Per­sonas, Fun­nels and Bar­ney The Dinosaur

Under­stand­ing your customer’s moti­va­tions is the great­est super­pow­er in mar­ket­ing. It allows you to con­nect in a way that makes them click, ide­al­ly not to manip­u­late them, but to hon­est­ly sat­is­fy their needs and wants.

But it’s not easy. Most of the time, we’re not even aware of our own moti­va­tions. Let alone those of anony­mous vis­i­tors to a dig­i­tal, intan­gi­ble website.

When in Rome

There’s a com­mon trope we’ve all seen in TV, movies and sto­ries from ​“Super­man” to ​“Boss Under­cov­er“: Some­one rich, famous, pow­er­ful, or a com­bi­na­tion of all three, hides in plain sight with a half-baked dis­guise of some kind as she walks among the reg­u­lar peo­ple. It’s known as the ​“King Incog­ni­to” plot. 

My favorite ver­sion tells the sto­ry of Cae­sar Augus­tus, heir to Julius Cae­sar and first Roman Emper­or. This guy was so big he named a month after him­self. Once a year, the mighty emper­or used to dis­guise him­self as a beg­gar to walk the city streets and min­gle with the com­mon folk. Not a bad way to stay ground­ed for the biggest ruler of the known world. He expe­ri­enced first-hand what worked or not. The pace of the streets, their food, smells, joys, frus­tra­tions, com­plaints, chaos, obe­di­ence, life and death. 

The Romans were his cus­tomers. And he lis­tened care­ful­ly. Asked the right ques­tions. Looked for the hid­den moti­va­tions. Found the pat­terns. It was pure, old school research.

And with it, he made informed deci­sions that raised an empire. 

Who’s our customer?

Fast-for­ward two thou­sand years. We have more tools than ever to under­stand the peo­ple we need to per­suade and enchant. Some of these are amaz­ing. Oth­ers, very pop­u­lar ones, don’t make sense any­more.
 
Buy­er per­sonas are use­less. They’re fun exer­cis­es for mar­keters with a taste for world-build­ing. And good for agen­cies that want to grow the retain­er with vague services. 

How on earth is this use­ful? I ana­lyzed dozens of lead­ing mar­ket­ing and UX research web­sites for this arti­cle. There are a hand­ful of argu­ments in favor of buy­er per­sonas that are per­sis­tent on every one. Exam­ples include:

Know­ing who vis­its your web­site allows you to cre­ate per­son­al­ized experiences

Uncon­vinc­ing. 

Per­son­al­iza­tion is pro­gram­mat­ic. Group-based, not per­son-based. Hav­ing a wel­come text say­ing ​“Hey, *|FNAME|*” on your favorite mar­ket­ing plat­form is no longer impres­sive. More advanced per­son­al­iza­tion through tools like Bloom­reach, Advanced­Com­merce and the like is based on your spe­cif­ic shop­ping activ­i­ty and pre­dic­tive, self-cor­rect­ing algo­rithms. It allows you to use real-world mer­chan­dis­ing tech­niques on a web­site, alter­ing item or cat­e­go­ry posi­tion­ing for eas­i­er access and con­ver­sion. In a nut­shell, what you want to see automag­i­cal­ly appears first.

When it comes to per­son­al­iza­tion, demo­graph­ics, reli­gious ideas or cook­ing tastes are total­ly irrel­e­vant because we have stronger tech to fig­ure it out for our­selves and for every sin­gle user.
 

Hav­ing a cus­tomer sto­ry helps you empathize

Bull­shit.

Let’s con­sid­er our work. Mar­ket­ing is about three sim­ple things: Hav­ing an accu­rate diag­no­sis, devel­op­ing a clear strat­e­gy around it, and exe­cut­ing it using the best pos­si­ble tac­tics.
 

Adver­tis­ing is about telling sto­ries that cre­ate empathy. 

Design is solv­ing prob­lems in a way that’s beau­ti­ful and, hope­ful­ly, mem­o­rable. Tech is noth­ing more than anoth­er design tool.
 

