User personas — What are they and how to build them?
Market and customer segmentation have been around for a long time, although the interest in market segmentation theories picked up in the 1920s as an evolution from mass production and mass marketing in the end of the 19th century.
Market segmentation is based on the assumption that different market segments require different offers, prices, promotion and distribution.
However, with the evolution of user-centric and one-to-one marketing, the practice of creating user personas is becoming more and more common. User personas are one of the most effective ways of understanding and empathising with these customer segments.
There are different ways to create personas. The main point being that a user persona must be depicted as a real person with objective personal and professional traits, but also subjective preferences and interests.
So, what are user personas, and why are they so important?
What is a user persona?
User personas are structured and general representations the goals and behavior of your ideal customers. Synthesising data collected from interviews and observation, personas can help different teams in marketing, sales, product, or service to better understand and relate to the customers your organisation is selling to. By having a deep understanding of your user personas, you can find out what are their real needs to better address them improve both customer acquisition and retention.
The image below is an example of a user profile for a persona that lays out the key elements of the user persona.
How to create a user persona
User personas build up on market segmentation, so it is a prerequisite that you already know who your potential users are, how many they are and that you have quantitative information about their socio-demographics.
User personas are usually created through research, surveys, and interviews of potential users in your target market. Using the data from your market segmentation, you can identify and include a mix of customers and prospects in your research effort. You can use several methods for your research:
- Interview customers and prospects to collect information that would help you draw a clear picture about their personal characteristics, their job, their daily challenges and their go-to information and knowledge sources.
- Research trends either by using your existing CRM database to identify patterns and trends about how the different group of leads find and consume your online and offline content or use online data to get general market insights. You can use keyword research in SEM platforms such as Google to discover what people are searching for in relation to the product or service you are offering. Finally, you can also use SMM platforms such as Facebook Insights to further understand your personas motivation.
- Leverage your landing pages and online forms to further segment your personas. Design different landing pages with form fields that capture persona data you could use in your user profile.
- Tap into the knowledge of your sales and service teams. Your sales team has a day-to-day access to the leads they are interacting with, while your service team can give you first-hand feedback from your current users and their challenges.
Another way to create a user persona is by taking the time to create it yourself. You should aim to get all stakeholders together in a 1 to 2 days session. The closeness, the different perspectives and direct access to the users makes it easier to build rapport and empathy with the potential users.
To promote collaboration and encourage participation, it is better to favour analog tools such as coloured post-it notes and sharpies. Lay the user profile canvas on a whiteboard and work with the participants to identify, discuss and fill the different sections of the canvas.
If you find it hard to fill your user profile pains and gains sections or if you feel that the user profile is too broad, empathy mapping is a great tool to put your team in the customer’s shoes. It can help you empathise with your potential users by easily visualising what they hear, see, think and feel in different situations.
Negative personas or the customer you don’t want
Once you are done building your user personas, it is important to spend some time to build your negative persona.
While your user personas represent the ideal customers for your product or service, a negative persona represents the type of customers you don’t want to sell to. You want your marketing and sales teams to avoid wasting their time on the leads that fit a negative user persona such as customers who cannot afford your product or service, that are too expensive to acquire or customers with challenges that do not fit with the solution you are offering. Excluding these types of leads will allow your teams to focus on the leads that have higher chances of converting and higher ROI.
