Why a typical marketing persona just isn’t enough (and what you can do to fix it)
“Know exactly who it is you want to connect with.”
Daydream into this person’s life and imagine every detail you can about this person. Get into their heads, their hearts, and their very souls. Feel like you know this person intimately.
When it comes to selling ourselves on the internet, we’ve all gotten the same bland advice. But we are rarely given the insight into the way this process of target-audience infiltration actually works.
We both present ourselves and see others at the depth of our online profiles.
Online, you can become an avatar. Your best-projected self. You need only show the polished and glittering parts of yourself. What you choose to post is obviously well edited.
The problem with the folks working the audience-identification assignment at most marketing agencies is that they don’t really, and can’t really ever know the people they are trying to target because they are the proxy for the person with the passion for the product or service in the first place.
And their work often comes out flat.
Level 1: The ‘Middle School Crush’ Persona
I’ve seen many marketing professionals develop their target-audience “personas” at roughly a middle-school, daydream level of maturity.
The desired being is merely given a superficial description of their external qualities by the growing child who so desperately wants, and desires.
This reminds me of when a kid is first introduced to the twinging, slightly uncomfortable feeling of love. They might spend time daydreaming about who they want to meet and fall in love with, someday. They might have some ideas about this person, but it’s all surface-level stuff that they focus on.
Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
“Jane is a 30 something, college-educated, professional woman who wears glasses and likes technology. She has a degree in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in New York,
She is interested in increasing productivity on her team and likes to watch sports in her free time.”
Does that feel very intimate to you? Really? Can you feel Jane through this description? I can’t.
Do you think that you could make a connection with her at a professional event — if those interesting, but ultimately superficial things were all you cared about when you struck up a conversation with her?
Level 2: The ‘High School Date’ Persona
As a marketing expert begins to get closer to real interactions with actual customers, the marketing personas can be written with slightly more depth.
These data portraits start to dig into some of the real motivations, concerns, and vulnerabilities of the target reader. They’re a little bit more like a high-school or college crush on an actual person.
You may have even spoken with this person in real life once or twice. They have a slim chance of knowing that you exist. And if you’re lucky, they might even know your name.
They may or may not like you back. But the chances of “happily ever after,” or even going on a first date with this person are not looking strong. Yet, you may hold out hope for ages, depending on your own level of attraction to them.
“Alex is a 28-year-old male who works at a start-up in the sharing economy space. He’s passionate about creating useful connections between people using technology as the intermediary.
He loves to read and write and has a collection of every book ever written by Robert A. Heinlein.
In his free time you can find him at the gym, playing his mandolin, or at potlucks eating delicious food hanging out with his friends.”
This is getting better. It’s less focused on things like his age and appearance, or his demographic statistics. It gives you a little bit more of a feel about what drives him, and what kind of things he’s interested in.
You might be able to actually spend more time with a persona like this, and get to know him well enough over time to make a solid connection with him. Eventually.
But you really still need more.
Level 3: The ‘Truly Intimate’ Persona
Intimacy is built over time and with practice. Intimacy is the result of falling over and over again, getting back up, and being brave enough to really see the person you want to share space and time with. Intimacy is a visceral experience that encompasses emotions on both sides of the relationship as well as sensory experience and knowledge of the other person.
Intimacy means you know these people’s gnarliest and most tender nooks and crannies, and you know how to relate to these places in them from your most real self.
“Thom is a tall, strong guy with a fragile side who only eats his eggs scrambled. He uses hot sauce on everything with vegetables in it and likes to drink his tea black. He hates boxed cereal but has a thing for overnight chia-seed pudding.
Though it’s passing its style peak, I don’t think Thom is likely to get rid of his man bun soon because at heart he’d really rather be a lumberjack. He’s really into the smells of palo santo and patchouli and burns incense on a little black metal plate by the door of his studio.
For now, he chooses to work a day-job in tech in the city to cover his bills while he keeps his creative mind lubricated with weekly poetry slams and a woodworking station that lives in the corner of his art studio. He’s very into sustainability.
He’s an amazing father and a devoted husband that works hard to make a difference in his community, while still maintaining the downtime that allows him to recharge his introverted energy on a weekly basis.”
Now, this profile sounds like a guy you’ve known since you were a kid.
