Before we wrap up the course on personas, I wanted to take a few minutes to address some questions I've recently received from my students. Here's one, how can or should market research inform your persona? Now, this is a great question. If you have access to timely, meaningful market research, you should absolutely take advantage of it. But be careful remember that market research tends to have a short lifespan associated with it because market conditions change so fast. So I wouldn't rely on any market research that was done say, two three years ago.

But if you have access to something that's being completed now, and it's relevant to your business case, and it's relevant to the types of people you're trying to sell to to your typical target buyers, then by all means you'd want to take advantage of it. So one thing that I might recommend is read carefully reading through the market research and then having open next to you your draft persona and looking for the implications looking for the the ties that might relate to what you've learned in the research and what you wrote originally in your target persona, personas are not static in nature, they need to be updated in a timely, reasonable passion. So if you have access to market research, that's a great tool to use to tune and make sure that your target personas are still in line with the realities of today's market. What is the downside of using a persona?

There is no downside. There is absolutely no harm at all about using a persona. Now some of you might be thinking, well, if I'm focused so squarely on one persona and I'm therefore ignoring the rest of the market. Doesn't that hurt my business? The answer is no, absolutely not. And let's separate out Where you're going to be exercising reactive marketing versus proactive marketing.

A persona can be best used when you're thinking about where you're going to be spending your proactive marketing dollars. So let's say for the sake of argument that 80% of your marketing budget is going to be applied in a proactive, a very thoughtful, maybe even aggressive way to try to win new market shares or expand your foothold in an existing market. Therefore, the persona will aid you greatly by helping you focus and prioritize those customers that you most want to win. Now, of course, if anybody outside of that target market wants to knock on your door and purchase your products or service, you will happily sell to them so there is nothing to be lost there. I would rather have you be wildly successful in one two or three carefully targeted markets, then fail miserably but try to Go after 1000 markets, focus is good. And the persona is an exercise that will help you laser focus on those you must win most important market segments.

How do I know if I have the right persona? Boy, this is a great question. And you know what you're not going to know until you actually start using it. The persona exercise is really an exercise in building a hypothesis on who you think your best type of customer is those folks that you can deliver the best value to to help themselves the right business problems or, or issues that they're trying to solve. But you're really not going to know until you see how your marketing programs and campaigns respond to the persona that you've built and put forth. So if let's say you go through the persona exercise, you build your house.

Hypothesis and you've executed direct marketing campaign, etc. And you get wildly successful results from that. Just lots of inquiries, lots of prospects, lots of high conversion rates, then obviously, you guessed right, and life is good. But let's say that your persona was wrong. Let's say I hypothesis that you met may did not quite fit. Well, you would notice that in that your marketing campaigns would not produce the level of responses that you were hoping for.

That can be an incredibly important learning experience that will help you go back and revisit the persona, revisit the assumptions that you've made, and maybe allow you another opportunity to refine your persona, maybe change some of those assessments, and then reevaluate, put forth a new persona and then build a next set of marketing programs aimed off that. So some of you may be thinking Gosh, what a wasted amount of time and effort hardly, okay. If your marketing campaigns are going to fail, you want them to fail as quickly as possible. And so if your persona doesn't work, if it's not quite right, and if you're paying attention to how your marketing programs respond to the market, you'll discover that fairly quickly. And then you'll have the opportunity to go back and make changes. This is incredibly empowering.

So what's the alternative? The alternative would be, gee, I don't know why our programs are failing. Well, if your programs are failing, because you never developed a persona, that would be difficult to know where you should look and what you should change. But if you did develop a persona, you would have a set of clues, assumptions, observations that you could apply, that would help you make an informed marketing decision on what elements of your marketing campaign should change about what elements of your marketing messaging should change. So It's very powerful. The last question is How should I evolve personas over time?

Now this is a great question. As I shared earlier, personas are dynamic in nature, they should not be static. It's not bogged down a persona. And I'm done. You never look at it again. No personas need to be evaluated at least once a year.

But I think more importantly, whenever market conditions merit. Now, what does that mean? Well, that might mean changes in the global economy. It might mean there's a new competitor in the mix, it might mean technologies have shifted, and there's a new technology that's available that's changing the options, and the experiences that your customers are having with your products. Anything and maybe hundreds of other elements might indicate that a change in the marketplace and therefore a change in how you interact with your clients and prospects is at hand. So I there is no set rule other than I would say by default at least once a year, you should look at your percentages once a year.

But some companies look at them more often. Some may be a little bit less, it depends on your business conditions. But you should always be vigilant because as I shared earlier, market conditions and customer expectations can change at any time. And they often do. I want to thank my students who have shared with me there are questions over the last couple of years this course has been available. If you've got some core questions about this course that I have not addressed.

Please feel free to email me via Udemy. I'd love to get your questions and I will post some additional videos on frequently asked questions.