How to create buyer personas for your startup

[Music] hey guys what's up my name is Sean I'm the marketing manager here at the spin lab and today I want to talk to you guys about personas and why they're so important for a startup there's a lot of challenges today in today's world with startups and marketing is unfortunately one of them but to make this smarter and efficient as possible it's so important that you create your personas from the very first steps what we're gonna learn today is for yourself what is a persona and why it's important how you can create it and what you should do with the persona moving forward so first off what is a persona actually the simplest way to describe this a persona is a real living picture of an actual perfect person that you want to sell your product or service to this goes much beyond the case of a traditional target market the target market in 2020 is actually completely obsolete because it's too broad and you can't address the actual problems and pain points of your customers with simply having a target market so persona in theory should look something like this for the spin lab we're looking typically for founders in the field of innovation and technology normally they're between the ages ages of 25 to 45 on average they're specialized in the theories of either a health energy smart city or other successful areas of technology and they're in the early phases of their startups and they're looking to scale and the typical problems that this persona for us has two big ones that you all probably know no time and no money so they're strapped for capacity and they're strapped for financial resources it goes beyond that a lot of founders don't have a complete founding team so they need to find co-founders in areas that they need support and maybe they need help founding the company as a legal entity maybe they need help finding free money and grants within Germany because they're not interested in actually taking on typical investments these things are things with the persona that are extremely critical because they actually have to do with the goals and the pain points of this imaginary person how this differs from a target market is because the traditional target market usually only focuses on demographics people who like sugary drinks between the ages of 18 to 65 in the whole world is a target demographic for perhaps something like coca-cola but for startups because these circumstances are limited we have to be smarter with marketing and how we actually operate our businesses so the question is now when do you focus on your personas and how do you actually make them well the answers of the first question is actually pretty simple because that answer is as soon as possible as soon as you have a concept down and your business plan is written you should already be focusing on your personas another difference with personas is this methodology is actually used throughout the entire company so picture this three years down the line your startup is now operating with a fully fledged sales customer success and marketing team those areas of the business should be harmonizing with one another in order to create a holistic customer journey from marketing to sales all the way to how that customer is taking care of after they've actually paid for your product this can actually only be accomplished with proper persona creation so now the question is how do we create personas there's one thing that you want to really focus on during the persona creation process and this is one thing if you only take away one thing from this video is that personas should be created with real data at all cost now what do I mean by that that means you should be talking to your sales team to figure out what objections they're getting from clients why aren't they buying the product these are going to be one of your key resources for persona formulation because your sales team is going to be dealing with the most objections to your solution in the company so there'll be an invaluable resource if you've got the marketing data you can look at website behavior you can look at conversion rates to determine these things to give you a better picture now I know one of the questions is going to be well I'm a start-up I don't have either of those things well that's okay because there's still a lot of real data at your disposal and we're going to take a look at that today I'm going to show you some tricks on how easy it is to actually create a persona from start using real data that's available on the internet for free just like we talked about in the first part of the video it's important to try and base your personas on as much actual information as possible like I mentioned in the first part it's always best if you can actually do this with real solid information that your team and your company has generated itself you know a couple of ideas on that we're talking about focus groups with customers potential customers we're talking about talking with your sales team to get an idea of objections they're becoming that they're getting against the product and why people might not be buying it and any analytics tools that you might have already collected data with so we're talking Google Analytics if you're on any of the social platforms you'll be able to capture information there as well but today we're going to use the premise that we're not on any of that and we literally have zero information so what we're going to do is we're actually going to look at an example of a start-up that's in our current class so this is the website for a - bike it's a company that we're currently supporting and to make a long story short it's in German here so yeah to make a long short story short they actually built a - bike cam that replaces your taillight basically and under certain circumstances it'll automatically turn on and start recording if a car gets too close to you so that in the event of a of an accident you you know you'll you'll have that data available which you can later use for possible evidence and maybe court of law or things of this nature so for today's purposes we're going to use their product to kind of a