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.
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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”
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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