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.

Engage with your Personas

If you create a persona profile including a name, photograph, goals and needs and other key research attributes for each group of persona segment, you can bring them alive.

By creating the personas, designers are able to recognise that different people have different needs and expectations. If they are able to engage with them as real people, they will ultimately be able to create better products are services.

Once you know who your personas are, there’s infinite stories that you can create about them.

Review and Retain your Personas

Now that you know who your personas are, you need to treat them as ‘live’ customers. Customer behaviours constantly change and you need to be reactive to these changes.

These personas have now given you the power to incorporate them into your marketing strategy.

As with any product or service, the buyer journey never stops. Therefore your persona never dies! In this respect, you need to constantly review your personas to ensure that your product and service continues to meet their needs.

Don’t forget that there could be competition that will capture the attention of your personas. Keep up with the research and work on ways to retain your customers that buy into your brand and remain with your product or service as repeat users / buyers. As the market changes, there may be new persona types, so continually review who your personas are.

So, in summary, having strong persona types and knowing who you are working with, really does provide the power to building a loyal customer that will remain with your brand for the future.

For more information on how Mediabox can help you to create personas for your business contact 0115 9881641.

By Becky Bedson