Episode Transcript
Ashley Segura: So to kick us off, when you are not at your desk creating copy or identifying personas and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go to dish to cook?
Naomi Soman: Ooh, that’s a great question. So I actually love to cook. And during COVID, everyone had their like COVID activities.
Mine was, I taught myself how to make pasta from scratch. Oh, wow. Yeah, lots of time here. So I found this amazing recipe. It’s a ravioli made with acorn squash in the middle and a black garlic butter sauce. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried black garlic, but it’s absolutely fabulous. But yeah. That is one of my signature dishes.
Ashley Segura: That sounds amazing. I actually just made pasta a couple nights ago, and I’ve been having it for pretty much every meal since because it’s just, it’s delicious. And when you get homemade pasta, you have to just continuously eat it.
Naomi Soman: For sure. Pasta is the best.
Ashley Segura: Yes. Yeah. Okay. So from pasta to personas, can you kick off the conversation by explaining what a persona is and why it is so essential for any marketing campaign?
Naomi Soman: Of course. So personas are essentially a description of the user that you’re targeting. And it’s so important to have personas because you have to know who you’re writing to in order to create content that’s really going to resonate with the target audience and going to drive people down the funnel.
But I think that When people think of personas, a lot of times they’re operating under the model that was really relevant like 10, 15 years ago when HubSpot started promoting inbound marketing. And I think that we really need an upgraded version of personas, especially because today marketing is so much more complex than it was 10, 15 years ago.
We need something that’s a little bit more relevant to today’s marketing. And that’s also easier to use, because I think that person, when a lot of times we think of personas, we think of like a resume. So they went to this kind of university and they make this much money and they work in this department and et cetera, like these list of criteria when I think of persona, a lot of times I try to think of a persona that.
I try to create a character based on the narrative that I’m trying to sell.
Ashley Segura: I love that approach because you’re right. The, that HubSpot persona set this standard. Personas have been around in marketing for forever, but there was really this very clear HubSpot version of personas of like age, location, how much they make, like the basic demographic data.
brackets, but there really is so much more to a persona, especially when you’re writing to them that you need to identify. So what are the first steps that you take when you’re building a persona?
Naomi Soman: So there are really three main things that I look for when I create a persona and cause I try not to overcomplicate it.
I don’t, I try not to have for pages of information, because I want people to actually use this. What I look for the pain points. I look for, I call them dream states. Meaning, any way that they describe their ideal situation. So that could be the more tangible benefits, the time they’re going to save money, extra money, they’re going to earn, et cetera, or that can be more emotional.
Like my team is going to respect me or my boss is going to appreciate me, or I’m going to feel more control, more in control of my work, those kinds of more emotional things that are still very relevant. And then the third thing I look for is the doubts and hesitations. That people have about purchasing a product.
And so though, like you can also throw in belief systems or definitions of the product. And those are great, but I think that those three categories, the pain points, the dream States, and the doubts or hesitations, those are going to be enough to get you 80 percent of the way there. That’s the 80 and the eight.
And the way that I love to do this is I love to go into sales calls. So most companies will record their sales calls, whether that is on a platform like Gong or Chorus, or whether it’s just on Zoom. You can hit record and a lot of companies have these because they want to use them for training purposes, whether for other sales team, other sales members, or for just.
New employees that want to learn about the product because some of these recording platforms are a bit expensive, but you don’t need those to actually record sales calls. And so what I love to do is I love to go into the discovery calls where they’re first jumping on with a client, first getting to know them, learning about their story, learning about their company, that’s where they’re going to talk about what’s going on in their life that led them to.
Talk to you, let them to talk to a salesperson. So they’re going to talk about the problems they’re having. They’re going to give you those really juicy moments. Like I’ve heard I’m waking up in the middle of the night worrying about my to do list or for a payments company, we have. Boxes of checks that we can’t cash because we don’t have the resources to cash them.
So we need an online system or I have a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open and I don’t know where any of my information is. Those moments that make you go, yep. I know exactly what you’re dealing with because. Those are the kind of moments that bring a person to life. We don’t want just a resume. We want a persona that’s living and breathing in our imagination.
