Introduction
If you work in B2B, startups, or are in the process of launching a business, Personas and Contact Lists are the starting point for crafting and identifying the heroes in your personalised brand stories. So we thought, what better opportunity than this to coach you through this process?
In today’s episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the heroes within your stories and discover how to find the right people in the room. We talk about personas within your contact database and see how to use them to identify which hero to invite into which story.
To help you improve your marketing strategy, download the free brand script worksheet, which includes sections for each part of the storytelling framework we discuss in our episodes, here (or copy and paste the link below):
demodia.com/brandscript-worksheet
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Join marketing experts Simon Harvey and Daniel Kleber on Authentic Marketing, the biweekly podcast that provides proven marketing tips to improve your marketing efforts and help your business grow.
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Episode Transcript
Simon Harvey:Whether you're partying with friends, or trying to build your business network, finding people to hold an interesting conversation with can be hard work. You can start the conversation by talking about yourself, but this soon gets boring. Throwing around random topics might hold the conversation for a bit longer if you hit the right one, but most people are going to have left the room well before you ever get there. There has to be a better way. And of course there is. In today's episode we're going to take a closer look at the heroes within your stories and discover how to find the right people in the room. We talk about personas within your contact database. and see how to use them to identify which hero to invite into which story. So let's join the party together and learn how to tell a story that not only captures your hero's attention, but also wins their heart. Let's get started. Hi there. I'm your host, Simon Harvey, and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia, where we give you actionable advice that will help you to create marketing that works. So welcome back. Um, I hope you've managed to get some time away from the office over the last couple of weeks. Hopefully you've enjoyed yourself, maybe with friends and families. And I trust at some point you've managed to get out and enjoy a few parties as well. Sort of office get togethers or things over Christmas. Myself, you know, things tend to close down here in Europe, which is great. So I've had plenty of time to get out and just relax, which is really nice for a change. You know, even though it's a holiday, I think I've come back more tired than when I left. I tend to find that quite often, particularly at this time of year, you know, for those that do know me. You'll know that I'm more of a quiet type, you know, potentially some might call it an introvert And I'm not a great fan of large gatherings. Definitely. So all these conversations and all the socializing it really does tend to wear me out That said though, yeah, I do love to talk with people hence I'm here talking with you guys today The only trouble is that when there's so many new names and faces to try and remember I really do find that stressful And I know probably many of you do too I'm definitely the sort of person that would rather find a small group of like minded people and I'd rather sit there in the corner chatting with them all evening. I'm definitely not the sort of person that will go around surfing the room, you know, talking to everybody. I'm sure you know those people. That really isn't me. I'd say I'm probably the same in business too. I've always hated things like sales conferences and even the idea of sending things like bulk emails, you know, sending out spam if you want to call it that, to loads of people that I don't know. Yeah, really that. That sort of gets my back up a bit too doing that. I'd much rather have a conversation with a small group of people, whether they be customers or prospects, but just people that share a similar idea, you know, people who care about each other, care about what each other's got to say, and care about the value that each of us brings into that conversation. So, the question for today. is when it comes to business, how do you find the right people? And how do you start those conversations? And that's what I want to share with you in today's episode. When it comes to finding people to talk with at a party, there's a few tricks that I've learned over the last couple of years. And I guess you've probably got your own approaches that you've tried yourself. First one that I find works particularly well for me is what I call Friends of Friends. You probably know what I mean and you've probably done it yourself. So if I know somebody else at the party that I get on with, well, what do you do? I'll go over and hang out with them. It seems obvious really, doesn't it? The thing is, most often these friends, they're probably talking with similar people, you know, might be friends of their own, but they've probably got similar interests to the person that I know. And so when I want to hold a bit more of an engaging conversation, it tends to be that those interests are more similar, the personalities are more similar, and you know, you can have a better conversation. So that's the first thing that I find works well for me. The second one that I've picked up over the years, I refer to as lurk and listen. So, if I don't know anybody at one of the parties, what I tend to do then is to stroll around. You know, I might have got a pint of beer in my hand or something like that, that I'll sip on occasionally. But whilst I'm strolling around and drinking my beer, I'm going to be looking and listening to the other people in the room. And by looking at the things that people wear, um, you know, maybe the way that they're behaving, and definitely listening to the things that they've got to say or talk about within the group, then I decide who looks interesting and where