Persona

Humans create personas

Persona is a term that represents a market segment representative. A persona will give flesh and bones to your customers and users who enter your website. These personas can be called user personas, customer personas, or buyer personas.

You will assign them features and characteristics such as age, residence, hobbies, or occupation.

With this knowledge, you can prepare an offer tailored to the customer and user needs. Without persona, it's like shooting blanks: your offer won't hit the target.

Persona is a representative of a customer segment. What does it mean? Segmentation consists of grouping people interested in your services.

Personas consider demographic and mental similarities between users. They also reveal specific customer habits and preferences.

It also allows you to understand how others perceive and evaluate your product (if it is already in the market). We covered customer segmentation in a separate article.

Customer segmentation enables you to create a sales funnel or a path traversed by a customer from the moment of encountering a product to its purchase. In the era of new technologies and the Internet, such a process seems relatively easy to carry out because there are numerous tools facilitating the entire process.

Creating user personas before starting a business, or human first

It's very important to create personas even before starting a business. It can be illustrated with the case of Easy Shave Club, a carbon copy of the popular US Dollar Shave Club. Both businesses provide, among others, razors as a subscription service.

Wojciech Bartoszek, the founder of Easy Shave Club, which sells subscriptions through a website, thought that his customers would primarily be young people.

Yet, mainly older customers were interested in his offer. Bartoszek had to adapt his existing sales model accordingly. Older customers were distrustful of the word "subscription," which required developing a more flexible model of cooperation with club members.

The Easy Shave Club's founder made a mistake by opting for his idea about his customers instead of conducting some research, which would have enabled him to get to know them better.

Make My Persona is another useful application. Although a less extensive solution than Personapp, it is still an interesting proposition.

A persona should include the following information:

• Basic data such as age, gender, residence, education, occupation or interests
• Role in a social group: for example, in a family, these can be household chores, budget contributions, etc.
• Goals and challenges: value hierarchy, passion, or a life motto of the persona
• Financial situation, including monthly earnings, savings, or loans

You can also include additional content, allowing you to get to know the customer or user even better.

Persona and free data sources for quick verification of assumptions:

• Google Analytics
• Hotjar
• Yandex Metrica
• Google Search Console
• HubSpot and other CRM systems
• Facebook, Instagram, and other social networks where you are active and have access to the users' analytics panel.

Social media and analytical tools can provide resources for monitoring website traffic flow, which can help build a persona.

The most popular is Google Analytics, which has received an interesting alternative in the form of Yandex Metrica.

Yandex Metrica offers functionality that you won't find in the Google tool. It lets you track user sessions and spy on how Internet users view your website.

This enables you to, e.g., notice that users don't scroll to the very bottom of a page because they see that the newsletter blocks the end of the page while there is still important information below.

UX and marketing persona. We explain both terms

We can distinguish:

1. Marketing persona focusing on demographic information, motivation, and preferences. It includes data such as age, residence, or occupation.
2. Design persona focusing on goals, behavior, and sensitive points. A persona of this type is created based on conversations and customer meetings. A design persona describes why a person makes specific choices and explains relationships between decisions and certain activities.

Every business is simple. Discover a need and fulfill it. In other words, offer value.

The work on persona is the first tangible result that leads you to a business idea and to the creation of the right business application.

Types of personas

According to the Interact Design Foundation, four types of user personas can be distinguished.

Goal-directed personas

As the name suggests, goal-directed user personas focus on users with specific goals, objectives, and tasks they want to achieve and complete with your product. To create such a user persona, you need to analyze the steps your customers take to accomplish their desires. You also need to examine what paths they would prefer to take to fulfill their needs and adjust your processes and workflow accordingly.

With enough user research, you can determine what value your product or service provides to the user and, based on that, find a way to meet their requirements.

Role-based personas

Like goal-directed personas, role-based personas concentrate on objectives and behavior. The creation of role-based personas requires both quantitative and qualitative research methods.

This type of persona allows you to define the user's role within an organization so you can make better design decisions. It also includes considering the following aspects: Where will the product be used? What objectives will the users want to achieve with this product? What are the functions of this role?

Engaging personas

Engaging personas are designed to study the emotions, psychology, backgrounds, goals, and roles of users and customers. The primary goal is to create a fully fleshed-out persona so that designers and the users of this persona can relate to it and engage more with it.

The reasoning behind this type of persona is that when they are seen as more "real," then team members will be more willing to consider them during product design and acknowledge their needs.

Fictional personas

Fictional user personas aren't created based on user research; on the contrary, they're made based on the assumptions and ideas of a UX design team. The "data," in this case, are the experiences and interactions with users and customers that happened in the past. It's the cheapest form of a persona that enables you to imagine what a typical user might look like.

This type of persona shouldn't be used as a final image of your customer base simply because it will be a lacking picture that won't reflect real users. However, you can treat it as a starting point that you will later confront with research results.

How to create effective user personas?

What steps do you need to take to create a user persona that will effectively reflect your target users?

1. Conduct user and market research and gather data.

A key step in creating user personas is conducting user research or market research and collecting data about your users and customers. These data will provide you with information regarding user needs, expectations, pain points, and details about who they are as people.

To collect the necessary data, you can use research methods such as user interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc. You can also conduct market segmentation to discover your target audience or better understand it.

These methods will allow you to discover valuable insights and data that you can use to improve user experience and marketing strategies for products and services.

Remember that you don't necessarily need to perform new research to gather data. It's enough to start with information that you already possess. For example, suppose you have a running online store and want to create a buyer persona. In that case, you can analyze data provided by your customer support and marketing teams or look into website analytics.

2. Divide the target users into user segments.

User segmentation involves dividing your customer or user base into more easily manageable groups with distinct characteristics. You can create personas based on these segments; for example, you can divide customers based on their spending.

Types of user segmentation:

• Demographic segmentation
• Psychographic segmentation
• Behavioral segmentation
• Geographic segmentation
• Needs-based segmentation
• Technographic segmentation
• Value-based segmentation

3. Analyze the collected data.

Once you gather all the essential data, take your time analyzing it. Try not to speed up this process unless necessary; it may cause you to miss important insights or pain points.

It's important to remember that you should first focus on the similarities between the users instead of their differences. This will enable you to create small groups that will be easier to manage and describe.

4. Create user personas.

After you analyze the collected data, it's time to choose a persona tool that will help you include all this information into a neatly designed user or customer persona. In other words, it's time to create a persona based on the data from your research and analytics tools.

You can use a persona template that contains the name, occupation, age, industry, goals, education, etc., all valuable information that will help you define the targeted user.

It's also important to note that you can create more than one persona. After all, you don't offer your product to just a single type of person but to multiple people with similar needs.

5. Ensure your user personas are up-to-date.

Customer and user behaviors change over time, so you must ensure that your user personas are up-to-date and accurately reflect changing needs and expectations. You should also remember to add new user personas when your business acquires new customers or users. This will enable you to align your marketing strategies and goals with users.