Not only that, it sounds like this is the guy you’d know and love if the product you are selling is lumberjack-scented hair care for men who care about fair trade, non-GMO, and regenerative organic certifications.
You can feel into Thom by reading through this profile.
This is a guy who you’d go on a group family vacation with. This is a guy for whom you might feel a deep sense of brotherhood or a man who you might relate to as a warrior in arms. You can almost smell the scent of his hair when you read the words describing him.
Good advertising comes from a combination of these four things:
(1) A VISCERAL (EMOTION OR SENSATION ELICITING) PRESENTATION
(2) OF A TANGIBLE PRODUCT OR SERVICE
(3) TO A QUALIFIED AUDIENCE
(4) FROM A SENSE OF GROUNDED PRESENCE
How does it feel when you are talking to someone special? What does it feel like in your body when you’re just enjoying the connection you make with them? What do you feel when you miss that person? These are GUT LEVEL feelings, and they arise naturally from conditions of close personal connection. In a word, intimacy. (Photo credit)
Intimacy, as it’s used in our culture, is often just a code word for sex.
But really, it’s so, so, so much more than that.
It’s so much more complex.
What is Intimacy? A few simple definitions of the word:
INTIMACY:
Close familiarity or friendship; closeness. “the intimacy between a husband and wife”
A close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group.
A close association with or detailed knowledge or deep understanding of a place, subject, period of history, etc. an intimacy with Kyoto Japan of the Edo period.
Synonyms: closeness, togetherness, affinity, rapport, attachment, familiarity, friendliness, friendship, amity, affection, warmth, confidence; informal chumminess.
Intimacy is a state of complete comfort in the presence of the other — in all shapes and formats. (Image from Storyblocks)
Intimacy and attraction. What does it have to do with the digital world?
Everything actually.
No one gets past anyone else’s attention guards if they don’t know how to stoke emotions, create physical sensations, or evoke a sensation or feeling in the person on the other end of the line.
I was inspired to write this piece after I went to a fabulous workshop on Intimacy and Attraction given here in Austin by the inimitable Bella LaVey.
“The Intimacy and Attraction Workshop® is a set of techniques and exercises for inviting presence, connecting through the heart, and exploring the play of masculine and feminine for strong sexual attraction.”
The workshop was a three-hour class about how to be embodied. How to feel what we are actually feeling. How to be present with another. How to be present in the presence of another.
How do you learn the art of looking into another person’s eyes and recognising the commonality of humanity we all share? By practicing.
Needless to stay the work was challenging and invigorating. As a freelancer, I spend so much time working alone with a computer that it was refreshing to be around other you know… people. People who weren’t also sitting at laptops.
Of the 20 participants in the workshop, I spoke to 2 other tech professionals.
I was SO encouraged to find my peers in this seemingly touchy-feely class because so often in our digital business space, everything is about the MIND. The BRAIN. We are so focused on transmitting and absorbing information that we get completely outside of the realm of our bodies and subsume ourselves into cyberspace almost completely.
These days, mind-to-mind communication is so omnipresent that it’s REALLY hard to make a real, physical connection to someone based on the sharing of information alone.
Online, you can become an avatar
Your best-projected self. You need only show the polished and glittering parts of yourself. What you choose to post is obviously well-edited.
This is true for an individual, and it can also be true for a business.
Your digital presence is merely an amplification of your analog (physical) presence. So when you are shouting ideas at people from this avatar’s state of mind, don’t be surprised that they don’t feel anything. That they don’t respond.
Mind-to-mind marketing doesn’t work so well today. We’re inundated and many of us have switched off our natural receptors for general information in most cases.
You have to get to the heart of it, and into the guts of it to make a real spark happen within the body of the person you’re speaking to. Otherwise they might not even see you.
As I’m writing this, there are two deaf folks working on a project in the café next to me. They are going back and forth with animation, obviously excited about what they’re working on together.
They look so much more intimate than anyone else sitting here typing away on their laptops. Why? Because the nature of their communication requires them to be in their bodies!
Intimacy is about embodiment. Being in your own body, and getting into the feeling sense of the body of the person you are being intimate with!
So how do you go deeper?
What are some practical steps you can take to get more intimate with your audience or the person you are trying to reach?
I’m so glad you asked!
Here I wrote about the simple three-step process I recommend for getting you in touch with your target audience, now that you know where they shop for groceries and what brand of underwear they prefer.
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