I'm going to go and try and join that conversation. So this way is maybe, you know, a little bit more hit and miss. But if you don't already know somebody, then for me, I find this much easier than just going and picking a group at random and trying to spark up a conversation. Maybe you're different, but certainly for me that I find works much better. So I hear you asking now, how does this apply to sales and marketing? What are you talking about? And why should I care about your social behaviors? The answer is simple, because the way that you do this personally is exactly the same way as it works in business. So, think about this for a minute. I want you to picture maybe your top five customers. Hopefully you can see pictures of the faces in your mind, and then maybe you can pick up the names of the companies or the names of the individuals involved there. These are your best friends. But they're your best friends in the business world. So think now about why you really like working with these people. What is it about their business or what is it about them personally that makes that relationship work? Perhaps it's the number of people in the department. Maybe the problem that you have that you're working together to solve. Maybe it's the type of work that they do or maybe a particular technology or something like that that they're using. You know, there's going to be something that's similar between all of your different best customers in there or your favorite customers in there exactly the same way as there is with your best friends. And it's these traits and demographics that make up what we know in the marketing and sales world as a persona. So we'll talk a lot more about those in a little bit. Before we move on, there's one other important thing about friends of friends that I almost forgot to mention then that I should pull up. You know, if you've got common friends. Then what happens, you know, if you're looking for new friends, your friends are going to introduce you to the other friends, you know, the people that they know. And again, the same is true in the business world. If you've got common interests, if you've got commonalities between you and your customer, those customers are going to know other customers or other businesses with similar sets of problems or in similar circumstances. And they're really happy probably to introduce you to them. So the one recommendation I would really make here is never be afraid to ask, you know, as a startup recommendations are the most likely place that your initial business is going to come from. So going back to what I was talking about a minute ago, in the friendship world, the next part comes almost automatically. We go out and we look for similar people, whether or not we're looking for just general friends, whether or not we're looking for partners in there. Yeah, we're going to go out and we're going to try and find people that match those traits that we've sort of subconsciously defined. And you're going to do exactly the same in your business too. So, now you've spent a few minutes looking at those top customers and what that ideal customer looks like and what those common traits are between those different top customers. Now you need to start looking for people that match elsewhere in your contact list. So this is now a little bit like me. lurking around the party here. You're going to look at their demographics, you're going to ask them questions when they fill out forms on your website, and you're going to watch their digital body language, you know, the sorts of things that they do, what are they interested in, what do they look at on your website, and these are going to be the signs that you use. to map people into those specific personas in the same way as when I'm walking around the party, I'm looking at what people are wearing, um, how they're acting and what they're talking about in there. So once you've done that, you can pull them into those groups, and then once you've got them in the personas and the right groups, you can start telling them the right story, which is the key thing here, and start turning them into the hero of their own story. So that was a long introduction there, but I've got Daniel with us as normal. And I wanted to spend a few minutes now, really digging into how we do that in the real world, you know, how do you create a persona and use tools like HubSpot to create that persona? And then once you've got all those contacts in your database, how do you find the right people? How do you find the people that match the personas and then match the personas to those stories so that you can invite them into? their own personal story because that's the way that you're going to get them to engage. Welcome back again and welcome back Daniel. Hello Simon. I hope you enjoyed your few days away from the office over, uh, the break. I did indeed. It's good to have you back again. So we thought we'd do something a little bit different, um, this season to what we've done previously. Daniel's working regularly with startups, and he's also got a side business of his own that he's in the process of launching and behind the scenes, we've talked in the past or he's asked in the past about how do I use the authentic engagement framework and the sort of the tools that we discuss on the podcast within his own company. So, as most of you are in similar situations where, you know, you're trying to get the hang of how do you do this stuff and how do you physically deploy these sort of tools and approaches within your own business, we thought, you know, what better opportunity than basically to coach Daniel through this process. So, you know, he's in the same shoes as you guys and got some similar sorts of questions and problems. So, I mean, does that sort of describe things appropriately, Daniel? Yes, I think so, Simon. So, you've had a chance to listen through what we've been talking about earlier with, uh, Personas, and some ideas as to how do we go about approaching and engaging with the right people in there. Is everything clear in there, or what questions do you have? Actually, I
Daniel Kleber:have a lot of questions.