Somebody that we can take marketing Molly and we know who, what she’s like. We know how, what happens when she’s at the water cooler or what kind of things she struggles with when she’s on a meeting, at a meeting or whatever that is. We want a character that feels real to us. And so getting those moments are, I think, the easiest way to do that.
So I get those in, and if you can get on a call and interview a client, or you can use sometimes user testing platforms like user testing or winter, or there’s another platform I like called Listener. Sometimes they have options to actually interview people who are within your target audience. That’s ideal.
But if you can’t get that sales calls, they’ll get you pretty much as far as you need to go. And it doesn’t take that many calls, maybe three to five discovery calls and a couple of demo calls and you’re good. So it shouldn’t read if you can get really good calls cause some of them are just not relevant or sometimes.
You may be looking for to create a buyer persona for a small and medium business, and you get a bunch of enterprise calls that you need to filter through. So, sometimes it takes a little while to find the right calls, but it doesn’t take that long to create, to get enough examples of, Those three categories that makes a lot of sense because it,
Ashley Segura: when you use sales calls, you’re literally hearing the exact words that customers or potential customers are using.
Like you’re able to identify so clearly what their hesitation is or what their pain points are. I’ve been using sales calls for years to take the transcript. And now with chat, GPT, it makes it a whole lot faster. I’ll take the transcript and I’ll pop into chat, GPT and be like, Hey, can you. Quickly identify what the pain points are.
And then I use that internally to help identify new topic ideas for clients or for content, yum for our own agency. But I love the idea of going super backwards with this and starting with your personas from these sales calls. Does that mean you’re building several different types of. Let’s call them like characters within the personas, or do you usually just identify one persona type and maybe different kinds of pain points for that persona?
Naomi Soman: I think it depends on, are there several personas like some products you have multiple use cases. And so you do have different personas, or if it’s. A more complicated, expensive product. You may have multiple people in the buying committee. And so you may have champion, you may have the end user.
You may have the person from finance who needs to sign off on it. And you have the person from upper management who wants to be involved because they have to sign off on it because it affects multiple teams in the company. So if it’s a 50, 000 product, you’re going to have multiple personas. Now, when it comes to marketing, I don’t always know if you need a persona, if you need to create material for each one of those candidates, if in the case of a large buying committee, because a lot of times those people are going to be brought in later.
If you’re working on top of funnel or even bottom of funnel content, you’re not going to really be speaking to them directly. If you’re creating more sales enablement material, Then it might be more relevant or if you are on the sales or customer success team, then you may want to have a buyer persona for those other characters.
But I think I work mainly in PPC. For PPC, it’s not super relevant. I think for a lot of top of funnel content, social media, blogs, it’s probably not your top priority. But if you have like a sales use case and a marketing use case and an HR use case, I’m sure you’re going to want to have a buyer persona for each of those people.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. Especially if you have like very different types of clientele from, the small business to the enterprise, but from a PPC standpoint, that’s really interesting because at that touch point, you have someone who’s actively searching for a solution for something or information on something.
And so you already have a slight bit of interest activated. And so you can identify regardless of if this is Jan from down the street or Joe from the big corporate building, they have the same problem and they’re looking for the same solution. The service level may look different from that. So how do you then take a persona that you’ve identified and start to incorporate more of that?
Aggressive sales copy that really speaks to both Jan and Joe. I can’t even remember what I called him, but guy and lovely lady down the road.
Naomi Soman: Yeah. So I actually use that, those examples right in my copy as much as I possibly can. I will write, if it’s a Facebook or a LinkedIn ad, I’ll say, if you are still struggling with a, or if you are still trying to babysit a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open, try this solution.
And pair that with the the Design that reflects that. We used to do this a lot at monday. com. We used to have designs with an email thread with that goes on and on, or like we used to have a monitor with like post it notes stuck all around the monitor. So we used to visually show what that pain point looks like, especially in ads, because ads are, even though.
PPC users typically have a little bit of intent for ads. A lot of times these are more top of funnel if they’re trying to generate awareness. So I think hitting that pain point, agitating that pain point in both the copy and the visual is great. If you can do that for some products that are a little bit more complex, you can’t always show that great example.
