Many com­pa­nies have devel­oped per­sonas, yet only a few use them effec­tive­ly. It’s rel­a­tive­ly easy to throw togeth­er a set of cus­tomer char­ac­ter­is­tics and call it a per­sona. It’s not so easy to cre­ate per­sonas that are tru­ly effec­tive in help­ing you devel­op your con­tent mar­ket­ing and per­sua­sive strat­e­gy.

Did you know most per­sona efforts fail as soon as the per­sonas are com­plet­ed? Teams cre­ate their per­sonas, design slick posters to put on the walls, and say “these are our per­sonas!”

Cre­at­ing per­sonas is real­ly just the begin­ning. A per­sona isn’t a doc­u­ment — it’s a clear under­stand­ing of a tar­get cus­tomer that exists in the minds of your team. Per­sonas evolve as your data around them evolves as well. Every test you do, every insight you gath­er should be designed to fur­ther under­stand your cus­tomer base and your per­sonas.

Per­sonas will allow you to eval­u­ate your con­tent and iden­ti­fy the gaps in your con­tent strat­e­gy to meet your poten­tial customer’s needs.

In order to help you under­stand what vis­i­tors need in order to achieve their goals, you need to have empa­thy about their jour­ney through the buy­ing process. Too many com­pa­nies and their agen­cies are so wrapped up in their own sales process­es they for­get that cus­tomers have a dif­fer­ent angle of approach to the prob­lem or need that they could solve if they took the right per­spec­tive.

Since it’s a chal­lenge to pre­dict behav­ior down to the indi­vid­ual lev­el with­out enough data on each indi­vid­ual, our ini­tial focus won’t be on true per­son­al­iza­tion of ele­ments but on “persona”-lization.

From Hip­pocrates through Jung to Keirsey and beyond, humans have been try­ing to fath­om the dimen­sions of per­son­al­i­ty and moti­va­tion. In the most gen­er­al scheme of cat­e­go­riza­tion, we’ve learned that each of the mil­lions of dif­fer­ent per­son­al­i­ties falls into one of four main groups, which my broth­er and I labeled in 2001 in our book “Per­sua­sive Online Copy­writ­ing” as Dri­ver, Ami­able, Expres­sive, and Ana­lyt­i­cal, and lat­er renamed them to:

• Com­pet­i­tive. Fast-paced deci­sion-mak­ing, log­i­cal­ly ori­ent­ed
• Spon­ta­neous. Fast-paced deci­sion-mak­ing, emo­tion­al­ly ori­ent­ed
• Human­is­tic. Slow-paced deci­sion-mak­ing, emo­tion­al­ly ori­ent­ed
• Method­i­cal. Slow-paced deci­sion-mak­ing, log­i­cal­ly ori­ent­ed

It doesn’t real­ly mat­ter what you call them. The thing is, you need to become inti­mate­ly acquaint­ed with these per­son­al­i­ties. They are your website’s vis­i­tors. And once you know who they are, you have the inside track on how you shape your design and writ­ing to per­suade them most effec­tive­ly.

At the most fun­da­men­tal lev­el, all peo­ple are moti­vat­ed by a sin­gle, crit­i­cal ques­tion: what’s in it for me (WIIFM)? Their dom­i­nant per­son­al­i­ty types strong­ly influ­ence how they ask that ques­tion, per­ceive val­ue, and con­scious­ly – or more typ­i­cal­ly, sub­con­scious­ly – approach a deci­sion-mak­ing task.

Usabil­i­ty pun­dit Jakob Nielsen shared the results of an eye-track­ing study he per­formed in 2007 on the U.S. Cen­sus Bureau’s home page. He uses gaze plots to describe four main types of vis­i­tor behav­ior: “search-dom­i­nant,” “nav­i­ga­tion-dom­i­nant,” “tool-dom­i­nant,” and “suc­cess­ful.” If you were to look at these four types of behav­ior through the lens of the per­son­al­i­ty types you would nat­u­ral­ly see beyond what peo­ple gazed at and clicked on, and into why they act­ed the way they did. It’s a nat­ur­al pref­er­ence.

When you look at these four thumb­nails, which per­son­al­i­ty type do you think is the method­i­cal pref­er­ence for slow deci­sion-mak­ing style, log­i­cal­ly ori­ent­ed?

A, B, C, or D?

You can see that image B is spend­ing a lot of time on each part of the page with these heavy gaze plots and that is your Method­i­cal behav­ior. Jakob’s “nav­i­ga­tion-dom­i­nant user” behaves with a log­i­cal bias sim­i­lar to Com­pet­i­tives, but with a far more delib­er­ate pace.

Method­i­cals want to become their own expert, study­ing every detail before they make a deci­sion. No detail is too small. They want it all. The good news from a mar­ket­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions per­spec­tive is that they’re will­ing to give you their time – pro­vid­ed you’re will­ing to give them rel­e­vant con­tent.

The Method­i­cal approach was to look every­where: active win­dow, left nav­i­ga­tion, right col­umn, above the fold, below. You name it, they saw it.

What Jakob observed as a “search-dom­i­nant user” in this study was image A – the Com­pet­i­tive mode, work­ing at a fast pace with a log­i­cal bias. The Com­pet­i­tive user quick­ly scans and skims every­thing, look­ing for a clue as to how to solve the puz­zle. These users want their clues to their answers to be in your head­lines and sub­heads and then they might explore more.

Jakob’s “tool-dom­i­nant user,” image C, the Spon­ta­neous pref­er­ence, behaves at a fast pace with an emo­tion­al bias. These users are high­ly expe­ri­en­tial by nature. Jakob describes these types as peo­ple who “like parts of web­sites where they can do some­thing.” They focus on the inter­ac­tive fea­tures before leav­ing because you didn’t engage them quick­ly enough. The gaze went every­where, with­out focus, until a sin­gle fea­ture grabbed their atten­tion – that is, until anoth­er rab­bit hole appeared (on anoth­er web­site) that was more enter­tain­ing.

Jakob’s “suc­cess­ful user,” image D, behaves at a slight­ly less delib­er­ate pace than the Method­i­cal, but with an emo­tion­al bias. Tes­ti­mo­ni­als and social were cre­at­ed for this type. They are attract­ed to the human ele­ments of a page.

Many peo­ple mis­take these four per­son­al­i­ty types as per­sonas. Let me empha­size – they are not; they are just one ele­ment that can be used as a short­cut to under­stand­ing your vis­i­tors’ behav­ior, seed­ing your web­site with ele­ments that match their moti­va­tion, and work­ing on the next steps to uncov­er­ing what makes up your per­sonas since these four char­ac­ter­is­tics exist in all humans. Add this fac­tor to your per­sonas and you will now give your per­sonas the voice in which they com­mu­ni­cate and you will under­stand what you need to mir­ror back to them to match their buy­ing jour­ney.