Simon Harvey:There's nothing new there, yeah, far away.
Daniel Kleber:So we talked about personas. Yes, indeed, yeah. I think I didn't really get the hang of it, you know. So maybe can you explain to me what a persona is and why I should actually care about those?
Simon Harvey:Yeah, okay then. So to go into personas a little bit more. So personas are used not just in marketing, but in product development and various other places and really what they represent is a semi fictional character, people in the real world that you want to sell to or that you want to use your product if you're developing personas for that. And what you want to do is you want to sort of say, okay, well, this is what my ideal customer or my hero or my persona looks like. And these are the things that represent them. So, for example, they might be a certain age range. They might be a certain gender. They might live somewhere specifically, you know, in a certain country. They might work within a certain industry. They might have a certain problem. Those are all facets of your persona. And what you're going to do is when you create your personas, you create a list basically of all of the different things that make up that.
Daniel Kleber:I understand. So you basically create lists with people or customers that have the same characteristics, and then you specifically market to those lists. Alright, so I understand. So you group these people because they have the same needs and problems. Yeah. So that, that actually answers also why I should care about those. Mm hmm. Because if we group those people, then we can create, uh, marketing that is specifically made for that group, right?
Simon Harvey:Yes, exactly right. You can do marketing specifically to that group. And I guess that goes on to the sort of question of, well, how do you do that? So if you're going to try and implement this in your HubSpot instance, the way that you would do that is you'd use a combination of two things. So HubSpot has, first of all, something that they call personas. You're going to have to hunt for those things. They're a little bit hidden. They're not underneath the main menus at the top, but if you go into the settings menus in your HubSpot instance, and then you go into the contact object in there and you search for persona, you'll find there is a contact property called persona in there, and you can create different personas to represent your different characters of your audience. And in there. You can type in basically a little bit of information about each of those people, so you can give each of those personas a name, a bit of a description as to who they are, and then HubSpot provides some sort of standard notes fields. The challenges field is where I'd outline the problem that they've got. The goals field is where I would outline what their aspirations are, you know, what do they want to achieve in there. So there are a couple of parts that we've pulled out from the storytelling process. So you might not necessarily want to use all of those things, but that's definitely a place to start. Um, so that's the first part. The second thing that you can do is I would then say in HubSpot use contact lists. What you can then do is you can basically tag those people with that persona. So you can create a list and assign a specific persona. To a specific person and then create an active list in HubSpot. And then what you can do is you can add a filter into that active list that says select specific persona, and then you pull all the people that you've tagged with that specific persona into that list. So you can then directly market to that group of people. Okay,
Daniel Kleber:so you first create the persona inside HubSpot, and then you have your list with your contacts, and then you assign this persona to the whole list of the contacts, or do you assign the persona to each contact on an individual level? So
Simon Harvey:you're going to assign the persona to a specific contact, so within the contact record itself, that persona property will be in there and you can go and assign the specific persona to the contact. And then if you've built up the list the way I just described a minute ago, the contact will then automatically get added into that list based on the persona property that you've given them.
Daniel Kleber:Alright, so HubSpot is capable of looking up the characteristics of each Contact that it captures and based on that, it assigns a persona or one of the personas you've created automatically based on the characteristics that the contact has that it just created. No,
Simon Harvey:you've got to assign the persona to them.
