User personas are one of the most important elements of your marketing and communication plan and the one you should start with first. If done correctly, they will give you a guiding North to exactly how you should communicate with your ideal users, what tone and language you should use and where to reach them.
More than just a marketing strategy, creating a user persona, if done thoroughly and researched well could bring about awesome insights into who your users are as well as the effectiveness of your branding.
For early stage startups, it’s important to define a user before all communication has begun. However, if you already have users engaging with your brand, this will help you create your user personas because they won’t solely be hypothetical.
Either way, theorizing with your user personas is strongly advised against. You want to go out and conduct interviews, talk to real people, and get inside their head.
With that, we’ll take our own advice and instead of theorizing the user persona with you, we’ll give you an example of our Bravuz Client Persona and walk you through how we created it.
- BIOGRAPHY :
The 1st thing to do is to describe your user in detail. Go for the demographics and hard facts here. What’s their name? How old are they? Where do they live?
Example: Leonard Sandberg, 32 years old, Founder, Single, Europe
Leonard is in the process of prototyping his product and wants to know more about his potential user and how to attract them. (StartUp Stage)
Leonard is in the second version of his product and wants to expand the number of users in international markets. (Growth Stage)
2. PHOTO :
What does your user look like? This will help you visualize them and more easily help you define where they work/live/what brands they use etc.
3. QUOTE :
If your user had a favorite quote, a motto, a saying they lived by- what would it be?
Example: “The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”
5. BRANDS
Which brands does your user love/admire/use the most?
Examples:
6. MOTIVATIONS :
What motivations does your user have? Think of personal, professional, internal and external.
Example: Necessity of achievement, self-realization, independence, associations, increase of income and power.
7. FRUSTRATIONS :
What frustrates your user? First start with general frustrations, personal frustrations then narrow down to the frustrations that relate directly to your business.
Example: Lack of start-up capital, mentoring and training.
8. GOALS :
What goals does your user have? Start with personal goals, then professional. Usually they will be inter-lapping and will have a lot in common.
Example: Increase the number of users; Growing in the domestic market or in other markets; Be more strategic; Measure Results
9. CHALLENGES :
What challenges is your user faced with? These could include general challenges (you should start with general) and then narrow them down
Example: Lack of internal resources and knowledge; Reduced budget
By now, if you’ve answered all of these questions thoroughly and not theoretically you should have a pretty strong “user persona.” Put it into a canvas and stick on your wall where you can see it — it’s important to build your communication strategy around it.
In our next “How to” Series we’ll dive deeper into creating a marketing-growth hacking strategy for your startup and really kill it.
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