M profs personas and tov workshop v3
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This document discusses how to create useful personas and tone of voice guidelines for branding. It defines personas as semi-fictional representations of ideal customers based on real data that describe demographics, behaviors, motivations and goals. Personas are used for identification, targeting, consistency, hooks and briefing. The document provides tips for researching personas by talking to customers and making composites of real people. It also discusses defining a tone of voice to establish branding, differentiation and emotional connection by outlining audience, voice, language, viewpoint and desired relationship. The document encourages researching tone of voice examples from other brands and being consistent to avoid looking clueless.
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M profs personas and tov workshop v3
- 1. Matthew Stibbe www.articulatemarketing.com matthew@articulatemarketing.com @wearearticulate Creating useful personas and tone of voice guidelines
- 2. Persona: Matthew * Not actual size
- 3. About you
- 4. Why is this important?
- 5. Reader first, customer first Talk to them about their needs and problems in their language (Not your needs and problems in your language)
- 6. What brands have a distinctive ‘voice’?
- 13. Personas
- 14. What is a persona? ‘Semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals’ (HubSpot definition)
- 19. Turbine persona
- 20. What are they for? • Identification • Targeting • Consistency • Finding hooks • Briefing
- 21. Personas are NOT • A product spec in human form • Actual real people • Market research • Everyone • Generic
- 22. Research tips • Who knows customers the best? • Composite of real people • Ask actual customers
- 23. Let’s make a persona!
- 24. Overview • Biography • Day in the life • Reading • Challenges • Needs
- 25. Biography • Name • Job title • Employer • Education • Family • Career • Hobbies
- 26. Day in the life • Where do they work? • What do they do there? • How do they spend their time? • What do they like? • Dislike?
- 27. Reading • What do they read for pleasure? • What do they read for business? • What websites do they like? • What blogs do they visit? • Who do they follow on social media?
- 28. Challenges • Pain points • Business challenges • Threats • Development needs • Barriers to progress
- 29. Needs • Career opportunities • Business opportunities • Product or service wish list • What would they do if they had three wishes
- 30. Your examples
- 31. Tone of voice
- 32. What is a tone of voice (TOV)? • Branding • Story-telling • Differentiation • Personality • Proof of ‘why’ • Emotional connection
- 33. What are they for? • Insight • Change • Permission • Consistency • Briefing • Inspiration
- 34. Do your research
- 35. Talk to your tribe
- 36. Be consistent or look clueless
- 37. Don’t do quirky for the sake of it
- 42. Let’s write a TOV!
- 43. Overview • Audience • Voice • Language • Viewpoint • Relationship
- 44. Audience • Who are you writing for? • Personas? • Reading age • Education
- 45. Voice • For example: • Ironic • Cheeky • Serious • Earnest • Jokey • Formal • Conversational • Who speaks like this? • What other companies use this voice?
- 46. Language • Mandatory words? • Forbidden words? • Readability requirements? • Style guide? • British English? American English? • For translation?
- 47. Viewpoint • What is your attitude? • What do you know? • Why should people listen? • Who has this attitude? • Platform • Permission • Authority
- 48. Relationship • Actual? • Desired? • Who has this relationship?
- 49. Your examples
- 50. What next?
Editor's Notes
- ‘It’s not the usual Yada Yada’ Google does endlessly a/b tested approachability
- Virgin does counter-culture and sex appeal (Although I spent three hours on the phone with them this week. Calling from BA Concorde Lounge! HA!)
- Plus sexy provocation and innuendo Hard to forget Hands up if you could get this kind of copy past your CMO?
- Who has seen a persona? Who has created one?
- You may need three to six for your company. Too many is a problem. Too few is a problem. Talked to Efrat last night – full engaged content marketing genius – but only had one persona. Fair enough. But actually within that persona there were different use cases / product interests and that could tweak a master persona. Even if you only have one, really getting right helps you talk to their issues.
- http://academy.hubspot.com/examples/customer-examples/?Tag=Buyer+Persona What elements do we see on this page?