Sometimes you need something more of an icon or an abstract image or a picture of the product or something else to get people’s attention. But I try to take the examples that I find and just throw them into the copy. And. Use their language as much as possible. There’s an idea in psychology of mirroring.
You want to mirror back somebody’s language to them. And you can use this in therapy, you can use it in a job interview, you can use it in a lot of different contexts. The idea is that you can create a connection with somebody if you are reflecting back their words and sometimes their body language as well.
And I think we should do more of that in copy Where if we can reflect back to somebody exactly what they said in the language that they use, then they’re much more likely to feel like they’re understood. And I have some really interesting examples of this, because PPC, we use keywords. If it’s a big Google campaign B2B, but this is when I was working with B2C affiliate company, we had a landing page that was for diet programs.
And I don’t remember what the exact keyword was, but it was either diet programs or diet plans. And we had one of them in the title and we switched. So let’s say we had the best diet program. in the title. We switched it from diet program to diet plan. It was a difference of about 20, 000 a month in estimated monthly revenue.
It was a huge amount of money. And Just from changing that one word. Now, this was a large website with a lot of traffic going to it. So it’s different than what you’re going to get on a smaller campaign. But the point is if that small of a change can make that big of a difference, imagine if you did that through all of your marketing campaigns.
Yeah, that’s
Ashley Segura: a huge change and such a positive change, but if you say you don’t have a sales team and sales calls aren’t happening, you’re limited on resources. So how do you identify what’s going on? What words that your personas are using so that you can make those changes from like diet program to diet plan.
Naomi Soman: So I actually think that it’s easier if you don’t have a sales team. The reason why I turned to sales calls is because it was so difficult to actually talk to. to these users and get voice of customer data because you’re, if you want to talk to a person, you have to go through the customer success team and you have to set up an interview and the person doesn’t show up.
And, or if you use a program, it costs a lot of money. So that was my solution for okay, let’s not do this because we don’t have access to good data. But I think that, especially for more B2C companies, There’s so much available online, if you go to YouTube comments, or Reddit threads are really great, Quora forums are really great, Facebook groups, and just copy and paste, figure out what people say.
Sometimes that’s actually more reliable than interviewing somebody, because interviewing is a very difficult thing to do. It requires a certain skill, because people oftentimes tell you what they think you want to hear. And you always have to work on editing your questions so that you don’t lead somebody to say something that they assume that you want to hear or impress you or make you like them.
Whatever it is that, and people are strange. We do weird things in in interviews, but if you go online, people are talking about their problems in a very organic way because they don’t know that you’re listening in on them. Listening in. So yeah YouTube comments, forums, social media if you follow influencers, things like that, those are great sources of information if you can’t get an interview.
Ashley Segura: So can you walk through a full example say your brand is going to create a new blog post on like top 10 things to do in Tel Aviv. Where would you start to identify the language, the type of language and the words that you should include, like doing through this example of YouTube comments and Reddit and whatnot?
Naomi Soman: Yeah Facebook is really popular in Israel. I feel like it’s a bit outdated in the U. S., but in Israel, people use it all the time. So I would go on some of the popular Facebook groups like Secret Tel Aviv and go through a lot of the comments. There is a women’s group called Bellavive where women will post on lots of different random things, switching apartments, relationships, places to go, WhatsApp groups and figure out, I guess if we’re talking about the top places to go, to figure out, Number one, what they like, and number two, what kind of language they use.
This is something that ChatGPT can also be really helpful with, because if you can just, and I’ve done this before, you just copy and paste I don’t know, 10, 000 words from different Facebook groups and dump that into ChatGPT, you can ask it to create a style guide. And you can be really specific about this.
So you can say, what grade level do people speak in? Speak at. How long is the average sentence? You don’t even need transcript for this. You can do this in like a word counter. Tell me about the cadence. What kind of diction did they use? Did they use a lot of complex sentences, compound sentences?
Do they use metaphors and figurative language or do they speak very simply? Whatever it is, you can ask it to come up with a style guide. You can even ask it to come up with ideas for things that would be relevant. I’ve even seen There was a tool that I came across once that will analyze whether a voice is more feminine or masculine and has this whole algorithm for coming up with it.
