Persona Principals
Personas are powerful tools, not only helping your marketing strategy, but they align every part of your business and are the core to developing successful products and services.
Personas are fictional characters or archetypes that bring people to life. By getting to know who your audience and customers are, they will help provide the power and potential to grow your business.
Thanks to personas, designers and marketers are able to keep the real user at the heart of everything they do. They can consider the real user experience and user behaviours such as with a website and alter the design accordingly. Copy writers can also ensure that content is written to the appropriate audiences and stakeholders or leaders are able to evaluate new site features and ideas dependent on the persona in mind.
Personas should be created based on research and analysis of market data, which will help you understand the users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. This will result in creating reliable representations of your key audience segments for reference and build on the emotional connection. This article aims to dig a little deeper into how personas, when built correctly, really provide the power to business success.
Outline of Buyer Personas and UX Persona types
Better marketing and higher quality leads adds up to better ROI. One of the primary benefits of market segmentation is that by examining the data of different segments, you can move resources and spend toward targeting those with a higher customer lifetime value, driving higher ROI
- Set an objective. What is the purpose of this market segmentation process? …
- Identify customer segments. Establish a research design, collect data, analyze the results, and develop your segments.
- Evaluate the target segment.
- Develop market segmentation strategy.
- Identify launch plan.
This will then allow you to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference.
There are two types of behavioural segments within personas – The first type are called the Marketing Personas, the people that are going to buy a product or service.
For marketing personas, research needs to be made into the demographics, market challenges, geographics, behavioural patterns (such as researching pain points) and purchasing habits.
The second behavioural type are called User Experience (UX) Personas. These people focus on who are going to use the product and service and how they are going to achieve using it.
For this type of persona, research needs to be conducted to understand the persona goals, webographics, values and skills needed for the product or service.
Ways to conduct persona research
Personas are only as good as the research behind them. In order to make them as accurate and true to life as possible, you need to base them on qualitative and quantitative research and web analytics.
There are many ways to conduct research in order to get accurate persona outcomes. Creating a survey, sent via e-mail campaign or a paid database will provide an excellent picture of your personas. By having face to face conversations, or even a web video call will help firm up the persona characteristics.
When preparing for the interview or survey, list all the questions down that you need to be aware of, such as for example, their age, gender and what are the frustrations they may have.
It is a good idea to ask for contact details at the end of the survey or interviews, so that you can clarify anything and even go back to them at the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) stage.
From this data, you should extract and start to identify patterns of behaviour to describe different types of user. It is important to listen to the research and build your personas based on this and not your own idea of your audience.