walkthrough on how we would actually go about creating a persona and how this actually looks like in theory and the main takeaway from this video is I want you to have an idea of what resources you do have available from the very beginning so first and foremost it's a really cool tool here called a the make my persona tool that's from HubSpot really recommend it because it's just a good way to stay organized and also make your personas in a way that's a visually appealing so the URL for that up here is HubSpot comm slash make - my - persona and don't worry you don't have to write all those down I'll post all the links you know to these resources in the video itself but again we're under the assumption that we have basically no information at all that we've generated ourselves so at this point what we can do is make the best possible education educator just as we can on what this fictional character this perfect customer actually looks like so let's walk through this really quick it's important to give your personas a name that kind of a you know reflects who they are and what their problems are so for this example we have - by Daniel something better in retrospect probably would have been something more along the lines of a safety Sam you know let's make this a guy that's a concerned with safety here again we've got no real information but we know that maybe from you know our talking with friends families or possible clients partnerships that this is generally going to be someone and the age range of 18 to 40 highest level of education on average a master's degree socially hip with the with some of the platforms here and you know we can assume that we're talking mainly Instagram Twitter and LinkedIn preferred methods of communication are listed here as well as how they take in information that's pertinent to the product now the most important stuff that we want to look at here and this is what we really want to reformulate with our own data when it becomes available and as more time passes with the company goals and objectives and biggest challenges why that's important is because one from a marketing perspective every piece of content that we make for the website and content being videos blog social media posts should somehow speak to a persona and it should speak to the goals or objectives of the persona or the challenges because ultimately the startup the company is there to solve a specific problem and that's the information that we want to be providing out there so again we've got no real debt at this point we're under that assumption so good educated guesses at this point are going to be the goals of safety Sam here is actually a you know self-preservation on the bicycle and preventing injury and being prepared in case of worst case scenario on a bike like an accident biggest challenges safety Sam he knows bike safety is important but is limited to only using traditional protection methods like riding safely in Lorain or riding under extreme heat and wearing a helmet you know like general things that everyone on a bike should be somewhat aware of what's special about him is he actually has no idea what the legal implications are in the event of a bicycle accident so he's concerned about it but doesn't really know what to do or had to be prepared for that or how that scenario would even play out and he has an affinity to technology in general but is not necessarily sure how this can apply to bicycle safety so you know your typical gadget millennial who you know likes to solve as many problems as they can with an app or Hardware piece or something like that but you know we're dealing with a bit more of an extract product here so that could be a bit more a bit more difficult in his case so again these are some some good assumptions we can make from the very early point in time so let's talk about some tools that we could maybe use to our advantage and we're gonna walk through a couple here some of them may be relevant at this point in time some of them may not be but the main thing is is that you need to know what's at your disposal at this very early phase first thing I can recommend oh and I'll state every tool that I'm gonna list on this tutorial is again online and free for the purposes of what we're doing today these are all free tools some of them have some paid pro memberships but for what we're doing for persona research it's it's not necessary one and this is a must HubSpot CRM is a free high-quality CRM that stays free basically forever so for the CRM capabilities of spot that stays free definitely recommend looking into their documen documentation and setting this up as soon as possible because this is where those conversations are going to get logged with your sales team and your customer success team so every customer interaction should have a log in the CRM so one you can actually provide better service but two you'll start to collect data and notice these trends over time and that's going to affect your your personas and how they evolve over time so I'm not gonna walk through the CRM here it's pretty self-explanatory hub spots got a lot of great tutorials on that on their website but just know that it exists and I highly recommend it we use it here it's been lab a lot of our startups use it it's just a great tool that cost zero money for this purpose so let's get started how can we maybe figure out more real information about the behavior of this type of persona of safety sab so one thing I recommend is actually googling Facebook not Feb F is a sad book yeah here Facebook audience insights and just click here and this is a pretty cool tool you can actually use to get in basically as the name implies insights onto various audiences on Facebook so what you want to do here is just go with everyone on Facebook because we're going on on general persona definition at this point we want to see where possible information can lie so generally what you want to do here I'm actually gonna use remove United States which is on there by default and I'm just gonna throw this out to the the whole Facebook world basically anyone that's ever given any extra extra information on Facebook is now being included