I don’t know how accurate that is. I don’t know how it works. But yeah, if you can. If you’re looking for how they talk, then that’s a, that’s great. And then you can actually ask ChachiBT to, if you have like content that you’ve written, you can ask ChachiBT to rewrite it. In the style, based on the style guide that it created.
Anytime you’re using ChargerBT, you always have to edit, you always have to tweak it, you always have to go through a couple of revision processes. But that’s a really great, because I’ve also done that for brands have told me, wow, we love this brand’s voice. We want to sound exactly like them.
And they have a super off the wall, funny, sarcastic voice that I wasn’t able to imitate. So I’ve done that for that as well. So I imagine for, if you’re trying to imitate consumers, then that would be a great way to do that.
Ashley Segura: I couldn’t help. Usually like I’ll wait until the very end and then just write down so many notes, but this is this is so good.
I had to stop and write all this stuff down. Okay. So what else are you using chat GPT for when it comes to personas? Because that exercise is huge to create a style guide in such a great, Stepping point, whether you’re an individual brand or you’re an agency trying to figure out, like you just mentioned the tone for your own clients.
So are you using chat to BT for any other unique methods?
Naomi Soman: There are sometimes when I’m working with a product that’s very complex and there’s not a lot of information online about them now. I work with mostly B2B brands so this is a medical company where they’re targeting managers and healthcare organizations.
So not doctors, but people who manage doctors which is very complex and not somebody that you know a lot about and not somebody who’s like hanging out on social media forums. So I’m sure that’s relevant for other consumer brands as well, but somebody that you can’t find a lot of information about.
Now, again, if it’s super scientific, you’re going to want to have to validate this. But what I have done is I’ve said, like, tell me a story about so and about Mike, the, um, medical care president of this group walk me through a day in his life. Tell me about the struggles that he deals with and then I say be specific and give examples.
And I’ll sometimes I’ll even say tell me about what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling, what he’s seeing, what he’s hearing. Because then it can help you generate some ideas for things that are going on in his life. Ways to be more specific in your copy. Ways to inject details that help bring your content to life.
Transcription BT can be really good at that. Again, sometimes it makes mistakes. You have to be careful. You have to be, you have to verify with somebody who’s in product or R& D or somebody who’s running the company who would be able to verify that for you. But it’s much easier to go through Chattopadhyay to come up with this story and come up with these details and then afterwards verify it because a lot of times if you’re trying to extract information from people who create products or are more technical or who even just work on other teams, either they don’t have the time for it and they don’t have the mind space or it’s just They’re not marketers, so they don’t think in the same way.
And so they might not surface the same information that you’re looking for. So it’s easier to come up with it with chat GPT and then have them say, Oh, that’s not true. Here’s a better example. And then you have the information you need.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. The chat GPT more so gives you the starting points. And then from there you can.
Add in the expertise. And that’s really, especially with creating content these days with EAT. Authoritativeness, like it needs to be there. If you’re going to create a new piece of content on something, you need to have the right and ability to do which means you need to know what the heck you’re talking about, basically.
So chat, dbt can help take that technical topic that. You may just be touching the surface on and allow you to dive into it. But then of course, actually checking everything with an expert is the safe way to go. Speaking of mistakes, because there’s tons of them, especially when it comes to building personas, a lot of mistakes that I’ve seen of just this is who they are and this is how they’re always going to be.
What are some of the biggest mistakes people make when they’re trying to create a persona?
Naomi Soman: Great question. I’m wondering where to start. That means there’s a lot. Okay. I would say number one. No, this is very typical. A lot of companies that I work with. Most of the companies I work with are venture backed SAS companies.
A lot of times they confuse. Persona of the venture capitalist investor with the persona of the user. Because, and I’ll explain how this is relevant for companies, all different sectors. The kind of the language that you sell to the investor, it’s also copy, but. They want to hear about how you’re changing the world, how you are making the world a better place, how you fit into the market.
And those are all great things. And those are also relevant to other companies. So when you talk on, if you’re a founder and you’re talking on social media about why you created the company, why it’s important to your story, how you came into this, how you decided to launch this product. Those are all really interesting stories, but those stories are oftentimes not.
