Methodology Part 2: Rich Personae Development
Return to NextStage Methodology Part 1: The Audience Is...?
Knowing your audience in depth and detail is a required first step. The more richly detailed and complete your knowledge is about your audience, the more you can do to build a receiver -- a website, video, print ad, et cetera -- they will naturally and effortlessly interact with. There are two crucial elements to "receiver" design that come from the previous section's discussion on a rich audience personae and specifications for building that receiver.
Let's consider each of these elements on their own and use the Emetrics Summit as an example in both cases. The first -- rich audience personae -- is incredibly straightforward. The Emetrics Summit's organizers know who their existing audience is: web analysts. All web analysts think alike, yes?
All web analysts think alike at certain times and regarding certain things, yes. The rest of the time, web analysts are as different from each other as any other collection of randomly selected people you'd find walking down the street. A rich personae starts with the basic personae description you'd find most anywhere: they're this old, this educated, they have this kind of job, they're interested in these kinds of things, they have 2.3 children and half a dog.
The next layer of a rich personae determines the CB/EM matrix. In the case of Emetrics, some of that CB/EM matrix was shared in Mapping Personae to Outcomes. At this point, we know what the audience looks like and how they think. We complete that rich personae by elaborating what they'll respond to in rich environments, for example, not only on a website, on TV, in print, but also who and what needs to be at the Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in order to fill the seats. This was first done at the request of Lunametrics CEO Robbin Steif, when she asked who WAA members would respond most strongly to. A simple analysis revealed the characteristics of presenters that Emetrics organizers needed to have at their Emetrics Marketing Optimization Summits:
- 35-45-year-olds who have been analyzing websites for 10-plus years both in and out of corporations
- That have been doing web analytics for 5-10 years, and ditto for large and small businesses
- That have spoken/presented at major conferences
- That have "hands-on" knowledge of at least five different analytics platforms
- That have product neutral (no commercial affiliations)
- That are patient with ignorance
This determination was made via NextStage's TargetTrack tool prior to engaging with Emetrics, and it was later incorporated into the engagement process. Interestingly enough, the majority of presenters at Emetrics had most, if not all, of these characteristics, even though NextStage, at the time, had no knowledge of the summits at all.