- http://academy.hubspot.com/examples/customer-examples/?Tag=Buyer+Persona How have they written up this PO
- What about this one? This comes out of our HubSpot system and I like the way it’s integrated into the platform
- You ask who is your customer? Personas answer that question. They tell you about your customers’ innermost needs and problems. They tell you how to engage with customers in an imaginative and emotional way as well as a logical way. They ensure consistency across media, agencies and writers They tell you what kinds of messages and writing your customers trust They help you brief writers and agencies
- These are abuses. Get a bad persona and you’ll get bad copy. Also, if you don’t have an actual persona, you’ll have an unwritten, ad-hoc persona or multiple ones per writer Letting product managers write them, you get product specs in human form ‘John needs inbound marketing content services’. It’s not a market research exercise – it’s your IDEAL customer Microsoft brief – ‘its for techies and senior management, in business and the public sector for SMBs and enterprise customers’ If you write for everyone you write for noone Too generic and you won’t get any differentiation.
- Even a little bit of bad data is better than no data at all Make it clear it’s not a sales call Respect people’s time Make it easy to help Generally sales people know customers better than product people – objections, pain points, they know people’s psychology What have you done?
- The question you’re all asking yourself
- Get paper and pen or laptops out! Write down these headings. You can adjust this formula. It’s not written in stone. But it works for us. ME: I’m going to try write a persona for this audience by asking you questions I want YOU to write personas about YOUR ideal customer so you can take that away with you
- Let’s get to know someone Ask people for their names, job titles, education level Write this up on the white board
- Ask some questions – on your last day in the office, what did you spend most of your time doing – what was the modal task
- If you want to be credible, it makes sense to know what they already find credible What’s your favourite blog? What’s your favourite magazine? Who’s your favourite marketing opinionator?
- What’s your biggest marketing problem?
- Microsoft Word wizard – ‘Write my report’, ‘Write my novel’. What product or service would make your life better?
- The question you’re all asking yourself
- Your brand in writing It’s typically 2-3 pages (but can be more) that help writers understand how to speak like the company NOT a style guide – just give people Economist Style Guide and/or Strunk and White Only one company in any given market can be the cheapest, everyone else needs to differentiate themselves in some other way. Here’s the thing: if you don’t have curated TOV, you’ve got an uncurated, unwritten, inconsistent, mediocre one. The opposite of good TOV is blandness, me-too-ness and emotional disconnect
- It’s a kind of diagnostic tool. An imaginative proposal of how a company could communicate, if it wasn’t boring Sometimes companies know they need to change their voice but need to overcome internal inertia Like a speechwriter – listen to patterns We love getting a good TOV – most of them are not so good. Most of them are just generic style guides. But good ones help us speak like our customers. Be Googl-y
- The first stage is to understand the company, its employees, products, market, customers and values. Interviews. The best way to do this, as with most research, is with intelligent interviews. The gestalt of an interview is as important as the words. Somebody’s body language may belie the bold claims they are making, for example. Also, you can use interviews to discover the power hierarchies in a company. Who is the ‘VP of NO’? Who are the brand police? Who inspires progress? Focus groups can help. But I don’t trust them because I think they tell you what you want to hear. Often they are best for persuading people that the new improved recipe is better than the old one. Competitor analysis. Reviews of competitor brands and sites can also help, if only to learn what not to do and how to differentiate. (Always learn from other people’s mistakes – it’s the cheapest way.) But you may also find examples of branding through writing that shine. They may require a competitive response. Virgin vs. BA is one classic example of this. Existing content. A detailed review of existing content is important. Are there any good examples? This kind of ‘accidental style guide’ can help to set precedents and inspire a more consistent approach. Bad examples? Rules of engagement. You need to understand what the company wants and what it will tolerate. For example, can it relax into addressing the reader directly (‘you’) and using the first person (‘we’). Is it serious, witty, whimsical? What rules did they follow before?
- Simon Sinek ‘start with why’ ‘The most basic human desire on the planet is to feel like we belong,’ argues Sinek TOV is your ‘proof of why’ Get this right and it resonates It’s okay to have people hate you; as long as they’re the right people You need to figure out your buyer personas in order to create an effective tone of voice. You need to know both who you are as a company and who your tribe is. This goes beyond simple semantics. It means the energy and ideals you emulate through your tone, which people can identify with and feel at home with. Simon Sinek talks at length in his ‘Start with why‘ presentation about the need to understand why your company does what it does. Not how you do it, or what you do, but why. He discusses Apple as a perfect example of a company that started with ‘why’ when building out their tone and messaging. Why do they exist? To challenge the status quo. To ‘think different’. People are Apple fans not because they love the computer, but because they identify with a tribe of people who want to empower the individual. Your tone of voice has to serve as proof of your why in order to resonate with your tribe. ‘The most basic human desire on the planet is to feel like we belong,’ argues Sinek, and when you find that community of people who believe what you believe, you feel trust. And trust is vital if you want people to not only buy, but believe in and promote the what that proves your brand’s why.
