 I'm not nervous, you are. All right, so today we are going to talk about audience personas. Yeah, see, audience personas. But first, oh, she already messed up. OK, I can't go back. Anyway, so I'm going to talk about something called audience personas and why you need them and why you don't just need buyer persona. But before I get into all that, I figure I need to make sure we're on the same page and that we all know what a buyer persona is. So what is a buyer persona? Looks a little something like this. Someone named Loyal Lola, whoever that is. And a buyer persona is a semi-affictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Personas help your marketing team write compelling messaging and create effective ad campaigns. Sounds pretty easy, right? Everything's all there for you. But there's a problem with classic buyer personas. They tend to use these arbitrary stock photos, which isn't really helpful. It's not a picture of your customer. They use these cutesy alliterative names like Marketing Martin or Hardworking Henrietta or our friend Loyal Lola back there. You don't call your friends or your colleagues by these alliterative names. So why would it help you suddenly be a better marketer? And there's this misguided focus on demographics. So certainly there are some cases where demographics can be useful. But if you're selling laundry detergent or software, a lot of this doesn't really matter. Plus, if that's what you get, when you bucket people into demographics, you have two very, very different people who generally have the same demographics. But you wouldn't market to these people in the same way. They have different challenges. They have different motivations. Buyer personas, they only help some of your marketing team. So sure, they help the copywriters and the product team write new website copy. They help the brand team test how a new product name is received. And sure, I think they're helpful for the demand generation team, and it helps them create white papers for account-based marketing. But they don't help the PR team create effective media pitches. They don't help the brand team design effective influencer seeding kits. And they definitely don't help the content marketers write a compelling weekly newsletter. And what about everyone here? What about search marketers? So I think maybe some of you are using buyer personas to inform your copywriting or your content writing. But those personas don't help you get backlinks. They don't help you get amplification. And a core part of your job right is to do keyword research to find relevant topics. But you don't know who's doing the searching. Buyer personas definitely don't tell you that. So I'm going to say, think bigger. Consider the whole audience. Now, who's the whole audience? So here's there. So you have your broadest circle here, your industry, your community. And within there, you have your potential customers. And then within there, you have your current customers. But there are two more segments here. You have your potential amplifiers to the people who might amplify your content. And so this might include some of your current and potential customers. Mostly includes people in your industry, community, or niche. And then you have this other group here, this last group, of what I call your potential content consumers. So the people who might be reading your blog, your newsletter, they might listen to your podcast. They might be customers, or they might not. They could be a little bit outside your industry. Maybe within that marketing community, maybe these people are more so on the tech side. But they're still part of your audience. So audience personas. So to describe your entire audience, think about it this way. Audience personas then serve as various ideal customer profiles across all of your marketing functions. Now, I have this table here to kind of outline what this is like. So within this group of audience personas, you have, sure, you have your buyer persona. This is one subset. And we know that this is mostly beneficial for the performance marketing team. Audience personas, this represents the people who embody the characteristics and motivations of ideal customers. And you might have three different kinds of buyers, couple different key buyers in your audience. But next, you have your amplifier persona. Your amplifier persona, now, this benefits some of the non-customer-facing marketers on your team, like the PR brand, product, events, content, and search teams. And the amplifier persona, this represents people who can potentially amplify your brand and your content. So who would that be? A mix here, right? Could be reporters in your niche, podcasters, employees of your company, indie writers, similar brands, and even creators. And lastly, we have our what I call the attention persona. So the attention persona benefits a similar group, PR, brand, events, content, and search. And the attention persona, this represents the people who would hopefully consume or pay attention to your content. And this would consist of other reporters who might not write about you but are still paying attention to your industry, analysts who are following trends, venture capitalists or investors, executives, peers, and competitors, the people who would pay attention to you. So we talked about, in its point, kind of who these personas are for. But why else should we do it? Why do we need this for the entire marketing team? Because marketing has