I think my best marketing hack so far is to download a shit ton of podcasts with the persona I’m interested in reaching, and then listening carefully for their pains, jargon, recommendation and worldviews across ~50 episodes or so.
Conversation
When I was doing content marketing for others my internal metric for “can I be effective at marketing to this persona” is “if you put me at a table with my target persona, how quickly can I get them to complain about their job?”
You’re ready if the answer is “< 10 minutes”
1
4
20
Why < 10 minutes?
Well in any domain you want to market to, there are usually a handful of roles you can sell to, plus a handful of org setups, and a handful of pains for each combination.
You’ll need to quickly slot the person you’re talking to into one of those combinations.
Replying to
Which means you must know all of them.
The point? You want your target persona to think “Wow, this person really gets me! You must’ve worked in my field/role before!”
Yeah, well, guess why I’m able to write things you feel compelled to share?
1
4
Anyway, the ‘<10 minutes’ heuristic is super useful when you’re hiring and training marketing folk. And I think it should be one of the requirements for on-boarding to your org.
1
9
But of course, now that I’ve given you the heuristic, you can be creative with how you get to that point!
For me it’s podcasts, which I listen to while cooking. (I do a lot of cooking).
But you might have other ways, and I’d love to hear about them.
6