Creating A User Persona (Part 2)
Last week we talked about the basics of creating a user persona, this week we will further explain it with an example.
Let’s take a website named Spark Online. Spark is looking to curate electricity related content and reach out to power sector stakeholders and electricity consumers in their local market. They have a long term goal of launching a payment solution allowing users to pay electricity bills on their platform.
After evaluating their User Persona with the questions listed earlier, the following was discovered:
- 72% of users are active on the website between 11 a.m — 3 p.m.
- 63% of traffic come from Lagos, Nigeria.
- 82% of users are directed to the webpage from twitter.
- From Google Analytics, user interests are Sports & Fashion.
- Readers spent more time reading the youth section of the blog.
Now from this data, some inferences can be made. Looking at the data it’s easy to infer that the user demographic is quite young, owing to the time they are most active, their interest in Twitter, Sports and fashion, and their preference for youth content.
With this consideration a Buyer Persona was created.
Buyer Persona
Name: Tijani Bello
Age: 20
Interests: Music, fashion & Sports.
Occupation: Electrical Engineering student at Unilag.
Goals: To be a top electrical engineer in his field.
Challenges: Access to industry information outside the classroom
Bio: TJ (yes, we’re now on first name basis) is obsessed with engineering and he’s been following power sector news to prepare him for the challenges of the sector when he’s done with school and begins working in the industry.
Now this gives you a rough idea of your ideal User Persona. The next thing to do now is to compare this to the target audience you desire and see if the User Persona fits this target audience. If it does, then great, you’re off to a great start and now you can tailor your content strategy with all these new information in mind. You can start off by answering these two key questions:
- How we help?
2. What’s the content strategy to leverage this audience?
If the buyer/user persona doesn’t fit what you need then you should evaluate your content model more closely. For example, the buyer persona above is young and may not have huge income, hence less purchasing power so selling anything to him may not be a good idea, because no matter how much he loves it he just may not be able to afford it. So the long term goal of Spark Online, which is earning via online vending may not be best suited for this younger demographic.
A counter argument may be that it is okay if they adjust their target audience to fit this user profile as these young demographic, in a few years will become income earners who may then be able to use Spark for their electricity bill vending, but that’s a long shot and long term value offering.
So now the Lead content developer has a choice to make: stick with this current model or change content strategy to attract his desired target audience. This is a conundrum that may never have presented itself without an assessment of the User Persona, but it is one that if handled correctly, can help scale your business quickly and allow you provide better content focused on the people that really care about your content.
These considerations are what needs to be assessed after making a User Persona.
Creating a user persona is a very key practice for any business. While the process may seem herculean at first, as you get deeper into it, you get to understand your audience even better.
If you need any help with creating Buyer Persona or have any other content marketing need, feel free to reach out to us at welcome@plaqad.com for tips and insights . . . and yes, it’s completely free.