Sales is the dis­crete art of seed­ing a need of con­sump­tion on some­one, and then cre­at­ing the envi­ron­ment to sati­ate that need.

Any­one work­ing on any of these areas is required to have a decent abil­i­ty to empathize. If we need a col­lec­tion of post-its and molds to be remind­ed that we’re talk­ing to peo­ple, we are in worse trou­ble than we think.

Buy­er per­sonas help you make design deci­sions
 

Non­sense. 

Design is guid­ed by a mix of trends, per­son­al pref­er­ences and ‑unless you’re deal­ing with a tru­ly excep­tion­al design­er — the bound­aries of our own tech skills and cre­ativ­i­ty. User sto­ries (the list of what a cer­tain user type might want to do on an app or web­site) guide design deci­sions. User per­sonas, whether entire­ly fab­ri­cat­ed or inspired by real life, do not.

Fos­ter­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion: User per­sonas uni­fy teams under a shared under­stand­ing of who they’re design­ing for, break­ing down silos and align­ing goals.

Ver­ba­tim.
I don’t even know where to begin with this one. 

Let’s move on.

Fun­nels and fic­tion­al characters

Aside from the fact that Bofu, Tofu or Mofu could make amaz­ing car­toon char­ac­ter names?

We’ve been up to our eye­balls in Omni-every­thing for five years. Your com­pa­ny no longer sells in one place. Touch­points are every­where. Brick and mor­tar, web­site, mar­ket­places, social, ads, apps, resellers: Every­thing is a shop­ping cart. 

Your cus­tomer is no longer a pre­dictable demo­graph­ic. Gen­er­a­tions don’t mat­ter any­more (did they ever?). And their jour­ney from aware­ness to pur­chase is every­thing but lineal. 

This is even more cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly true in B2B. We know for a fact that, on aver­age, bare­ly 5% of your poten­tial cus­tomers are in the mar­ket for a solu­tion. We can’t shove them down a fun­nel, because there is no fun­nel, and if there was one, they’re not in it.

There is a spoon

There’s a 99.9% chance that you want to sell more. Some peo­ple are great at sell­ing mirages. Fata Mor­gana. Most of us do bet­ter when we can sell a good prod­uct, from a smart brand, act­ing pur­pose­ful­ly, for a cus­tomer that needs it. 

We’re big fans of the real. Actu­al busi­ness­es doing qui­et, sim­ple, good work.

You have cam­paigns. You have data. Those are very real too. One is sub­jec­tive, art­ful, per­sis­tent, and requires a mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy that believes in itself. The oth­er is objec­tive, action­able, mea­sur­able. We can under­stand the fluc­tu­a­tions if we ana­lyze caus­es and effects.

A map for your campaigns

I often see a dis­tinc­tive pat­tern in clients’ strate­gies: A dis­con­nec­tion between old fash­ion media (TV, radio, print, ads), dig­i­tal ads (from Google to Tik­Tok and from PPC to pro­gram­mat­ic) and dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing (email, social media, SEO, inbound marketing).

Tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing is the long-term game. Ads are tools for short-term acti­va­tion and sales spikes. And every­thing else is kind of brand­ing-in-between filled with ​“what needs to be done”. 

Com­pa­nies strug­gle to make long term plans and fail to stick to them. Par­tic­u­lar­ly when results are not what we envi­sioned, usu­al­ly too small or too slow. We need a goal, a com­pass and a map. A great place to start is Gini Dietrich’s PESO Mod­el. Essen­tial­ly the mod­el maps out every media chan­nel avail­able into four cat­e­gories: Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned. And it gives you a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to dis­trib­ute the efforts (time, bud­get, cre­ativ­i­ty) into these chan­nels and categories. 

We apply it to our own strate­gies. Key results:

1. We need­ed a frame­work that could be flex­i­ble and adapt to chang­ing pri­or­i­ties. Now it’s eas­i­er for us to know which chan­nels we’ll explore next. What to chase, who to meet or shake hands with, where to invest our effort and resources.
2. Our con­tent is more stream­lined and we can re-uti­lize a lot of our IP for dif­fer­ent pur­pos­es, media and audiences.
3. We can push mar­ket­ing tac­tics for long and short term strate­gies simul­ta­ne­ous­ly in mul­ti­ple chan­nels. The dis­con­nec­tion is gone.

