Your leads aren’t a popularity contest: How to win better business

PLACEHOLDER

Elliot

 Hello. Welcome to the Bon Sauce Podcast, a brand new podcast where we chat about branding and marketing pain points with me, Elliot, founder of marketing consultancy Bon Creative, and my buddy, Eliška, founder of branding outfit Light  Sauce  Studio.

Eliška

Elliot and I have worked together for a couple of years now on multiple client projects, and we see a lot of pain points come up again and again.

And we talk about them a lot. We nerd out over them. So we've decided to start sharing those conversations wider and with you. Okay, so this episode deals with the pain point of understanding your audience and how that is the key to good branding and marketing. But how do we go about doing that, and are personas the answer?

Everybody loves chatting about personas, so we're gonna dive into their usefulness in this episode.

Elliot

At the end, we'll be sharing our secret sauce for understanding target audiences and using personas effectively in your business

Eliška

Okay, so I really wanted to discuss target audiences and personas specifically because I am such a huge proponent of being user-centered and starting with the user.

I really don't think there's much point in doing branding and marketing if you don't understand who your audience is, who you're speaking to, because ultimately it's just not gonna be very effective. And personas are a really useful and popular tool within brand strategy and marketing strategy. But I do think that there's a big discussion about how useful they are, because people tend to go really detailed and apply personas blindly to their projects, and they just take a methodology that they've seen and a format that they've seen from someone else or online or whatever, and then apply that to their project.

Elliot

All right. So to kick us off, Eliška, do you actually want to tell us what personas are?

Eliška

Okay, so personas are hypothetical archetypes of your user. That's a lot of long words stuck together, but essentially what you do is you make a fake profile, let's call it, of your archetypal user or multiple different users.

So this will have details about the demographic. So are they, uh, women? Are they men? Are they within a certain age bracket? Are they within a certain geography? Are they within a certain income bracket? And then there's psychographic data. So are they all type A personalities? Are they all really into music?

Are they all really into going out? And once you've gathered all of those details, you create a persona, so, so an, a fake person that has all of those characteristics. So it's Jane, age 24, who lives in Surrey and goes horse riding with her best mates. Um I don't, I don't know why I went for that but-

Elliot

That's very, very niche.

Do you know this person?