The stories that will help convert the end user. The end user is more interested in their story and their problems. So you don’t want to confuse those two. Those are very different personas. So that’s number one. Number two, I would say, I mentioned this earlier, don’t confuse the persona of the CEO and the persona of the end user.
Now, if you are For sure, the CEO is important, but those messages are around, you’re gonna, a lot of times it’s a brown ROI, you’re gonna earn more money, you’re gonna save a lot more time you’re gonna be a lot more efficient, those bottom line kind of messages. Those are great for upper managers, but middle managers, people who are dealing with the nitty gritty, they often, or people who are working in small companies, so they are, maybe they’re running the company, but they’re also in the weeds.
Yeah, those people are oftentimes more concerned with the everyday problems than they are. With the high level picture and the reverse to don’t talk about the everyday problems if you’re speaking to a CEO or if you’re speaking to a head of product, because not that they don’t care, but they’re not as aware of it.
They don’t feel that pain as much. So you want to oftentimes keep those separate for upper managers or CEOs or VPs. I like to talk about the vision. I like to keep the pain point on the back burner and talk about where they want to be, how they view the future of the company. Tell them their name is going to be up in lights.
They’re going to be industry innovators. So that kind of language. So that’s number two. And number three you mentioned this earlier. Don’t. Assume that once you create the buyer persona, you’re done. Buyer personas should be living and breathing documents because you always want to be testing these things.
You want to be launching new ads, seeing which perform and then upgrading it. Not only because you’re learning more about the person, but also because the market is changing and your product is changing and your buyer personas have to change with that. So always be humble enough. To know that this is not set in stone and you may learn a lot of interesting information as you go.
Ashley Segura: You’re just like dropping so many amazing bombs right here. This is so good. Did you do any psychology background or cause to even understand that the difference of what a founder is looking for to someone who’s more entry level and. Their pain points are versus the founder wants to see them on the billboard or once that press release about their company.
And like, how do you even begin to identify that those are the things that those people want?
Naomi Soman: I don’t come from a psychology background, but I did study literature. So definitely psychological aspects in there. Yes, definitely. Definitely a lot of storytelling. I think it came from the fact that I have always worked in a very data driven team.
I’ve always worked in acquisition teams with campaign managers, and I’ve touched other parts of marketing, but. But I work in a very data driven field with very data driven colleagues. So all of my colleagues were not that I wouldn’t work with the other content managers, but the people I always worked more closely with where the campaign managers and their main goal is I want to scale these campaigns.
So my goal was I need to get. I need to write things that are going to work. I need to write things that are going to convert. And, but on the other hand, I’ve always worked with content teams that are touching other parts of the organization. And so I would get a lot of messaging. Ideas, or I would get a lot of information about stories that they were telling maybe for a big brand commercial or for billboards or for new features.
And they were talking about a lot of the messaging, but because PPC works in very specific ways, number one, because you’re using keywords, so you have to use the keywords. That people are searching for. You can’t just use any terms or any categories that the company is using. You have, you’re bound to certain limitations.
For example you have to adapt your strategy a little bit. And you figure out very quickly what’s going to work. So to give you, and this example is super common. When I was at Monday, we they are promoting this concept of a work operating system instead of just a project management tool, because they wanted to show how robust the platform is.
And it makes total sense. The platform is much more robust than like an Asana or a Trello. And I totally get it. But you have hundreds of thousands of searches for the tool for the word project management tool. And so if you’re in PPC, you have to keep that in mind and say, people don’t yet understand what work operating system is, and they’re not searching for it.
So how can I take that concept and still make sure that these campaigns are working? Or in terms of the middle manager, upper manager, like sure, if you’re selling to enterprise and you’re moving and the rest of the company is moving more into an enterprise market, then you can say things like, yes, we help you achieve your business goals.
But if these campaigns are primarily to small and medium business owners, then You learn very quickly that’s not going to work. So we would test hundreds of different ads, and we found very quickly that messages around take more control over your work or master your workflows were much more effective.
And I realized That’s because we’re dealing with a very different kind of persona than the enterprise team is. The enterprise team is trying to deal with enterprise accounts. Of course, they have different messaging. Think that it’s, I think the main, Way to figure this out again is to just test as many things as you can and to have what I like to call a good testing hygiene so good testing hygiene, meaning that if you’re running a test, then change one thing about the test.