in this query so you want to start a little broad here so I'm just gonna go with bicycle and actually see what comes up as suggestions so bicycle helmet pedal Road bicycle wheel suspension frame in this case looks like we're best off starting with bicycle and let's see what actually happens here so right now we're looking at basically everyone in the world on Facebook who has chosen to provide this information from 18 years onwards 18 years old onwards all genders so when we look at bicycles you know we get this breakdown here which is pretty self-explanatory you know it can be said here that you know basically the majority of people that are into bicycles on Facebook are between the ages of 25 and 34 for both men and women relationship status that's all nice and stuff selected audience did we really get too much here no this is still more in the area of a target audience things that you want to start to look for here or is if you can get a really specific match here with the introduced interests and additional interest bicycle as far as I'm concerned is way too broad of a term because we're dealing with a bicycle cam here and the implications that lie within that so if something like bicycle injury were to show up no maybe bicycle lawyer know stuff like that would peak a bit more interest and once you have that you can actually dig a bit deeper and go into page likes this is something that's actually pretty cool because depending on what's happening here let's see if we can find a good example apparently must to do travels is something that this demographic likes to deal with so what is this actually so here is basically the most no is the most yeah this is the most like page out of this segment you know people that have interests in bicycles and going through this and seeing you know what is actually happening like what are people talking about on this page can we identify specific post or problems like here we got some guys in Taiwan and again this has nothing to do with bicycle safety at this point I just want you to get an idea of how the research process actually looks we start off here with a very high-level demographic and we start to dig in into these different things that these people are liking on Facebook different industries and narrowing it down and seeing if we can identify trends I can't stress that enough personas are really all about real data and trends you know like what can you find that's relevant and that's happening often so these guys are in Taiwan again these guys are in Dubai so it's all about travel I got a statue here about Shiva so again this is not really relevant for - bike purposes but that's how you can kind of luteal eyes really leverage the facebook audience insights and sometimes for the early phases you can get some insights that you you just didn't know exist basically and a location and activity is also based here but again I think bicycle is just a bit too broad for us so let's move on to the next tool which is going to be actually Google Trends this is another interesting tool which will give you some indicators of what might be happening in the world with various Google searches so let's try our luck here I'm also going to change this up here you should be able to go worldwide on this where did the option go maybe not I think that comes up later well let's try something here let's try a bicycle accident what does that give us and I think here I'm gonna change this also to worldwide there we go now we got the option now we got the data for the whole world for the last year you can see 12 months up here so what's happening with this term we can see that the interest per region strangely enough is bringing us well actually it's not too strange because the traffic in these regions is crazy but Malaysia and Vietnam we've got some cities with bicycle based accident attorneys and that is something that is a pretty interesting to look up here because now we've got sort of a trend you know one can one can define this type of data as a possible trend here because we've got Phoenix New Jersey Charlotte and Tucson cities all paired with the term bicycle accident and either attorney or lawyer so yes we are doing the research now for safety Sam however it's possible that maybe we just discovered another segment for - bike that could be considered a b2b persona now is it possible that we need to target bike attorneys or bike lawyers and various regions of the world based on the data that we can find is that a potential actually that'd be kind of like a B to B to C model in this in this instance but this is exactly what I'm talking about here guys you want to kind of go through these tools and see what kind of trends you can identify like as we go through matches six through ten you can also see here that there's a mattress for New York Phoenix again near me we could do some maybe regional targeting Brownsville and so on this is also nice because it gives you an indication of when terms are starting to pick up so based on the year we can see to no surprise we hit our peaks at a middle of July and then again in August so obviously in the summer the term the search frequency for a bicycle accident is going up so that's another tool that you can actually use it your disposal here for Google Trends to get another idea maybe identify some your trends and the last awesome tool here that I'm going to show you guys is a ubersuggest now this is an SEO tool SEO tool is basically in my opinion the most important form of marketing in 2020 we're not gonna get into SEO today but we are going to see how we can use this tool in terms of persona research I'm gonna kick this to English so that everyone following along can can can follow so let's try this again here I'm gonna go again with bicycle let's go with safety again because we're talking about safety Sam all right I just threw in this this term here and there's a lot a lot of nice SEO metrics here going on what's actually important is going to be here in keyword ideas and the nice thing about this is we can go directly into this little area here for questions because ideally questions are going to be one of your strongest data points