User personas, the way to a brand’s heart. Learning all about your customer’s customer.
User personas are fictional characters based on real customer data. They allow you to empathise, create and build stronger brands and experiences.
Why do we create user personas? Aren’t they just imaginary customers?
We create user personas to emphatise. By learning about the needs, goals and struggles of our customer in a real way. By building persona’s based on consumer insights we can create nuanced and layered personalities that represent the broader target audience. By talking about actual ‘persons’ and not demographical statistics (‘40–50 years old males working in the tech industry’) we avoid generalisation and stimulate ‘empathy’.
How do we create user personas?
User personas should be build upon a strong analysis of your target audience. I would advise to create anywhere between 3 to 6 persona’s that represent different segments within your customers scope. We can define a few important steps in the process towards creating user personas:
1 — Defining the target audience
Before creating user personas you need to know what the target audience of your brand will be. Remember, the target audience is not always the same as the current audience, make sure you know where the brand want’s to be in terms of audience and where it ‘is’. The target audience can have a few parameters such as:
- Geography
- Age
- Gender
- Interest
- Income
- Media behaviour
If the target audience is broad you can create ‘segments’. There are well defined groups with the target. These segments can be geographical, by age, gender or multiple parameters, depending on the importance and difference of buying behaviour.
2 — Customer research
To know the pains and gains of the target audience, you need to do some research, there are many ways to go about this, from simple online searches to phone calls, focus groups and much more. A couple of things to get started
- Listen to the conversation online: what are people saying, how are they responding. Go on Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, Reddit,…
- Talk to some real customers: pick up the phone, stop by, invite them, you’ll be surprised what you’ll learn from talking to real customers when the client is not in the room.
- Talk to the staff working closely with customers (sales, support,…), they know the objections and fears of their customer.
3— Create user personas
Once you have all this data you will automatically start to see User Persona’s emerge. Try breathing life into the gathered data and start creating your first persona.
- Start with general information: age, location, education, job,..
- Then get to the personal story: how does an average day look like, what is their personal history, where do they go,... This is where you can really start to imagine things coming to life. Take some post-its and try to storyboard one day in the life of your persona. Maybe you’ll find some hidden touchpoints for your brand.
- Get into the needs of the customer. What are the problems they are facing? What do they really need? What are there goals, ambitions and dreams?
- What are the customers core values? What do they value the most? What are driving principles. For example: “Rita Heller is single mom. She believes in hard work and open communication. Every wednesday she has a ‘truth or dare’ night with her 2 children. They get out popcorn and share stories.”
- Think about their personality: how are they talking? Are they used to formal communication? Do they like quirky, witty jokes?
- What is their behaviour like? You can talk about media behaviour, buying behaviour and much more. For example: “Rita loves scrolling trough facebook on her Ipad at night, she get’s a lot of idea’s for new recipes trough online pages sharing these.” Also think about buying behaviour, where and how are they buying usually? How will this affect our customer journey?
- What brands are they interacting with? How are they talking about them? How are they using them?
As you can see, creating personas is like entering the customers mind and looking at the brand from their perspective. This helps creating brands or experiences that are user-centric.
This article is written as part of a collaboration between HolaBrief and Let’s talk branding.
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