evolved. Marketing has evolved. We've seen that ad spend is decreasing over the past 10 years or so. The spend in traditional advertising spend has decreased. Even while the spend for overall marketing budgets has increased over the same period. And even think back to last year. Do you remember last year Airbnb very famously slashed their performance in brand marketing spend by over $662 million? And the vast majority of those cuts were in performance marketing. And why else? Because content is expanding. Content isn't just blogs anymore, so much more than that. We have podcasts, still growing quickly. Over 2 million podcasts in 2021, up from 525,000 in 2018. YouTube channels, 51 million channels this year, up from 20 million just a couple years prior. Substack. Substack is just a subset of the news that our industry, but even just substack has 500,000 paying users in 2021, up from 25,000 in 2018. And then finally, who could forget TikTok? TikTok, explosive growth, right? There are 500,000 creators on the TikTok creator marketplace today, up from 50,000 just in December 2021. So it hasn't even been a year yet. And plus the podcast host that you're pitching isn't just some talking head, right? They're a successful operator, founder. The writer you're reaching out to isn't just a newspaper reporter. They're a tech worker turned writer, a small business owner, a hobbyist turned writer. And that blog that you asked for a backlink with maybe a couple awkward mistakes or typos, probably not going to get that backlink, right? Blogs are different nowadays. Like at Spark Toro, we don't do backlinks. And we just don't do guest posts. And I think there are a lot more blogs now that don't even operate off the traditional keyword research strategy. So all this to say, as marketing has evolved, distribution and outreach don't work like they did the last 15 years. A new generation of savvy operators are running today's web ecosystem, which means you need a clear understanding of these people's marketing objectives and how you align with them. So let's go back to this audience persona slide. For the purposes of today, and knowing I only have you captive for 20 more minutes, let's get into some examples here. Starting with the amplifier persona. So who are your amplifiers, right? Or amplifiers are people with an influential platform. This would include brands in your niche, journalists, or it can be trade journalists and press, and influencers and creators, right? We know this helps PR brand, product events, content, and search. So who are some examples of these amplifiers? MozCon, right? Everyone here? MozCon is an influential event slash platform. And then maybe some other brands like SimilarWeb and Canva, right? I think these brands are all very influential to us. For most of us here, may or may not be competitors, but still potential amplifiers and potential co-marketers to tap into. Journalists and press, for those of us here, some influential press publications, right, are probably at age in search engine land, and influencers and creators. Now this is kind of a pretty broad spectrum because you have your traditional social media influencers like Charlie D'Amelio on TikTok. You have the indie writers, like Lenny Ritschitzky, who writes that product in tech. You have podcasts like the Search Engine Journal show. And then you also have these sort of influential B2B marketers and people that we know on social media, like Caitlin Burgoyne and Chantel Marcel on LinkedIn and Twitter. So all people who could be potential amplifiers. Now the good thing about amplifiers and designing amplifier personas is their motivations are a lot easier to figure out than customers' motivations. I can even go so far as to say that I think most, I think all amplifiers have pretty much the same motivations. That would be to earn new followers, readers, listeners or users, and to turn those people into fans. So what's your role here? Your role is to support them. Think about things like, how do you fit into their brand strategy? How can you help them create high engagement content that brings new visitors? And maybe, how can you boost their credibility and thus help them strengthen their reputations? You can also, so we know they're general motivations, and you can dig a little bit deeper and do some audience research to understand a given amplifier. So you can do this a number of ways. You can look at, let's go with the example of Lenny Rochitzky, the investor or writer. You could look at his followers, like maybe on Twitter or something. You could look at them. You could use a tool like FollowerWonk or more ILO.so to analyze people's bios. You could also use a tool like SparkToro and analyze his audience. So we're running a quick query here of Lenny San. And we know that of the tens of thousands of people who follow him, that these are their behaviors and demographics, right? So some of the top words in their bios include product, founder, manager. Some of the top hashtags used. Hashtag NFT, web three, machine learning. Frequently used phrases, right? Business model, thanks for sharing. Gender distribution is mostly mail, top job roles in fields or operations and engineering. Not that surprising for this product-focused audience. And their most mentioned skills are management, strategy, startups, leadership, entrepreneurship. Very interesting. You can also see the other social accounts they follow. Sam Altman, Ben Horowitz, Petra Collison. We