Daniel Kleber:Oh, okay. So you got to do this yourself.
Simon Harvey:Yeah, you got to manually assign that persona initially. Okay, good. That
Daniel Kleber:gives me a fair idea of how to use the personas inside HubSpot. And then once you have these lists. Or your contacts that are tagged with the personas. How do you go on and use that to, to do
Simon Harvey:marketing? Once you've tagged your individual people with a persona and you've pulled them into a list, you can then use those lists for a couple of things. So first of all. Obviously you can use the list for communications. So, if you want to send an email, rather than sending an email to everybody in your whole database, you can write an email that's targeted at a specific small group of people and send it just to that small group of people. Um, the other things that you can do is that you can actually use that information to personalize communication. So if you're sending out, for example, a newsletter and you've got an offer or something within your newsletter, you can, uh, dynamically change sections of contents within your newsletter and target a specific persona with each section. So for my coaching customers, I could say, you know, I've got a new course that's coming up. Sign up for the new course, but for my consulting customers, I might give them some additional advice or point them to a new blog post that I've written. So again, I can tailor the communication to make it more relevant to the people. Another thing that I can do, which I think is quite interesting here is once you've got the different personas attached and you're putting them into lists, uh, it's giving you more data that you can use. So you can look at numbers and you can see, you know, how big is your. contact database or what are the separation, I guess, in your contact database. You know, if you've got 1000 contacts in there, you can very quickly see, well, okay, 300 of these contacts are related to my coaching and another 500 of these are related to my consulting services and the remaining 200. I don't yet know exactly who I'm targeting inside there, so I might want to do a little bit more research to try and assign them or attach them to a specific persona.
Daniel Kleber:That sounds very interesting. So. You're saying I can create one email and then I can create it in a way that the email will look completely different to one half of my audience that I'm sending it to, then it will look for the other half just based on the On the persona that is tagged to the contact that I'm
Simon Harvey:sending to you. Yeah, exactly. You can use the drag and drop sections that HubSpot provides you. And then you can basically personalize, you can create what they call a dynamic section inside there. And you can say personalize this section based on membership of a list. All right.
Daniel Kleber:That's really good because then you could actually send one email out to all of your contacts and based on the persona that they're tagged to, they will all receive an individual email tailored for them.
Simon Harvey:Yeah, effectively, that's exactly
Daniel Kleber:right. Yeah. All right. That's quite a nice feature. I learned a lot now on the theoretical side, but in the practical side, now I want to know how I can use all of this in order to define. My brand hero because you know, I want to use storytelling because it's one of the most effective ways to really reach your customers and make them engage with your content. And how can I do that using my HubSpot
Simon Harvey:contacts? So what you can do. Is you can look at the way that people interact with you, basically. So you can look at, for example, the types of content that they're interacting with. So if you've got a set of blog posts that's relating to cyber security or something like that, you can look and see these people are interacting with cyber security, and therefore I might want to sell them cyber security things so I can put them into that particular persona in there. So using browsing data is a very good thing, whether that be blog posts or web pages, you can use that. You can capture data through form submissions. So, you know, think about the sorts of fields that you can put into your forms. So you don't want to have hundreds of fields in a form because people just won't fill them in, but you can. Put three, four, five fields in a form and people will normally fill those in as long as there is something valuable behind the scenes, you can use emails. So again, when you don't know the persona that somebody aligns into, if you're sending out a newsletter and it has three or four different articles in there, you know, you can look and see which one of those articles they click on, or if they're more targeted emails, you can look and see maybe which ones they open in there.
Daniel Kleber:Good, good. How can I tailor my communications, my channels and my approaches based on the personas?
