1-hour Persona: Mine Reddit for Customer Insights

Seth Godin says, "You can't be seen until you learn to see." He’s bang on. Businesses need to learn their customers' questions, problems, preferences, and concerns in order to speak to them in ways that resonate.

When a new lead reaches out to me, the first thing I do is check out their existing ads in the ad library. From a 20-second glance, I can tell how well they understand their target customer. There’s a wide chasm in the messaging between the ones that have a good understanding and the ones that don’t. The ones that do it well always open their ads with a question or problem that their target has. They then paint a story of how their solution answers or solves the issue.

Imagine spending months creating a marketing campaign, going through multiple rounds of design, building out the campaigns, and spending the cash only to see it flop with not nearly the amount of conversion that you expected.

It feels like you’re throwing money into a bottomless pit. What a sinking feeling in your stomach! A real nightmare for any marketer or founder. This happens more often than it should. The reason? Navel gazing.

Often times, we build marketing messages based on what the internal team cares about or thinks is cool, not what the person viewing them thinks. What our marketing really should focus on is:

• who they are

• what they want and what their problems are

• how they currently get what they want or solve their problems

• barriers they run into

Knowing these 4 dimensions pays dividends because it minimizes the guesswork when it comes to messaging, laying a clear path to success.

To avoid our nightmare scenario, it’s critical to build out a buyer persona and unearth those four dimensions of our customer. The good news? It’s not as laborious as it once was, and it’s extremely feasible for just about anybody to put together a lightweight version that will give you a peek into the minds of your customers.

Insights are lying out in the open, ready for the taking

30 years ago, a focus group might’ve been one of the only ways to gather this information. Although it might be more accurate and in-depth than what I’m about to propose, it takes months to set up and lots of money to conduct.

That’s no longer the case in 2023. The explosion of online communities and social media platforms provides a treasure trove of data that can be harnessed to quickly create customer personas. By analyzing the content and interactions on these platforms, you can gain valuable insights into the preferences, opinions, and behaviors of your target audience.

So let’s tap the "global brain," a term coined back in 1982. A global brain is:

Think about the places you go for quick answers, knowledge, and feedback. Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Facebook groups, and now even Tiktok. There are a plethora of online communities and social platforms where oftentimes anonymous users are sharing their unvarnished and unfiltered minds.

These are all gold mines. Tap into them. By digging in, you can create customer personas in 1-2 hours. This involves analyzing conversations, content, and trends within your target audience's online spaces. Not only is this method faster and more cost-effective (it’s free), but it also provides real-time data and a direct line to your customers' thoughts and feelings. A lot of these platforms allow users to pretty much remain anonymous if they want to, so there are no feelings of shyness or shame to restrict people from volunteering their truths. The same reason people can be so nasty online is the same reason they feel comfortable exposing their naked selves.

So how do you tap them?

All of these platforms surface the most popular pieces of content to you. Leverage this to get the statistically largest insights.

For example, if you type a product, service, question, or problem into a Google search and then simply append YouTube, Reddit, or TikTok to the end, you’ll usually get the videos or posts that have had the most engagement. I know a lot of you are already doing this because my Google autocomplete (even in incognito) automatically suggests appending reddit, which means everyone’s doing it.

Ok, now that you’ve got all these links, pop them open and start reading. Both the content and the comments on the content are gold mines. Watch the videos, read the posts, and then pick through the comments to extract insights. This is where being a good listener is really important. The beauty of this is that the cream rises to the top, with the most popular sentiments being upvoted or liked.

Keep branching out through content. You can do this in multiple ways:

• Allow the algorithms to feed you more related and suggested content on TikTok, YouTube, for example

• If you’re on Reddit, you can navigate to the subreddits that these posts belong to, sort by top all-time, and start to digest what that community of people care about and are interested in. You can also use subredditstats.com to find other subreddits that community might have overlap with

• As you discover new questions or problems that people have, repeat the cycle by typing those into a Google search.

What to do with all of these insights?

Now that you’ve found them, you should start taking aggressive notes. Let’s bring back the 4 dimensions we mentioned earlier and fill out a few columns:

• who they are (demographically)

• what they want and what their problems are

• how they currently get what they want or solve their problems

• barriers they run into

I typically create a new slide and start pasting literal excerpts to bring the insight to life. This also makes it easier for me to refer back to them when I’m collating and summarizing findings in the table.

Unexpected insights that I’ve uncovered while performing research for clients:

• Novelists can feel lonely writing alone. They yearn for feedback and someone to bounce ideas off of. They have daily word count goals and feel demotivated when they don’t hit them

• Urban apartment dwellers like the idea of composting but hate the smells and don’t have the space. So they put their food scraps in a freezer bag and chuck them into the freezer for months

At the end of this process, you’ll have a list of problems that you can speak to in your marketing.

So how about you?

What do you know about your customers? Are you mining sentiment where your people hang out? At the very least, you could confirm your existing assumptions, giving you greater confidence in tripling down on your messaging. Or, you could unearth desires that you can speak to in your marketing, or even uncover a market need where no existing solutions are filling the gap.

It’s free. So it’s all upside. All it takes is maybe an hour of your time. By taking the time to research and analyze this information, you can create buyer personas and marketing messages that resonate, resulting in lower CAC.