can see the websites they frequent, right? CoinDesk, first round.com, Hackernoon. And who knew? This is probably the only audience still left on Clubhouse. We can also see their text insights or what this audience is talking about online. I think you know where I'm getting with this, right? So these are the things that other people who follow Lenny Rotitzky, this is what they're talking about online. So let's look at these two topics here. Creator economy and imposter syndrome. These stood out to me. I just thought they were interesting, wouldn't have guessed. Well, you can see where I'm going. You could probably do some keyword research on this. So I don't actually have a keyword research tool right now that I'm using. So I'm using Google Trends. Looking at popping creator economy into Google Trends, we can see that over the past what, maybe year or two, that the term creator economy has become a lot more popular. So that's kind of interesting, right? Possibly demand for content there. Or same with imposter syndrome. This one really surprised me because, you know, I've been feeling imposter syndrome for the past 10 years, but people have only been talking about it for the past two years or so. Or it's becoming more popular over the past two years. So at this point, you know, you have a sense for the type of people who follow and engage with Lenny Ritschitzky. You might even have some content ideas that would appeal to them into him. And maybe you can start to distill all of this into some kind of template, kind of like that buyer persona template, right? Maybe this, maybe this amplifier persona is the nation newsletter writer. They're the dominant thought leader in an underserved niche. Their motivation is to grow their subscriber base, strengthen their reputation, gather credible sources for future writing or content. And look, some other related socials, influential sites are press, influential podcasts, their target audience, founders, indie hackers, other writers. And maybe some top of my topics are hashtag days of code, 100 days of code, overcoming imposter syndrome, monetizing their role in the creator economy. And what's interesting here is you can see how a persona template like this one is a little bit more dynamic, right? Usually buyer personas tend to be something marketing teams create once every two years or so. But this is information that can change maybe a couple times a year, right? So now what are some examples of working with amplifiers? How do we kind of, how do we put this into practice, right? So I have a couple of examples here. Okay, so this is an example of Clearbit and SparkToro. So a while back, we did a case study with one of our customers. We at SparkToro did a case study with Shepard, a brand marketing agency. And they actually tipped us off to a really clever tactic, which was to take their customer's email list and enrich that data through a tool like Clearbit or full contact. And then using that data, that thermographic or demographic data to then inform the type of queries they would run in SparkToro. And then getting more information that way, getting a more holistic view of their audience. So I linked to Clearbit in this case study as I outlined how to do this. And then a few months later, I wrote a high engagement Twitter thread that I think was about like lesser known marketing tools and tricks. I mentioned Clearbit and using them. And they noticed, right? Then they reached out to me and said, hey, do you want to do a webinar together? And of course, and this was a great fit, especially for me, right? Because Clearbit, at least I know I think, has a little more brand recognition in the B2B space. We share a similar audience, but we're not competing products, right? We have very different offerings. So yeah, we did the webinar together. We got over 900 registrants, and it was completely free, right? Didn't cost us any money. We just market it to our existing audiences. We got a bunch of new registrants together and gruer lead lists, great. The next example, so this company called Maven, they're essentially building their entire business on amplifiers. So Maven, they're an online education platform where they provide cohort-based courses or they host cohort-based courses. They tap into amplifiers, so like industry experts, right? And they teach them how to create their own course. So they become, these actual industry experts become course instructors. And some of them are making six figures a year, just from running a couple of courses per year. And the last example I have for amplifiers is Melanie Diesel and Unsplash. So you might know Melanie Diesel. She came out with a book a couple years ago called the Content Fuel Framework. But COVID and lockdowns kind of dashed her hopes of doing a traditional or a classic book tour. So she had to get pretty scrappy. So she hired a photographer friend to take some pictures of her book out in the wild, like at cafes, next to laptops, that kind of thing. And then she uploaded all these photos to Unsplash for free, for anyone to use, right? So you can see her book. You can see it in a clear shot, or maybe it's a little bit obscured, all free for anyone to use. And the great thing here is this is exactly where her target audience is, right? This is where writers, bloggers, content marketers, they're all on Unsplash, looking for free photos to use. And it paid off pretty well. People are using her photos. And she got to use, very