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How to Build Personas That Are Actually Useful
32 Plays8 months ago
Get ready to spice up your marketing strategy! In this episode, Ashley Segura sits down with Naomi Soman to dish out the secrets of creating customer personas for your marketing campaigns.
Naomi shares her approach to building personas and the importance of focusing on pain points, dream states, and doubts/hesitations rather than just demographic data. One tactic Naomi covers is using sales call recordings as a valuable source of information for understanding customer language and concerns.
The conversation covers various methods for gathering persona data, including tips like analyzing online forums, social media comments, and using ChatGPT to create style guides based on customer language. Naomi emphasizes the importance of mirroring customer language in marketing copy.
Learn the common mistakes people make in persona creation, such as confusing investor personas with end-user personas and the importance of tailoring messages to different levels of management within an organization.
The episode concludes with Naomi sharing her "secret sauce".Subscribe now for your bi-weekly dose of content wisdom, direct from the content marketing experts to your kitchen table.
Catch the full Video Podcast Episode Here:
https://contentyum.com/episode-17-how-to-build-personas-that-are-actually-useful
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https://contentyum.com/
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Transcript
Introduction to Content in the Kitchen
00:00:00
Speaker
That's where they're gonna talk about what's going on in their life that led them to talk to you, led them to talk to a salesperson. So they're gonna talk about the problems they're having. They're gonna give you those really juicy moments.
Meet Naomi: A Copywriter's Background
00:00:22
Speaker
Welcome back to Content in the Kitchen, where we gather around the kitchen and chat about content marketing. Today, we have a very special guest, Naomi, joining us to discuss how to build personas that are actually useful. She's a copywriter over at SimilarWeb and has a wealth of experience working in hypergrowth startups in Tel Aviv. which is really the heart of Startup Nation. Naomi specializes in crafting messaging and writing copy for performance marketing teams, consistently improving conversion rates, and bringing in higher quality leads for brands. From social ads to massive, ABM-driven late-gen, Naomi knows how to strategically tell a story to get users to click. So join us as we dive into the art of building personas that truly work and drive results.
00:01:08
Speaker
Grab your favorite cup and let's dive into the conversation with Naomi.
00:01:18
Speaker
So to kick us off when you are not at your desk creating coffee or identifying personas and you find yourself in the kitchen, what is your go-to dish to cook? 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. um 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 is absolutely fabulous.
00:01:59
Speaker
But yeah, yeah that is that is one of my signature dishes. 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 delicious. And when you get homemade pasta, you have to just continuously eat it. For sure. Pasta is the best. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So from pasta to personas.
00:02:22
Speaker
You can go for the conversation by explaining what a persona is and why it is so essential for any marketing campaign.
Why Are Personas Important in Marketing?
00:02:32
Speaker
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
00:02:55
Speaker
the 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 um easier to use. Because I think that personas, 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 it's like these list of criteria. When when I think of persona, a lot of times I try to think of a persona that I they try to create a character.
00:03:53
Speaker
based on the narrative um that I'm trying to sell. I love that approach because you're right, the that HubSpot persona kind of set this standard. I mean, personas have been around in and 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 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?
How to Build Effective Personas
00:04:29
Speaker
So there are really three main things that I look for when I create a persona and because I try not to overcomplicate it. i don't I try not to have like four pages of information because yeah I want people to actually use this. So what I look for, 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, the money, extra money they're going to earn, etc. When 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 kind of more emotional things that are still very relevant.
00:05:17
Speaker
and Then the third thing I look for is the doubts and hesitations that people have about purchasing a product. and so those 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 um doubts or hesitations, those are going to be enough to get you 80% of the way there. That's the 80 and the 80. 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. um they You can hit record and a lot of companies have these because
00:06:09
Speaker
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. um And so what I'd love to do is I love to go into the discovery calls where they're first jumping on with the 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
00:06:45
Speaker
talk to you, led 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 um 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, right? 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 sort of living and breathing in our imagination. Somebody that we can take mo marketing Molly and we know what she's like. We know,
00:07:37
Speaker
how what happens when she's at the water cooler or what kind of things she struggles with when she's on ah on a meeting and 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. um So I get those 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
00:08:18
Speaker
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 should read like if you can get really good calls, um because 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. um 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.
Leveraging Sales Calls for Persona Insights
00:08:57
Speaker
That makes a lot of sense because it
00:08:59
Speaker
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 our clients or for Content Yum, for our own agency. But I love the idea of going super backwards with this and and starting with your personas from these sales calls. Does that mean you're
00:09:44
Speaker
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? um Well, I think it depends on, are there are there several personas? um 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. So you may have Champion. You may have the end user. You may have the person from Binance 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 it affects multiple teams in the company.
00:10:34
Speaker
um 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. so 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.
00:11:24
Speaker
But if you have like a sales use case and a marketing use case and an HR use case, I'm for sure you're going to want to have a buyer persona for each of those people.
