3 reasons you should be conducting persona interviews

Recently, HubSpot Growth Marketer Anum Hussain presented at the Austin HubSpot User Group. Anum, who had written for the primary HubSpot blog, was charged with launching the blog for HubSpot's new Sidekick tool. She and her team grew the HubSpot Sidekick blog from 0 to 10,000 subscribers in six weeks, and fortunately for us, she shared some of her biggest lessons.

Anum’s experience writing for the primary HubSpot blog was certainly useful in developing a content strategy for the new blog. However, since they were starting a new blog for a different audience, Anum knew some research would be necessary. 

To get a better idea of what their audience cared about, her team interviewed 100 sales prospects to develop the personas for the Sidekick sales blog. Through target persona research, the team learned that the tone and language of their blog— meant for a sales persona—would be different than the tone used for the marketing persona of the general HubSpot blog. 

Think you can just jump in and start writing without going through this same process? It can be tempting to follow your hunches about your audience and create a persona based on your knowledge of your target customer. You may even think you can get by with just a simple survey. But the best method is to take the time to interview prospects before creating content.

Knowing who your target persona is and what motivates them is absolutely indispensable. What content to do they read online? Where do they go to get information for their jobs? What gets them really thinking about their career, and how do they learn about new tools or strategies to help them be successful? What are their personal interests?

Interviews will answer these questions, and show you subtleties about personality and preferences that you just can’t get from a survey.

3 key benefits of conducting persona interviews:

Create content that is more relatable. Listen for the prospect's vocabulary, puns, references, tone and gestures. You want to write content that resonates, so knowing what TV shows and other pop culture references they use to share ideas is important. How do they express themselves when sharing key concepts? You want to match their tone in your writing.  

Create content that resonates emotionally. Through the interview process, look for what makes the prospect light up, or what topics they hate discussing. This knowledge will help you create content that speaks to what they care about. You’ll also know the topics that drive a negative emotion; blog posts that help solve a problem can be the most successful at driving traffic and generating leads.

Create content tailored to personality. You’re also looking for visual cues about the prospect's personality. What’s their style? Write notes about their outfits and accessories. Ask questions about their favorite apps. This will also help you set the tone of voice for your blog.

Persona development is key to managing a successful blog. Really knowing who your audience is and what they care about will make your content more useful and targeted. This will help you gain your audience’s trust, and establish your blog and your business as a resource and an authority.  

To be successful, you don’t have to interview 100 prospects like Anum’s team did, but how many interviews does it take to develop strong personas? We usually find that 3-5 interviews per persona is enough to get started, but interviewing more people on an ongoing basis will help you continue to refine your content. If you feel bad asking for someone’s time, offer free lunch or coffee as an incentive. If geography or time are constraints, video conference is a great option too.  

Here is a presentation with some great tools to help you get started.

Ready to get started, but don’t have time to do this yourself? JMS offers a persona development project – contact us for more info.