A user persona is one of the most useful tools a marketing team can leverage. It can:
- Accurately target a specific demographic. 🎯
- Maximize the impact of an advertising campaign. 💥
Predicting who a product or service is intended for can help make informed design choices and communicate effectively with your audience.
When creating a persona for your product, ask yourself the following:
1️⃣ Who will use the product?
2️⃣ How will the product be used?
3️⃣ What problem(s) or pain points will it solve?
📝 The nitty gritty
With those out of the way, you can generate more specific details like customers’ potential age, occupation, and income.
A persona can be as vague or specific as you need it to be, from generic age ranges right down to specific day-to-day activities and habits! These details will be assumptions, but you can support these predictions by hosting interviews and gathering solid data from real people.
Offering some sort of incentive for participation – like a free drink at a local cafe, gift card, or discount code – will encourage enthusiastic and genuine answers from participants. The good stuff comes from asking about their daily routines or watching them use a competitor’s product.
It’s important to ensure all interviewees fit the criteria of your intended market. You wouldn’t be asking a child to navigate a banking application — unless education is your thing!
👔 Just business
A persona is usually organized like a business card. Adobe provides tons of information on personas and user-centric design with some killer examples.
Free design programs like Miro or Figma lets you easily craft professional, simple, and useful personas. Consider a simple table in any spreadsheet or text program to organize data as well!
📚 A very short case study
A persona can greatly influence your marketing strategy. Let’s brainstorm a hypothetical mobile app:
- It will highlight the relationship between our dietary habits and how they influence our overall well-being.
- It will have a simple, well-organized interface.
- Our market will consist of people aged 25-40 years old and with a steady income.
- Our competitors are Apple Health and Google Fit.
Upon interviewing several people about their habits and motivations, we find that our app simply isn’t engaging enough. It’s not as rewarding as watching a “calories burned” statistic or tracking steps.
Seeing this may help your brand in deciding whether to pivot the design to be more dynamic or competitive in nature. You may discover that your initial design needs some work. These observations would only be revealed to us through our interviews with people who would actually be using the application.
🔊 Communication and culture
After gathering all the interview info, it’s time for one last piece of the puzzle – how your future customers communicate.
Communication is integral to the perception of a brand. Effective communication encourages trust, empathy, and meaningful interactions between the brand and its customers.
It improves retention, generates new leads, and supports the best customer service experience possible.
Culture is crucial in developing a reputation. Understanding the culture of a target market provides insight into their values. With that information, businesses can give a unique perspective on those values and craft something wholly distinctive for people to enjoy.
Tell us about your research process and how it influences your business goals. What did you learn about your potential customers that shocked you? Respond to this email and let us know!
