Yes!
Persona-based messaging
Before I joined Coda, the team already had a set of personas derived from shared observations about who uses different kinds of technology within a team, and how they use itーand with what expectations of the technology. Since then, my amazing colleague Elaine has expanded our set of personas to guide things like shared product & story ideation in support of our enterprise offering. You can see the fruits of that labor at coda.io/enterprise, which I’m hopeful you’ll find feels very “Coda” in look, feel & tone, but directly speaks to the topics that are top of mind for an Enterprise buyer.
Prior to my time at Coda, I was privileged to collaborate with colleagues across partnerships and research to guide personas and principles for our products and outreach strategies on the Instagram Creator & Media marketing team. While Instagram is viewed primarily as a consumer app, there are three distinct audiences (personas) on the platform:
- Consumers who “tune in” to the app,
- Creators who “produce” the content consumers view, and
- Businesses who engage with those audiences in a number of waysーfrom ads, sponsorships and their own organic engagement.
- This is a fairly common 3-sided participation marketplace for any content platform.
A single person using Instagram might identify as any combination of the three audiences, but they tend to bias primarily towards one of them. Which is why within each audience, there are a number of additional dimensions and personas. The more you scale your reach, the more opportunity you have to build out increasingly precise personas. And the more help you’ll want to recruit from your talented colleagues in learning about them, documenting them, empowering them with product, and reaching them with messages!
Format
In terms of format, I've seen many successful approaches at different organizations, and candidly don’t have one that I’d recommend above the others. It depends on the type of market you’re playing in, the capabilities of your team, the stage of your businesses, and the goals you have in developing personas.
Distribution & Buy-in
Getting buy-in and distribution can also vary wildly, but there are a few best practices that have helped me wherever I’ve done this work:
Socialize your intention to build a persona program early and often! Especially in a start-up environment where you have to make tradeoffs with your time every day, help your colleagues and leaders in other departments understand why this work is important, how you plan to use it, and how it helps them and their teams. This should at least make sure you have the buy-in to carve out time for this work, but you might even get some volunteers to share the work!
Set and share a research agenda. Make sure your personas aren’t built on instincts, but on insights. Conduct surveys and interviews. Collect as many dimensions of identity as possible (geographic, firmagraphic, demographic, etc.) but be sure to store your info in a way that it is secure and anonymized before sharing your synthesis.
You might have to demonstrate the first “win.” It’s great if you have a killer write-up or presentation. But other teams are likely mid-flight in their own work, and probably won’t halt their world on its axis to shift course based on your personas. Instead, leverage them for a quick winーa small outreach campaign, a lightweight virtual event, a weeklong social media series, etc.ーand report out on the win as loudly as possible. People will want some of that secret sauce when they hear how delicious it is!