So either change the image or change the copy or change the colors or change the angle. And then you can figure out now, it’s not always an exact science when it comes to marketing. Sometimes you’re optimizing for quality. Sometimes you’re optimizing for quantity. Sometimes things aren’t easy to track, especially in a smaller company.
If you don’t have that great infrastructure in place. But it doesn’t have to be a hard science. If you do this over and over again, you’ll start to see patterns and then you can start to gravitate towards the messages that work better.
Ashley Segura: Yeah. It’s interesting because, when you’re within your own brand, it’s so easy to be like, why aren’t people getting it?
They’re like, this is what we offer. This is the solution to the problem that you have. It content. Yum. When we first started out, we were. Advertising, everything is pay as you go and all the cart content solutions. And people just weren’t getting it because people are used to, if they’re going to work with a content marketing agency, the typical agency structure.
So you have sales calls, you have proposals, you’re locked into 12, 18 month long contracts, and we made a pivot of, okay, instead of pay as you go, let’s change it to no contracts. And we saw a huge spike in the traffic from those ads from that minor copy. But at first it was, isn’t this what people wanted is pay as you go, but they didn’t identify with that because now this is new terminology to an existing industry, but it’s this new concept and so being able to actually backpedal on things and like you keep echoing, speak their language and put whatever your solution is.
In that language is definitely going to be the strongest point of contact when you’re trying to connect with personas.
Naomi Soman: Yeah. And I think that any company that’s trying to be innovative is going to come up against this problem. So it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. If you come up with a new idea or a new project, a new solution, it’s great to come up with new language to describe it.
And to talk about why you’re being innovative and why it’s better for your customers. But you have to make sure that you also have a little bit of scaffolding in place to help them understand it. So remember when we were always hearing like, this is Airbnb for this or Airbnb for that, or Uber for this or Uber for that.
Yes. You don’t have to use that framework, but have that in the back of your mind when you’re coming up with ways to explain this to people that you have to tie it back to something they’re already familiar with.
Ashley Segura: Yes, how like Airbnb and Uber is like the noun and the verb now that represents an entire industry is.
But let’s wrap up with what your secret sauce is. So what is a new strategy or a tool that you really like right now? Or maybe even a book that you read that’s really inspiring you. So the
Naomi Soman: tool that I love telling everyone about, because no one seems to know about it. But I love it, and I’ve been using it for years.
It’s a tool called Lysna. They used to be called Usability Hub. L Y S N A. And essentially what I do, it’s super cheap. I think that you can get a subscription for 100 a month, or you pay 100 for a test. Which is super cheap if you’re comparing it to winter or user testing. Which start at 10, 000 for the year.
What you can do essentially is you can upload seven different ads and see which one people like the most. You can ask people if they to describe the solution that the ad is advertising to see if they understand what you’re trying to say. You can upload a video. You can upload like a screenshot of a hero section.
So if you want to figure out if the top of your website or the top of your landing page is communicating. The right message, then you can upload it and you can have 40, 50 people within your target audience give you feedback. And I don’t have any data on this, but I like to say it’s 60 to 80% accurate.
Meaning that if you upload a bunch of ads, then 60 to 80 percent of the time, though, those ads that the platform, the, Testers on the platform say are the most successful are actually going to be the ones that are most successful when you launch them on campaigns. So amazing platform. Oftentimes it’s used for UX researchers, and so content managers don’t hear about it or they don’t use it.
But a great way to start testing if you’re not as familiar with testing or you don’t have the infrastructure or the data to actually be able to test Or if it’s more blog content where it’s just not something you can test, really, then it’s a great platform to start getting more information on what kind of messages resonate with your target audience.
Ashley Segura: That’s really helpful. I’m super excited to dig into that tool and definitely do some A B testing. For sure. Tell me how it goes. Thank you so much for being on the show today. And thanks for everything that you shared. I literally have so many notes. It’s ridiculous. I will make sure and include, you dropped a ton of tool names, so I’ll make sure and include all of the tools and resources in the recap and the show notes, but thank you so much for being on the show today.
Thank you for having me.