naturally, use the existing keywords of marketing, creativity, storytelling, product, laptop, reading book at a cafe, things that a lot of content marketers, or especially B2B writers would be searching for, and these photos have gotten almost 60,000 downloads, and she's gotten her almost seven million impressions basically free, right? Great example of tapping into knowing where your audience is and tapping into the amplifiers. All right, let's move on to the attention persona. So the attention persona, who might pay attention to you? So this could be anybody. This is a pretty broad set of people. Could be hobbyists, so people who are interested in your niche. Could be journalists, could be analysts, right? Peers, VCs, or venture capitalists. And this helps your PR brand events, content search teams. Now what are their motivations, right? I think their motivations are pretty broad, but we still know what they are. Maybe to network, right? People in the industry want to network with each other, kind of stay up to date with the trends. To stay informed, right? They want to stay informed about what's going on in their industry. Or maybe they want to be entertained. Could be a combination of these things, but there's value in the entertainment, right? So what's your role here? Your role is to deliver value, novelty, or entertainment. So how do you think about that? Think about it like, how can you help these people keep up with the news in your industry? How can you help them analyze trends? And how can you give them, or can you give them information or content that they really can't get anywhere else? So what are some examples of this? Here's one that I really like. So I don't have that much more time left, so we'll just get into trend-jacking. So this company called Pudding.cool teamed up with Vox. They did a seven-month-long analysis of what happens after a TikTok song goes viral. So super-long analysis. They published this not that long ago, just a couple months ago. And at this point, this 22-minute video, yeah, 20-minute video has over 1.1 million views. And in that first week, they got 750,000 views. It was incredible. But who is the pudding? Maybe you haven't heard of them, or maybe you have at this point. They're journalist engineers, right? They know how to parse through data. They know how to parse through that data and telecompelling story with it. And the work that they did with Vox got a ton of attention. So maybe now they're getting a lot of great business from it, but definitely put them on the map. The last example here. Oh, no. Tips for trend-jacking, right? So how can you do this for yourself? You know, I'd say it's at the intersection of what's top of mind for the people who would pay attention to you and your unique value prop, right? Your product and your skills, your expertise. Then you can create the news, whether it's finding original data, conducting original research, doing interviews, and then pitching it. I know it's not really this easy, right? But the good thing about trend-jacking is that when you do it right, you only really have to do one of these once or twice a year. You know, as long as you're staying open to the sort of serendipity of the news cycle and that you're equipped to jump on new opportunities. Okay, now the last example here. You might have heard of this. Fake Twitter accounts, right? This has been an issue, right? A couple of months ago, not very long ago, a gentleman named Mr. Elon Musk offered to buy Twitter and entered a merger agreement, merger and acquisitions agreement with Twitter. Then he tweeted this, Twitter deal temporarily on hold, pending details supporting calculation that spam fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users. Well, I think we know a little bit about something, it's for Toro, about social media and about data. So, we knew this would be a pretty solid opportunity for us. So we partnered with our friend Mark Mims over at Follower Wonk and conducted a joint Twitter analysis. And in our analysis, we've found that over 19% of active accounts are fake or spam. And we published our methodology. You can see this other gentleman named Rand Fishkin, you might know. Published the methodology along, how we did the research, what our flaws could have been, suggestions for moving forward, I'm even linked to some resources for other people if they wanna conduct their own analysis. And this paid off pretty well for us. We got great coverage in Newsweek, Associated Press, Entrepreneur, Business Insider. In fact, at least 500 unique publications mentioned or linked to Spark Toro. Got a nice little bump in website traffic. Most of these were new website visitors. And we went from not ranking at all, at all in Google for audience research tool, to ranking number two or number three in just one week. And your results may vary. Last week when I checked we were number four. And last night when I checked we were number one. So we went through a bunch of different examples here. Successful co-marketing with amplifiers, building businesses with amplifiers, and even creating news that captures attention. All pretty cool marketing results. Good marketing results that definitely did not come from a buyer persona template like this one. Thank you for your time today. If you enjoyed this talk, please amplify it and Amanda Natt on Twitter. If you didn't like it, just keep it private. Just send me hate mail privately, that's fine. I can take it. Thank you.