because your personas will have questions they're going to go to search engines and ask questions of sorts and what we want to find here are questions and the tool that actually have some kind of number populated here in in the volume column because that means that that question is being searched quite often so here we have some variations of bicycle safety as questions and unfortunately it doesn't actually look like we're getting much volume here so that's not a really good bet maybe bicycle camera okay so now we've got bicycle camera what questions are dealing with your here how to mount a bicycle and that's also not really too relevant relevant either so perhaps for this for bicycle camera baby bicycle accidents remember guys we are in the minds of someone who is now in a Google search so these terms were we're putting into this tool that means that the see these are ideas of what someone potentially would do on Google as well if they had a certain situation just like anyone nowadays whenever you're trying to figure something out so bicycle accident let's go with questions where did it go so we got 22 Wow we're still at nothing but zeros here maybe there's something when you do the upgrade but right now nothing actually bicycle accident okay maybe if we go super broad and just do bicycle no you know what I have a better idea I want to get a bit better than that maybe bicycle bicycle - let's see what that brings us okay bicycle - on its own is a search on average about ten times per month so maybe something onto their bicycle - can starting to get a little bit more relevant here with bicycle - cam and a variant - cam for bicycle and bike - cam so let's take one of these and see what we can find here so I'm gonna open up bicycle - cam and let's actually wait I need to reenter that here sorry that's giving me the the rankings okay bicycle - cam questions are actually zero but another thing I did notice here actually and two good things to know as you start to know your industries you'll start to get a pulse of what blogs and industry influencers are working in that area so and also with social pulse this first hit if little court a little short SEO lesson here so when we have this bicycle dash cam here highlighted what's showing here on the right side are actually the rankings currently on Google so that means that for this term bicycle dash cam this reddit link is ranking number one interesting enough reddit is a pretty cool source for information and also for persona research because that's only user based content it's all user-generated content so if I click here this will actually take me to the link and we can see up here in the URL and also on the title using dash cam on a bike so what happened to this guy I'm commuting a lot and started think about it - camera my bike anyone using it interested pros coms that's actually great we can actually as a company we can go through this because again this is all user-generated content there's no companies actually being involved here and we can actually see the one of the first post being highlighted is you know this is I happen to know that this is a direct competitor for - Canada actually and we're about to talk about that so let's see what people are talking about here you know why are they using it several reasons here's three well they're using it right now here's some drawbacks why don't they like this competitor you know you should be collecting this data somewhere and building your personas around it this is real data right here this counts this is real user-generated content about what people are going through this guy's talking about a GoPro session four on the front cyclic fly six on the back this guy's got a Yi action cam what are the reasons here there are how many posts here there is I think 44 is what I saw before I open it up 47 sorry there's 47 post here no 44 it's a year old so the data still really lives really fresh so something like that this is a huge win actually to do some to do some persona research about one last tool here or method that you can use with Ruby suggests and that's actually competitive research because I mean we don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel in all aspects we can use the data that's already there every spectrum and industry right now has competitions so you can use that to your advantage see what they're doing and see how you can possibly even overtake them with better persona formulation and better targeting in some aspects so as mentioned I already know that these guys cyclic out of Australia this is a one of the key direct competitors for a - bike so let's see what they're actually doing and maybe get into their heads of it here and be smarter marketers so I'm just going to take the entire top-level domain here and what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna dump that entire thing here and - Bri suggests let's see what we get so if you check this out here we're gonna get this nice overview of the domain itself that's gonna load I can see okay they get about 5,000 visits from organic traffic per month that's nice I don't really need to worry about this stuff right now what's important is what's going on here actually so these are the top-performing pages of this site for cyclic tom so i can see that for the home page is the top rate top rated site right now in this respect and no surprise so they're getting about 800 visits per month I can expand upon that a bit much a bit more and see what keywords they're actually targeting so all I did was click on view all here and now what's going on here alright so for example cyclic Slyke the camera fly six fly six camera those are all irrelevant because those are and keywords and I'm not gonna go after branded keywords obviously but if we look at this down at the very last result is bike light camera with a hundred and ten visits per month on average that's something that's relevant for me so now I could actually take this term and go through the exact same process that I did with the other terms with with ruber suggest and do a bit more research to see what the internet is talking about with this term it's relevant for them their