Crafting PPC Ads with Personas in Mind
00:11:34
Speaker
Yeah, especially if you have like very different types of clientele from you know 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 like a slight bit of interest activated. And so you can identify, regardless of if this is um 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 ah persona that you ah you've identified
00:12:21
Speaker
and start to incorporate more of that like aggressive sales copy that really speaks to both Jan and Joe. I can't even remember what I called him, but I am lovely lady down the road. Yeah. So I actually use that those examples right in my copy as much as I possibly can. Um, so 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 start still trying to babysit a spreadsheet with 17 tabs open, try the solution um and pair that with the um the ah design that reflects that. So um we used to do this a lot at monday dot.com. We used to have designs with like an email thread with like that goes on and on, or like we used to have a monitor with like post-it notes stuck all around the monitor. um 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. um So I think
00:13:37
Speaker
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. um Sometimes you need something more of an icon or an abstract image or or a picture of the product or something else um to get people's attention. But I try to take the examples that I find and just throw them into the copy.
00:14:08
Speaker
and use their language as much as possible. ah There's ah 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. So if it's a big Google campaign, um
00:14:56
Speaker
And now we work more in 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 key word 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 wow 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. um So it's different than what you're going to get on a smaller campaign. But the point is, like if that small of a change can make that big of a difference, imagine if you did that through all of your marketing campaigns.
00:15:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a huge change and such a positive change. But if you say you don't have a sales team and and sales calls aren't happening, you're kind of limited on resources. So how do you identify what words that your personas are using so that you can make those changes from like diet program to diet plan?
Using Online Communities for Language and Insights
00:16:15
Speaker
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 these users and get sort of voice of customer data. Because 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 like, OK, Let's not not do this because we don't have access to good data.
00:16:47
Speaker
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 so 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 um people are people are strange. We do weird things in interviews.
00:17:40
Speaker
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. huh So yeah, um YouTube comments, forums, social media, um if you follow influencers, things like that, those are great sources of information if you can't get an interview. um So can you walk through like a a full example? Say say your ah 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 link the type of language and the words that you should include, like doing through this example of like YouTube comments and Reddit and whatnot?
00:18:24
Speaker
um Yeah, um Facebook is really popular in Israel. um I feel like it's a bit outdated in the US, but in Israel, people use it all the time. So I would go on some of the popular Facebook groups, like Secret Tel Aviv, um and go through a lot of the comments. There is a women's group called Bel Aviv, where women will post on lots of different random things, switching apartments, relationships, places to go, WhatsApp groups. um 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 chat.jbt can also be really helpful with, because if you can just, and I've done this before, you just copy and paste like,
00:19:10
Speaker
I don't know, 10,000 words from different Facebook groups and dump that into chat GPT. 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 or speak at? um How long is the average sentence? You don't even need chat GPT for this. You can do this in like a word counter. um tell me about the cadence, what kind of diction did they use? Did they use a lot of complex sentences, compound sentences? um Do they use metaphors in figurative language or do they speak very simply? um Whatever it is, you can ask it to come up with the style guide. um You can even ask it to come up with ideas for things that would be relevant. I've even seen um
00:19:58
Speaker
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 coming up with it. um I don't know how accurate that is. I don't know how it works. um But yeah, if you can if you're looking for how they talk, then that's ah that's great. And then you can actually ask Chatcher BT, if you have like content that you've written, you can ask Chatcher BT to rewrite it in the style, based on the style guide that it created.
00:20:33
Speaker
so Anytime you're using Charged BT, you always have to edit, you always have to tweak it, you always have to go through a couple of revision processes. um But that's a really great, because i've I've also done that for like, 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 kind of funny, sarcastic voice that I wasn't able to imitate. um 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. I can help. Usually like I'll wait until the very end and then just write down so many notes. But this is like, this is so good. I had to stop and write all of this stuff down. me 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
00:21:24
Speaker
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 GPT for any other unique methods? um There are sometimes when I'm working with a product that's very complex. um And there's not a lot of information online about them. Now, I work with mostly B2B brands. um So this is a medical company where they're they're targeting um managers and healthcare organizations. So not doctors, but people who manage doctors, um 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.
00:22:11
Speaker
So um now, again, if it's super scientific, you're going to want to have to validate this. But what I have done is like I've said, like, tell um tell me a story about so and so, about Mike, the medical medical care president of this group, um walk me through a day in his life. um and Tell me about the struggles that he deals with. And then I say, be specific and give examples. um 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
00:22:56
Speaker
for things that are going on in his life, ways to be more specific in your copy, ways to inject um details that help bring your content to life. So Trantium BT can be really, really good at that. um 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 and&D or somebody who's running the company who would be able to verify that for you. um But it's much easier to go through chat2bt 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 out in the same way.