Simon Harvey:Yeah, okay. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, that's ultimately the real magic inside here, isn't it? When you actually start to use the data rather than just having this sort of spreadsheet or HubSpot persona that's sat there. You know, what you want to do here is you want to think about this in the concept of campaigns. So, um, the way that we work here is we say that a campaign is a story. that you're going to tell to a specific hero or to a specific persona, and it's going to be about them. So we've gone through the storytelling process many times in the past, and we've talked about the fact that you've got a hero there. The hero's got a problem, and the hero wants to transform into something else or become something else, and your brand is going to offer them the solution. You're going to guide them to the solution there. So the hero is your persona. What you're going to do in here to create a personalized campaign is you're going to start off by saying, okay, well, what story do I want to tell? So I'm going to tell a story to a specific persona. And in that story, I'm going to have maybe some web pages and the web page is going to explain, you know, we understand that this is the problem that you've got. And this is how we can help you might have some emails that also sort of go into that and expand on the fact that, you know, we know you've got this problem or we know you've got this concern. And here's some ways that we can help in there. You might have some blog posts that you've created that are related to the way that you solve that problem in there. So more guiding type blog posts. Uh, you might have a landing page with a lead magnet. So, for example, a report or a template or something that somebody can use a workbook that somebody can use that again helps them to start to solve that problem on their own in there and also shows them, you know, demonstrates your authority, you know, your expertise in that space. So you're going to pull together those set of assets to start off with, and then basically you're going to deliver it to them. In the order that we tell the story. So on the web page, you're going to start off with the problem in there. And when you start to send them an email, maybe you want to engage them by talking about the problem to start off with. Once they've engaged with that and you know who that is, then you can start to talk a little bit more about your solution and you can send them through to those blog posts using your emails in there. If they engage with those, you might want to have a call to action in the blog post that takes them through to a landing page and your workbook, for example, behind that, if they engage with your workbook and fill in the form, you know, again, that's where you can ask a few extra questions in there to try and refine and make sure they really are part of this persona. And you're telling the story to the right people. But then behind the scenes, you can put them into a nurture program that's related to that specific persona. And each of these parts you can see of is basically telling them. A different chapter in the overall story for this person, it's going to make a more compelling narrative, and it's going to make it much more interesting, basically, for each of the audiences and each of your heroes, rather than just doing this sort of batch and blast type stuff that I see all over the place where people just say, Hey, I'm going to send out a newsletter, and I'm going to send it out to my whole list just because I haven't emailed them in a long time.
Daniel Kleber:That's actually very interesting. So what I thought was that You create the story and then place it on your website, but what you're saying now is you don't just Create the whole story in one channel you split it into different channels and then you begin the story on your website and then you go on and continue it in an email and then you continue it in a blog post and That just keeps going until you got the deal sealed, right?
Simon Harvey:Yeah, that's pretty much exactly right. You want to use all of the different channels to tell that story. So yeah, you've got your web page, which is maybe where people are going to find you through if they've come in through Google, for example. It may be that they find you through your email. Maybe that's the first point of contact or actually another really common one that I didn't mention earlier. It's social. So, you know, if you're posting stuff on your Facebook pages or your LinkedIn profile, that can be the point where, again, you can talk about the problem and try and hook people through there or talk about, you know, some aspirational change that you can deliver that sort of hooks them and takes them through to that web page, basically. And then you get them into that story. Yeah, precisely. So you want to use multiple different channels, basically, for telling that. Alright, that's
Daniel Kleber:very interesting. And it's good to know. Okay, so let's say I created my story on different channels, and I even started marketing to some segments or some personas. Now, how do I know if all of this is actually
Simon Harvey:working? Yeah, that's a really good question, that one. You know, if you're going to spend time building all of this stuff yet, you definitely want to make sure that you know it's working. I think there's a number of metrics. And again, HubSpot's great for helping you out with this because most of this stuff can be tracked directly through there so you can create reports or you can create a dashboard with reports inside there. That's probably what I'd recommend doing a few key things that you want to look at. So some of the standard reports that you can pull out, look at your website traffic report in there that will give you overall a view of how How things are going, you know, is your traffic increasing, but then you can also look at specific pieces of content within those reports. You can look with certain web pages being accessed more or with certain, um, white papers or blogs or whatever being downloaded and viewed more so you can look at those and see if the content that you think should be being used by these personas is being used by these personas in there. Um, you can look at your email engagement, so you can look at the emails that you're sending. Open rates, uh, definitely are getting less accurate, so I wouldn't necessarily rely on open rates these days, but click through rates is what you're really looking for, for when it comes to emails. So, if you are sending out emails that you think should be very targeted at a specific persona, you want to look and see how many people click through to the next piece of advice that you're giving them. Because that will really tell you, you know, are you engaging with those people? Have you, have you understood them properly in there? Because if they don't click through, then they obviously don't feel the value in what you're offering them. So maybe you've misunderstood the value that you're delivering to that person, or maybe you need to rethink the way that you write your wording in your marketing emails.
