User/buyer persona
The first time I heard the term “user/buyer persona” was on my UX/UI classes with Raquel Castillo. What first came to my head was the definition of target market: group of consumers most likely to use/buy a product/service.
Difference between Target Market vs Personas:
Target market: technique that help companies analyse what segment to target.
Personas: helps companies to elaborate a communication tone to their segment by humanizing it.
One of the first steps for any marketing strategy is identyfing your target market in order to create a Marketing Plan and direct personalized actions and design the Personas in order to empathize with your customer, find a common language and better your product.
“People ignore design design that ignores people” — Frank Chimero, designer
Difference between user and buyer persona:
User persona: whoever uses the service/product. Might not be the buyer nor make the decision of purchase. Focus on details (ease of use, flat learning curve…)
Buyer persona: whoever that makes the decision to purchase the product/service. They are not necesarily the ones that use the product. Especially in B2B, strategic goals (often for the long run), ROI pursue.
In B2B, most cases your buyer persona won’t be your user persona. There are general managers, department managers or supervisors that are the decision makers.
How to create a Persona step by step:
Research
Collecting insights is key priority in order to make your Persona. You might have some previous ideas from your current customers or some hypothesis about future ones, but if you don’t there are some tools that help you collect all kind of info you need such as interviews or surveys.
For the last two sources you might want to know what kind of information you are trying to obtain so that you can ask the right questions.
- Approach: identify the problem you’re trying to solve, select the technique and the tool to collect the data, define the sample and describe the variables and dimensions.
- Preparation: prepare the collection tool (excel, google form, etc.)
- Data pick up: time to apply the selected technique, collect data (visual, attitude, behavior)
- Analysis: analize the picked up data, data interpretation, conclusion extration, report presentation and follow up with the client.
After collecting all this verbatims (text quotes from the interviews) we’ll get enough insights in order to prepare the Persona.
You should add some external sources to support your data (articles, news, researches…).
In some cases, like in Lean management teams, you will create your personas based on assumptions and not on research. These are call “Proto-personas”.
Segment
The persona would be a collective impression of a segment of your target audience. We’ll create one hypothetical persona which will be your potential user/buyer.
There’s no standard number of Personas you’d need, it would depend on your business and product/service. After a deep market research, you should have define your MVS (minimum viable segment). Then break these segment into groups with some features or properties that identify them (if your target audience is too broad, you might want to divide them into subgroups). These will be the number of personas you’ll need to create.
Prioritize which personas to design first based on the size or the importance of the group. Try to keep personas to the minimum since you will create your marketing actions based on them.
Demographic profile
In order to create the right actions with the right tone, you need to find out specific details of your Personas, and it’s logical to start on demographic data.
- Give your persona a name and a photo, it doesn’t have to be real.
- Age
- Marital status
- Location
- Job/income/studies
- Any other features you consider appropiate for your persona definition.
Goals / Frustrations / Motivations
Goals: it’s important to describe your customer goals in order to align with your business strategy.
Frustrations / Motivations: within your research you should be able to idenfity your customer frustrations and motivations which will lead you to find a way to win them.
Other
You might include some background of everything you know about your client and could be useful for your research, like the apps they use, their daily routines, skills, technologies they use, values/fears, hobbies..
I like to include some textual quotes that idenfity them or their main need.
Take a look to the following article to find out what questions you should ask in order to create a Persona.
The final end is to empathize with our customers by being good storytellers and put the marketing efforts in the right Persona.
