sound scary? Wait till you see what’s next.

You Can Let the Designers Into the Room Now

If you’ve selected an engaging copy body, it’ll be really clear to the designers what their designs should express. They can create real images from the ones your writer paints with words. They can guide your visitor through the story with navigation. They can throw away stock photos of pretty people and choose images informed by metaphor and analogy.

Give them the copy body, the corporate style guide and tell them to create a design. One design. Sure, you’ll make decisions along the way and maybe even significantly change the first comp, but try to let them do what they do well.

Steps You Could Add

If you realize the immense advantage that powerfully written copy gives you, consider investing in some testing. Implement two of the three copy bodies on your home page and on key landing pages. Use analytics to see which makes visitors stick and which generates more leads or sales.

• Which has the lower bounce rate?
• Which home page generates more page views and more time on site?
• Which has the higher conversion rate?

There is no better way to know if you’ve made the right decision than to test. And you may need some proof when your colleagues tell you that your copy isn’t “corporate” — and they mean that as a criticism, not a badge of honor.

Do you know a great copy writer? Do you have a success story or test results that demonstrate the power of effective writing? Let us know in your comments and I’ll feature you in an future post.

UPDATE

I’ve challenged copywriters to put together the very process that I’ve described here over on my Customer Chaos Blog. Would you like to work with one of these guys?

Photo courtesy andrewcs via stock.xchng.