NextStage Evolution's founder explains how to attract the right people to your event or product with personae mapping.
I had the good fortune recently to meet Target Marketing's Jim Sterne at the Washington, DC, Emetrics Summit. During a casual conversation, Jim asked a very simple question, "How can I attract the right people to these conferences?"
I think simple questions are the best. They interest and excite me because there's more room for exploration and discovery and that turns into richer, more robust solutions. In this case, I thought for a minute then offered that the question was answerable and involved three steps, which I elaborate below:
1 - Determine the Emetrics Summit's audience's characteristics
2 - Create personae based on those characteristics
3 - Map those personae to specific, desired outcomes
It would take about an hour of my time, about one minute of NextStage's computation time and about a day to write up the results. With Jim Sterne's permission, I'd like to share the methodology behind this because it's both replicable and can be applied to all aspects of reaching a desired audience, whether it's web, print, TV or whatever.
Background: What is the Emetrics Summit?
The Emetrics Summit, founded in Santa Barbara in 2002, started with fifty attendees, half of whom were vendors. The theme of the 2002 Emetrics was "Misery Loves Company - We Are Not Alone." Web Analytics Association (WAA) members might know that the 2004 Emetrics Summit was the birthplace of the WAA. Emetrics has since grown to some 500 participants, about 50 or so vendors, and will be held in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, London and Dusseldorf in 2007. Themes have matured as has the industry. The 2003 theme was "My Page Tags Can Whoop Your Log Files," in 2004 "Ask Me About My Conversion Rate," 2005 "My Managers Don't Understand Me," and now it's "Web Behavior is Changing Our Offline Business." Originally a single-track affair, the Emetrics Summit is now offering multiple tracks well beyond traditional web analytics.
1 - Determining audience characteristics
I've written before about how anthropologists and behavioral ethologists will create blinds to study cultures. The culture under study -- the group upon which we'd base our personae -- were the conference attendees. Creating the right blind is very important to the information gathering process. I didn't have months to study this culture, I only had an hour in which to collect rich data and the direct approach is known to fail in such situations. Eric Drouart, former VP, international operations, Bristol-Myers Squibb, said, "Marketing research methodologies that rely on questionnaires and standard surveys are inherently loaded with biases and errors related to the sampling frame, the survey instruments, the interviewers and the fact that the respondents know that they are being evaluated. NextStage is truly a non-biasing research tool with a lot of validity and reliability because it is based on non-conscious responses to information."
I presented Jim Sterne with some preliminary findings after utilizing the blind for about an hour. The DC Emetrics attendees fell into two distinct groups with the following characteristics:
- Group 1 (primarily web analysts) - Physically oriented, problem orientation in the past, solution orientation in the future, present tends to be either for pleasure or for transition, strong social component, digital thinkers, high process orientation, observe things but not visually unless they're observing activity or process.
- Group 2 (primarily marketers) - Visually oriented, no or little concept of past, strong future orientation, present tends to be something moved through on the way to somewhere/something else, strong social component, observes things and especially activities and processes.
I shared some of NextStage's previous findings regarding WAA presenters over dinner and everyone agreed the previous findings synched up well with the results from the blind. The next step was creating personae with which to develop future Emetrics Summit marketing material.
2 - Creating the right personae
Several companies use personae; one of the best is FutureNow. According to FutureNow's Bryan Eisenberg, "The power of personae (done properly) is to build a predictive model that helps companies focus on the customer and their needs, by empathizing with the varying buying modalities that exist in their diverse customer segments and enabling marketers to present to these personae the way they prefer to be presented to."
NextStage's concept of personae is (surprise!) a little different from most. NextStage recognizes personalities. A given personality may show up in both a truck driver and a chief research scientist. What you sell them might be different (different education levels, income levels, vocations, …) but the way you sell them will be the same (same motivations, same characteristics, same decision methods and drivers). In addition, recognizing group characteristics allows clients to isolate and target specific behaviors and motivational drivers in their marketing materials.
What Jim Sterne needed to know for marketing the Emetrics Summit was that a single website and marketing material could address both groups quite well by designing for the personae overlap. This means the Emetrics Summit home page and related material could
- Attract both groups equally well
- Guide each group to a specific, unique and highly attractive product