- People (well trustworthy and likeable people at least) don’t change their personality every five minutes, and neither should you. If you have a tone of voice that changes with every industry whim and fashion people will be wary that you’re just in the market for a quick buck. Being consistent with your tone of voice means people can come to trust that they’ll always get the same quality of customer service, value for money or whatever other benefit you offer. The last thing you want to appear is flakey and untrustworthy. They each have their own conversational quirk, a personality, something that makes them different or unique. If you’re a brand, if you can actually identify and recognise what that quirk or what that affectation or what that point of difference really is that will naturally give you your tone of voice. The thing about companies like Apple and Google is that even if they change how they make their money or alter what their product focus is, they are still Apple and Google. You still know who they are even if you don’t know exactly what they do. That’s because they keep their tone of voice and the culture that informs it consistent. Think of your brand identity as a person, advises Nigel Edginton-Vigus.
- It’s incredibly tempting to look at companies like Innocent or even Google, with their not the usual yada yada, and think being a bit fun and ‘different’ is the way to create a distinctive tone of voice.You couldn’t be more wrong. Doing quirky for the sake of it will completely confuse your customers and audience. You can only be quirky if you’re quirky through and through as a company. And even the companies you think of as quirky have to work very hard to get the tone of voice right; perhaps harder because of the risk of overshooting the mark and ending up with silly, trite or glib. Say you provide a specialist banking app to the leading financial institutions. You are experts in security and compliance and your actual product is top notch. Then you start putting out blog posts and product descriptions that make jokes and take digs at all ‘that crazy regulatory stuff!’ Your customers will have no idea what you’re talking about and you will undermine the very core of who you are as a company. Tone of voice has to aid understanding and communication, not hinder it. But don’t be boring or ‘professional’
- What’s good about this? This is Mailchimp’s voice and tone guidelines – voiceandtone.com I like this: User feelings ‘think clever, not silly’ Be specific, be confident
- What’s good about this? We already have a state religion, but if we didn’t, we’d probably choose the NHS It’s the third biggest employer in the world after Indian Railways and the PLA But it has a one-page TOV I like ‘Does it sound as if it’s being addressed to an individual’ – giving a test for the writer
- This is part of our TOV I like the viewpoint ‘the authority on inbound content marketing for techies’. I like the relationship we describe as a ‘trusted advisor’ Well, I would. I wrote it.
- So we’re going to write one
- These are common elements in a TOV Jot these down – I want YOU to create a TOV using these headlines. We’re going to create one for a fictional content marketing agency – ‘The Moon Underwater’. The world’s best content marketing agency. Again, your mileage may vary
- Simpsons and The Sun
- Ironic (Google) Cheeky (Virgin) Serious (HP) Earnest (McKinsey) Jokey (Ben & Jerry’s) You know how movie people pitch movies – ‘Jaws in space’ (Alien) – you can use other brands as reference points.
- Controlled vocabulary Readability stats Br / US english ‘Export’ English
- Friendly Didactic / instructional Expert Trend for a kind of ‘censor of morals’ view point (9 out or 10 people pay their taxes on time) Or Seth Godin provocative life questions What’s your permission/authority – this is really important. For example, Microsoft and SMB
- Complete stranger Very polite Very informal Downright rude Trusted advisor Friend The fonz, your doctor, a schoolteacher, Saul Goodman Grounded in reality – you can’t be a trusted advisor if you don’t give any advice.
- This mural is in my street back in London You’ll get better copy and better content if you do this. Even a provisional TOV and personas is better than none. So now you know you can create a TOV and Persona in less than an hour I give you permission to go do it yourself!
- You have my permission to find your own voice – find your own purple cow. You don’t need to write ‘proper’ or ‘professional’ (I saw this one on the Southbank in London) Keep revisiting your TOV and personas. They’re no good if you don’t keep them up to date.
- Getting stuck in the lab is pointless. You need to share your TOV and personas widely. People need to use them in every briefing.