Event Marketing: The Power of Personas

Does your event marketing tool kit include personas? If so, stick around. We'll dig into how to leverage this tool more effectively to boost registrations and grow attendance loyalty. For those not as familiar with personas, here's a quick lesson... Personas help us better understand the needs, wants, desires and ultimately, the buyer decision triggers for key customer segments. While you're likely serving many different segments, if you're smart, you've got a short list of most important segments. The people you most want to attend your event and ideally, these segments are the very same people your event sponsors, exhibitors and partners most want to connect with at your event. Wikipedia provides more insight to help you understand personas: "... personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user types that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way." As you build attendee personas for top targeted segments, you now have richer insight to create messaging that will resonate and tip more decisions to attend. As you design education content and networking experiences, you want to keep these personas top of mind to ensure that the experiences you deliver are valued and appreciated.

Best Video Lesson Ever on Personas

This video excerpt from a session on Advanced Lead Nurture Strategy delivered by Ardath Albee at Content Marketing World is packed with gems on personas. Albee describes personas as "a composite sketch of a target segment... this is not a person. It's a representation of commonalities across that role that will resonate with people in that role." She goes on to explain how personas capture Objectives, Orientation, and Obstacles. While Objectives and Obstacles are clear, Orientation was the intriguing one. Albee goes on to describe Orientation as "the human factors." She suggested using LinkedIn to conduct advanced searches to find people that match a particular persona. Then scan recommendations to find commonalities. What knowledge, skills, abilities, attributes are called out most? She goes on to explain that engineers tend to be more detail and fact-oriented, while executives (particularly those in senior leadership roles) aren't so interested in facts. They're more into nurturing big ideas. I would strongly encourage you to find six minutes to watch this video; and if you have a team you might consider watching it together. It's sure to spark some great conversations on best ways to apply personas to improve your event marketing results. Written by Donna Kastner