competitor so it's also relevant for me other than that I can also open up this link here and see who's relevant that is actually linking back to my competition that just means other websites out there on the net that are linking back to cycling comm to this homepage and if we see here the top performers in this respect car okay there's a YouTube it looks like that's an image I can't imagine that's irrelevant tech gadgets from the huffington post's could be interesting because that's a that's a credible publication coming from the United States Kickstarter that's probably them themselves when they first started and Louisiana by clause so a couple of interesting things here first off if we talk about competition and relevancy I know it's pretty easy to see exactly what's going on here this is the Huffington Post and they're talking about tech garlotte tech gadgets for college students so this is probably some kind of back to back to school gift guide and if we open this up we can see exactly what's going on and exactly as we guessed it's a back-to-school gift guide for college students now what is the cyclic thing doing on this list you know it's right here it's being highlighted they're talking about it and this is right along things with you know like a range extender for Wi-Fi a speaker a drone so a lot of cool techy type of gifts for a college student but does that open up some extra information for me does that tell me that maybe I need to break my personas even further break them up into further groups and make one that's specifically for college students is the problem set and goals so different from my first persona formulation that it warrants another persona these are things you can go back and forth with and you can take maybe some keywords and key phrases or problems from this article punch them into super suggests punch them into Google Trends repeat collect the data log the data repeat collect the data log the dead repeat collect the data log the data and identify trends this is what persona creation is really all about going back to your suggests we can see that we've actually got an email here that got indexed by by claw Louisiana this goes back to our first trend that we actually identified back in Google Trends but look at this these guys are actually sending emails looks like they're worse I click here what did they doing Yeah right here looks like they've teamed up with cyclic and sent that out to their users so we've now got two data sources on Google Trends and you know this link here that are indicators that maybe we also need to open up another persona with these lawyers and kind of target them in different regional hotspots for a bicyclist and create maybe a roundabout kind of B to B to C model with lawyers pushing out the dash bike product so this is a way that you can kind of get creative with Hooper suggests again it is a SEO tool that's what it's meant for at the end of the day but I mean big part of SEO is also research and seeing what competitors are doing and what your target audience is doing and that all comes back to personas so again guys that's a little crash course on persona creation on persona creation when you don't have any of your own data yet and I hope this helps out again we're gonna put the timestamps for different things and the links to this that we use in this video all in the description so check them out leave a comment on the video or in the blog if you're in need of help and you know let's help you formulate some good high-quality personas take care guys ciao so as you can see here persona creation from the beginning is actually not that hard there's a lot of good resources that any startup from any industry can use that are available for you on line today at no cost you just have to take the time to go through it and get your tools organized the next question is when are we actually done with personas and how many should we have those are actually also pretty easy answers because the first answer is you're never done with personas as long as your company is still operating and evolving your persona should be to either their evolving or your finding new personas as you add new product offerings or as you improve the product or the service your personas should constantly be evolving as your company does I recommend taking the personas you create and actually hanging them up somewhere in your office or your workspace so it's clear for the entire team to view and once a month set a recurring reminder in your calendar to actually go through that persona and see if there's anything on there that can be better optimized to serve your customers better and to make you more efficient at selling your product or service now going to the second question how many personas should a company have that's also pretty easy answer and unfortunately a pretty vague one but it's as many as necessary there is no hard rule here to a minimum or a maximum number of personas it's as many as it takes to cover all aspects of your customer spectrum for some companies that's going to be one for a lot of startups in the beginning it is only one because that's all the data that's available but again as you evolve you're gonna be changing those personas you're gonna be adding new ones maybe you're even gonna get rid of some that aren't valid anymore that's perfectly fine the main thing is the process with personas it doesn't end it keeps on changing as your company keeps evolving with you so guys that's today's crash course on personas this is a huge huge topic and we've only scratched the surface of it today but I wanted to make sure that everyone understands how important these are for cuts for company's success if you do have any questions on the topic want to learn more about it or maybe even just go through your existing personas with me definitely reach out just hit me up in the email that you're gonna see in the video and we'd be happy to talk about it further with you thanks and have a great day [Music]

Channel: SpinLab - The HHL Accelerator

Views: 4,395

Keywords: marketing

Id: mnh_bgSG6jM

Length: 31min 31sec (1891 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2020