Getting Grip with: User Personas

Imagine launching a marketing campaign that speaks so directly to your audience that it feels like you’ve read their minds, or imagine creating a feature on your app that saves your users precious effort and energy. Well, that’s the power of a user persona.

Before we dive too deep into the topic, I want to share where user personas fit in the branding process, as it’s where I use them the most.

Below is the periodic table of branding. It’s a wonderful infographic that splits up the branding process into phases, starting with the “Understand” section. Understanding your audience comes right at the start of that section, and rightfully should affect all decisions to follow.

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a detailed, semi-fictional representation of a target user or customer based on research and data. It's made up of the following information:

• A name and occupation
• Demographics
• Quotes that refine their character
• Challenges / pain points
• Appreciations and association
• Devices and online attention
• Goals
• Dislikes
• Beliefs, values and attitudes
• Desired benefit from engaging with your business
  

If you have real customers, it's worth referencing them to build your first user personas. Don't worry if you don't have all the information though, as you can make assumptions until you can feel further with authentic information.

The benefits of creating user personas

If your business is customer centric, your product and marketing should be tailored to your users. Knowing how to speak to you audience is guaranteed to produce a better product and make your marketing more cost-effective.

User experience (UX) design relies on knowing a person’s pain points and goals, while a marketing campaign won't produce results without knowing someone's attention habits. Both disciplines will benefit from different information. Alongside UX Design, and marketing, user personas a pivotal in brand strategy.

When creating a user persona for the sake of branding, you can go ahead and collect even more information that could be relevant to someone's geographical information, their likes, dislikes, goals and attitudes.

My past experience with user a personas

In my last full-time position our marketing strategy included creating new user personas every month. I was working for a company that catered to four markets, and each one of those markets needed at least three valid and relatively accurate personas. The characters we created greatly improved our internal communication and would help our sales staff predict who they would be pitching to.

These user personas proved to be valuable and evolved overtime. By the time I left, we had almost thirty users and buyers that helped to guide our identity, touch points, marketing copy and product direction.

Building a User Persona

So now that we have defined what a user persona is and how it can be useful to more than one area of your business, let's go into how to make one.

You can start by giving your user a fake name, a face and an occupation

1. Give your user a fake name, a face and an occupation
2. A character-defining quote — Try the user’s goal and the motivation behind it.
3. Demographic information — the age, gender, primary language, family status and education can all be relevant.
4. Beliefs, values and attitudes — What does this person stand for and what do they not care too deeply about in their life?
5. Appreciations and associations — will give you a key inside as to where they want to spend their time, money and energy.
6. Dislikes — just as important, as you can find out what really rubs someone the wrong way.
7. Challenges / pain points — to discover this persons day-to-day problems. These can be as detailed as necessary for your opportunity to market to them or design an app feature around.
8. Attention and devices — Which social channels do they hang out on? Do they still consume traditional media? And how many devices do they use every day?
9. Goals — what are they working towards? These can also be detailed. It could be what they want to achieve today or in five years time.
10. Desired benefit — describe what you can help them achieve using your product/service as part of the day.
    

Routinely make new personas. Making a new persona every month won’t take much effort, and it’s good business-practice to get your marketing team, your designers/engineers and your sales people on the same page about who you need to speak to.

Cover the aspects that are relevant to your offering. If you're trying to sell someone a product that saves them time, it's a good idea to know where they're spending it before you offer them the benefits. Also, if you're working on a shopping list phone-app, you don't need to know that the user drives a Subaru and takes forty-five minutes to get to work.

Lastly, I have a relevant quote from one of my mentors:

“Let the results inform rather than instruct your decisions”

- James Fitzjohn, Brew Consulting

If you'd like further context on how to best build user personas, I wrote a presentation on the subject for morning start-up that's available to view here:

I'd love to hear how you are using user personas in your own business, so feel free to reach out to me on my socials.