It also allows us to plan small cam­paign sprints and mea­sure results. A pop­u­lar post feels good but will hard­ly make an impact. It’s more van­i­ty than brand­ing. Results come when you achieve a long-term streak of ​“good enough” actions that feel ubiq­ui­tous and are planned, pur­pose­ful, tai­lored, broad yet spe­cif­ic, and share a com­mon plan.

And a map for your customers

There’s a way to group cus­tomers and it’s much bet­ter than per­sonas. 

It’s called RFM analy­sis and it’s been around for a few decades, since its adop­tion by direct email marketers.

RFM is key to group cus­tomers based on more than hunch­es. It stands for Recen­cy-Fre­quen­cy-Mon­e­tary. How recent­ly, how often, how much.

This client scor­ing mod­el helps us pre­dict with rea­son­able accu­ra­cy when a cus­tomer will make a pur­chase and how con­nect­ed to our brand they might be, and do some­thing spe­cif­ic about it.

The beau­ty of adapt­able models

No two com­pa­nies are the same. And every ver­ti­cal comes with its own set of chal­lenges, buy­er cadence, recur­ring buy­ing sce­nar­ios, vari­abil­i­ty or pre­dictabil­i­ty, and so on. The good thing about RFM is that, once you under­stand the scor­ing mod­el and find ade­quate soft­ware to qual­i­fy, you can tai­lor your groups in any way you want. This, in turn, allows you to cre­ate sub­sets of acti­va­tion tac­tics that fit for each of these cycles. 

You can even cre­ate cat­e­gories based on songs by The Killers.

Like for instance:
 

• On top. Cus­tomers who bought recent­ly, who do so fre­quent­ly and gen­er­ate more rev­enue. Strate­gies might include rewards or pro­mot­ing user gen­er­at­ed content.
• Read my mind. They spend a lot and buy fre­quent­ly, but have not bought recent­ly. You can nudge them with upsells, engage for reviews, and pro­mote high-val­ue, high-mar­gin products.
• Enter­lude. They spend just enough, but fre­quent­ly, and we can tell their activ­i­ty is reduced. Reac­ti­vate through lim­it­ed-time exclu­sive offers.
• Change your mind. Big and fre­quent spenders no longer buy­ing. We seri­ous­ly want them back. Get them on a tai­lored nur­tur­ing cam­paign about new prod­uct lines. Remind them of your val­ue promise. Throw a party.
• Los­ing touch. They haven’t pur­chased in a long time but they were nev­er big spenders or very active. Send spe­cif­ic prod­uct-dri­ven cam­paigns, spe­cial dis­counts, last item alerts, or run post-sale fol­low ups to iden­ti­fy future needs.
• Run­aways. They have the low­est scores on all cat­e­gories. Try an aggres­sive reac­ti­va­tion cam­paign and if it doesn’t work, for­get about them.

You can do this until you’ve cov­ered every group or range of low, mid and high rank­ings on recen­cy, fre­quen­cy, mon­ey. Spe­cif­ic, data based diag­no­sis and laser-focused tac­tics that are measurable.

See? It’s a killer framework. 😎

Our team can help you ana­lyze and cre­ate the groups, set up the RFM frame­work and PESO mod­el, inte­grate the prop­er soft­ware for analy­sis and track­ing into your ecom­merce tech stack, and train your team. Get in touch.
 

All roads lead to this

The fact that some­thing is main­stream or wide­ly accept­ed as a best prac­tice doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean it works. 

We nev­er had more tech­nol­o­gy to ser­vice our ideas than now. And yet, it’s easy to get lost in end­less choic­es, and even eas­i­er to fall into default, gener­ic solutions.

But things have changed. You can’t shove mon­ey into any one chan­nel and expect results. 

It’s a game of being every­where, doing every­thing, and every­thing right. 

It takes courage, good part­ners, and a lot of per­sis­tence to implode the mirage.