Daniel Kleber:Sorry to interrupt, but by click through, you mean if a contact or a customer clicks on something in an email that you sent
Simon Harvey:to them? Yeah, exactly that. So if you're going to send them a link to a blog post, for example, a recommend a blog post, you want to see if they actually click on the link through to that blog post. All right. Other one you can look at is, you know, are people engaging with your social posts in there? And again, what I mean by engagement is I'm not really too fussed about people that are following us. You know, I'd rather have, Similar to email lists, you know, I'd rather have a smaller group of followers that are actively engaging and actively working with us and communicating with us and commenting and sharing stuff as opposed to a massive community of people of which only a tiny fraction are actually interested in what we're doing. So metrics, I think I would look at there as I would look at the number of people that are resharing any posts that you're pushing out, and the number of comments that they're actually putting into those posts. I think they're probably the most interesting sort of metrics there. So there's a few things for you to go away and start to look at, certainly. Alright, so
Daniel Kleber:that's how you know that this stuff is actually working.
Simon Harvey:Good, so I hope, um, I've given you a few bits to think about today and, um, go through and you can start working on those with your company and, you know, maybe next time we can go back through there and have a look at what you've managed to do and we'll move on to the next step in here of how do you actually use those personas then. Yes.
Daniel Kleber:Thank you very much for all this practical tips, Simon. I'm going to explore all of this information now, and maybe next time we can even check my metrics to see how far I've got.
Simon Harvey:Cool. Thank you very much, Daniel. And, um, yeah, have a good week and we'll catch up again next time. Thank you,
Daniel Kleber:Simon. It was a pleasure to be
Simon Harvey:here. So with these simple steps, You can transform the way that you communicate with your customers using targeted narratives that resonate much more deeply with the individual parts of your audience. But if you're having problems telling your story throughout your sales and marketing, then don't forget, you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to wantauthentic. com to hire a coach who will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your communications and give you an easier way to grow your business. So we're at the point in the show again where I like to give you a set of concrete actions that you can take to help improve your communications and drive business through your sales pipeline. For today's exercise, we're going to detail your top 10 customers. So pick up a pen and paper, or if you prefer, fire up your spreadsheet. And then firstly, I want you to jot down the names of each of those companies. So 10 names down the first column in there. Now, across the next set of columns, I want you to detail, you know, why you really like working with them. What is it about their business that makes that relationship work? And what you're going to be doing here is you're going to be looking for commonalities, common things that align between each of those top 10 customers. So, when you've done that, jot it all into the table on your piece of paper or put it all into your spreadsheet and go through there and think about what are the strongest relationships, you know, which of those in common interests are the things that um, make your best heroes and which are the ones that, you know, maybe a little bit more outlying type things. So with your hero defined and tagged using personas, you're ready to start telling them stories and increasing the engagement they have within your community. And that's what we're going to look at in the next episode. That's all for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks as always for listening. And don't forget to bookmark the podcast and let us know what you think. Put your comments into LinkedIn or into the feedback within the podcast app of your choice. I love to hear what you think of what we talk about, and I want to know how we're helping your business to succeed. Thanks for listening and see you next time.