00:23:48
Speaker
And so they might not surface the same information that you're looking for. So it's easier to come up with it but 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. Yeah, me chat GPT more so gives you the starting points. And then from there, you can add in the expertise. And I mean, that's really, especially with creating content these days with EAT. I mean, the helpfulness, the 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 so, which means you need to know what the heck you're talking about, basically. so
00:24:26
Speaker
chat GPT can help take that technical topic that you may just be touching the surface on and allow you to kind of dive into it. But then of course, actually checking everything with an expert is the safe way to go. and Speaking of
Distinguishing Investor and User Personas
00:24:41
Speaker
mistakes, because you know, there's Tons of them, especially when it comes to building personas, a lot of mistakes that I've seen of just like, this is who they are and this is how they're always going to be. What are some of the biggest biggest mistakes you see people make when they're trying to create a persona? um Great question. I'm wondering where to start.
00:25:02
Speaker
Well, that means there's a lot. OK. I would say, number one, no this is a lot very typical of a lot of the companies that I work with. Most of the companies I work with are venture backed SaaS companies. um A lot of times, they confuse the persona of the venture capitalist investor with the persona of the user. um because And I'll explain how this is relevant for for companies of all different sectors. um 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,
00:25:50
Speaker
um 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 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, 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, one if you are
00:26:36
Speaker
For sure, the CEO is important, but those messages are around you're going to, a lot of times it's a brown ah ROI. You're going to earn more money. You're going to save a lot more time. um You're going to 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. Those people are oftentimes more concerned with the everyday problems than they are with the high level picture. And the reverse too, 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.
00:27:30
Speaker
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 sort of keep the pain point on the back burner and talk about where they want to be, how they view the future of the company. um Tell them their their name is going to be up in lights. They're going to be industry innovators, that kind of language. So that's number two. And number three, you mentioned this earlier, um 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
00:28:19
Speaker
the market is changing and your product is changing and your buyer personas have to change with them. 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 along. Did, you're just like dropping so many amazing bombs right here. This is like 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?
00:29:05
Speaker
Well, I don't come from a psychology background, but I did study in 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 I work in a very data-driven field with very data-driven colleagues. All of my colleagues were, not not that I wouldn't work with the other content managers, but the people I always worked more closely with were the campaign managers. Their main goal is, I want to scale these campaigns. so My goal was, I write things that are going to work. I need to write things that are going to convert.
00:29:52
Speaker
um and And, but on the other hand, I've always worked with content teams that are touching other parts of the organization. um And so I would get a lot of messaging ideas or I would get a lot of information about stories that they were telling, um maybe ah for a big brand commercial or for billboards or for new 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.
00:30:36
Speaker
that the company is using. you have You're bound to certain limitations. um For example, um you have to adapt your strategy a little bit um and you figure out very quickly what's going to work. Um, so to give you, and this, this example is super common. Um, when I was at Monday, we, they, 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, uh, an Asana or a Trello. Um, and I totally get it, but you have.
00:31:17
Speaker
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? um Or in terms of the middle manager, upper manager, Like, sure, if you're selling to enterprise and you're 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 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.
00:32:07
Speaker
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. So of course they have different messaging. no so i 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 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. um and Then you can figure out, now,
00:32:53
Speaker
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. um But it doesn't have to be 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. Yeah, it it's interesting because you know when you're within your own brand, it's so easy to be like, why aren't people getting it? but like this is 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 as pay as you go and all a la carte 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 are locked into 12, 18-month-long contracts. And we made a pivot of, OK, 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, well, isn't this what people wanted? It's pay as you go. But they didn't identify with that because now this is new terminology to
00:34:12
Speaker
in existing industry, but it's this new concept. And so being able to actually like 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. 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 um and to talk about why you're being innovative and why it's better for your customers.
00:34:54
Speaker
But you have to make sure that you also have a little bit of scaffolding in place to help them understand it. so like Remember when we were always hearing like, this is Airbnb for this, or Airbnb for that, or Uber for this, or Uber for that. like 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.
00:35:26
Speaker
Yes, how like Airbnb and Uber is like the noun and the verb now. That represents an entire industry is wild. but and 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?
Tools for Ad Testing: Spotlight on Listna
00:35:45
Speaker
so The 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 Listna that used to be called Usability Hub, L-Y-S-S-N-A. um And essentially what I do, it's super cheap. um I think that you can get a subscription for like $100 a month or you pay like $100 for a test, which is super cheap if you're comparing it to like winter or user testing, which started at like $10,000 for the year.
00:36:19
Speaker
um 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 what ah 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. um You can upload 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 um is communicating
00:36:50
Speaker
the right message, then you can upload it and you can have 40, 50 people within your target audience um give you feedback. And I don't have any data on this, but I like to say it's like 60 to 80% accurate, meaning that if you upload a bunch of ads, then 60 to 80% 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.
00:37:24
Speaker
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. That's really helpful. I'm super excited to dig into that tool and and definitely do some A-B testing.
00:38:04
Speaker
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.