At 3DN we are continually investing in new ideas to drive engagement and my typical approach is turn to a highly rated book to see what gems I can find. This time it was the
1 Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib.
Whether I get to a 1-page marketing plan or not remains to be seen, however early on in the book, Allan talks about defining your audience and presented a list of questions you can ask to try and determine the characteristics of what he calls an avatar. And in the web world, we’d call that a persona.
So borrowing heavily from his list of questions I wanted to present a similar list that could be used to develop a persona for your digital marketing plans. These questions should be asked in the context of a specific type of person in your potential customer base. In my example I've asked the questions and bullet point answers for a marketing manager:
What keeps them awake at night?
- Workload
- Open rates on emails
- Conversions
- Hits
- Getting content out on time
What are they afraid of?
- Dip in statistics
- Other departments not meeting deadlines
- Quality of content they don’t control
What are they angry about?
- Everyone thinks marketing is easy
- Inflexibility of website publishing
Who are they angry at?
- Other department heads
- Content writers
What are their top daily frustrations?
- Other people's priorities over his
What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives?
- Immediate publishing requirements
- ROI on content
- Sophisticated measurement
- Sophisticated marketing automation
What do they secretly, ardently desire most?
- For people to understand that there’s more to marketing than picking website colours.
Is there a built-in bias in the way they make decisions? (Eg: Engineers are analytical)
- Lean towards digital agencies (not tech companies)
- Tools and services that the big boys use
Do they have a language or jargon they use?
What’s this person’s day like?
- Morning briefing
- CEO email responses
- Review statistics
- Troubleshoot website issues
- Review budget
- Review team’s output
- Troubleshoot team’s issues
What’s the main dominant emotion this market feels?
What is the ONE thing they crave about all else?
- Make it beautiful – but so I can measure the result
Filling this in with just bullet points was enough to frame the rest of the process for the marketing exercise. In terms of building a persona, it will also help you figure out if you're making the right content and providing the right content pathways on your site. I highly recommend the book.