How do I build a good persona?

This document will cover what to think about and how to build a good persona.

The Three Components of a Persona

When building a persona, there’s three main components that one should always include in the thought process. These are separate fields in the contact schema, and using all three will give better results than just title alone.

  • Title

    • What is this persons title? Titles generally describe what someone does and their role in the organization

  • Seniority

    • What is this persons seniority? Are they junior or senior? Are they a manager or a c-level? You can have similar titles with very different seniority levels.

  • Department

    • What part of the business does this person work in? Sales or IT? Operations or HR? You can have similar titles in different departments with very different job functions.

What are the different matching options supported?

Matching Options:

  • Contains ← the title must contain the exact string provided

Example:

Would CONTAINS “City Manager” match:

City Manager of Long Beach

Yes

the exact string “city manager” is included in the title, this would also match using the “starts with”

City of Long Beach Manager

No!

The exact string “city manager” isn’t in the job title, even though CITY and MANAGER are in the title, it’s not the same! This is why it’s often much better to separate seniority and title.

Publicity Manager

Yes!

The exact string “city manager” is in the title, even though publicity isn’t the same thing, it’s still matching. This is a good example where a negative persona may be required

The pattern ILIKE '%city manager%' looks for the literal string "city manager" appearing consecutively (case-insensitive) anywhere within the text.

  • Does Not Contain ← the title does not contain the exact string provided

  • Ends With ← the title ends with the exact string provided

  • Starts With ← the title starts with the exact string provided

  • Is not null ← we must have a title value

  • Is Null ← we don’t have a title value

Actually building the persona

Now that you have the three components, title / seniority / department, lets start building personas.

I have the following seniorities:

Seniority

Example Title Matches

Notes

CXO

chief, cfo, coo, cio, cto, cbo, executive director

include chief equivalents

VP

vice president, vp

exclude “assistant vice president”

Director

director, executive director

main mid-senior group

Head

head of, department head, chair

Manager

manager, supervisor

Senior

senior, lead

Staff

staff, coordinator, specialist, analyst

exclude assistants

Owner / Partner / Founder

owner, founder, partner, principal

Intern

intern, trainee, student intern

explicitly low-level, can be filtered out later

I have the following departments that I can use to create a persona.

  • Administrative

  • Community and Social Services

  • Customer Service

  • Education

  • Engineering

  • Executive

  • Finance

  • Health Services

  • Human Resources

  • Information Technology

  • Legal

  • Marketing

  • Media and Communications

  • Operations

  • Product Management

  • Sales

Persona:

Start with department: “sales” or “marketing”

Then seniority “cxo” or “director”

Then layer in positive or negative title keywords ONLY IF REQUIRED:

  • Positive: Returned contacts MUST have the title keyword(s)

  • Negative: Returned contacts MUST NOT have the title keyword(s)

If you use too many title keywords, you might be missing titles you care about but have slightly different keywords than expected! Negative keywords can help clean up your list of contacts (Ex. remove “account” to eliminate “account executives” or “account managers” from your targeting list. But note, this would also remove “strategic account manager” or “Account Director” so be very careful with title keywords!)