What is a persona?
- A persona is a fictional character that we create in our minds or on paper to better visualize the audience of our website or media. In other words, a persona is a hypothetical personality that is close to most of our business customers and audiences. Therefore, businesses can portray a personality of users who can be their potential customers according to the various information they get from the market.
- A persona shows the different types of users who use your products and services. In fact, by defining a persona, you can better understand the needs, desires, pain points, behaviors and goals of the users of your target community.
- If you produce a lot of content, but you don't know the target audience and users, your efforts will not be successful. Paying attention to the persona in content creation should be considered as a permanent policy.
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✅ Types of buyer personas
Developing buyer personas helps to better understand the motivations and needs of a business's audience, and in this way, it will be easier to design marketing campaigns and determine sales strategies. Having a buyer persona helps the business to better understand the concerns and needs of the audience and form a stronger relationship with them.
In general, we are reviewing different types of buyer personas, and one of these types is the buyer persona itself. Buyer persona is a holistic approach to marketing. The buyer persona is the person who makes the final decision in the purchase process, and the concerns of this persona go beyond satisfying their needs at the moment. Designing and understanding the buyer persona is very key for businesses because this persona helps businesses identify the decision makers of other companies; Therefore, this persona helps companies to focus their energy on the people who give the final approval to buy their product or service.
✔️ User persona
User Persona is a tool you have at your disposal as a user experience (UX) designer when collecting user research and finding design solutions to solve problems and create more human-friendly products and experiences.
In the UX design process, the following two questions are often asked:
What are we designing for? (It means business)
The first question is related to the characteristics of the business, including needs, goals, mission, prospects, products, services, etc. The second question is related to the knowledge of the target users, which is usually known by the term "user persona".
User persona is the behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, characteristics and needs of a specific group of users. A persona is a representative of the user whose details the designer imagines in his mind to turn a fictional character into a real one.
🔻 Characteristics of a good persona
🔹 Personas are not imaginary guesses about what the target user thinks. Every aspect of describing a persona should be connected to real data (observation and research).
🔹 Personas reflect actual user patterns, not different user roles! So you should know that personas are not a reflection of roles in a system. A good persona focuses on the current situation, in the sense of how users are currently interacting with the product. A bad persona focuses on the future state because it is not clear how future users will interact with the product.
🔹 A specific persona that focuses on behaviors and goals related to a specific area of a product is usually a good persona. For example, if the product is related to the baby field, a good persona should tell the characteristics of parents, especially mothers.
✔️ Customer persona
A customer persona is a reflection of your ideal customer based on marketing research, existing data from your current customer or prospective customer. This reflection, which is completely based on information, will help you make the best decisions not only about your products but also about your business.
🔻 An ideal customer persona should represent the people to whom:
🔹 you offer your products and services to.
🔻 Why is it important to use customer personas?
According to the customer persona, we make sure that all the activities we do to attract and serve our target audience really fit their needs. In other words, by accurately defining our target customer in the form of a real person, we can better predict his needs, desires and behaviors and, finally, have a more appropriate performance.
When choosing a product or service, people naturally tend towards a business that they know and trust more. But how to build this trust? The best way to build trust is to demonstrate your genuine concern for the other party (here the customer) and show that you understand. In fact, until the customer feels that you have a correct understanding of him and his needs, he will not trust you and will not buy from you.
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✔️ Persona of the audience
Designing audience personas helps you understand the concerns of current and future customers. It also helps to provide more suitable content, higher quality product and better service by considering the needs and interests of customers. Also note that research such as customer surveys and interviews can help significantly in designing the best and strongest audience persona.
How does audience persona help increase sales?
By dividing customers based on persona, you can, for example, instead of sending a group email, group call, etc., categorize the audience and communicate with each group based on their interests and needs. In addition, by producing quality and targeted content, you can direct people who intend to buy your products and services to the desired page, and after presenting a persuasive content, by designing a call to action button, you can lead the person to purchase.
✔️ Proto persona
are personas that are based on educated guesses about your user base. If your time and resources for user research are limited for any reason, this type of persona can be a quick and easy way to implement a tool. It can also be a good way to dip your toe into the water of user personas.
This persona, as the name suggests, is used when you have not started your business yet, but you know who you want to be your buyer. The proto persona is your ideal customer, but you want to have a realistic picture of him because you ultimately have to sell your products and services to real people.
Another thing to remember about the proto persona and all buyer personas is that you shouldn't go into too much detail. Sometimes knowing a little more about a person and their needs can help us make more sales, but having a bunch of details will only make it more complicated.
✅ Persona in marketing and advertising
Professional marketers and businesses start with persona design to get to know their audience and attract their attention. Persona helps you know what your customer's behaviors are, how they react to different issues, what are the mental barriers that discourage them from you, what are their goals, what do they need, and finally what can you do about them. After knowing the audience, you can organize an effective marketing plan, meet the audience's needs and turn him into one of your brand's loyal customers.
A persona is used in marketing and advertising by creating a marketing persona that actually represents a segment or group of customers, so that businesses can focus on advertising their products and services.
The persona guides your content creation process so that based on the interests, needs and challenges of the target users, content creation is adjusted and you give a specific response to your contacts. Persona plays an effective role in content production so that your brand, products and services can also produce content based on customer needs.
✅ Persona design
Persona(s) are derived from data analysis and marketing studies and are representative of your target user community. Therefore, if you want to create a stunning and effective advertisement that attracts users, or design and produce a product and service that meets the needs of users and fulfills their desires, you must have a persona document.
Gather your data
The first step in designing a persona is to conduct research on users to understand their mindset, behaviors and motivations. The most accurate personas are formed based on field research.
The persona is extracted from a detailed and principled interview with users and data obtained from different departments of the company. The more and more detailed data the researcher collects during the interviews, the more realistic the persona will be.
🔻 Identify behavioral patterns based on data
🔹 After conducting research, list all user behavioral variables.
🔹 Map each user you interviewed with an appropriate set of variables.
🔹 Categorize the set of users into 6 to 8 variable groups.
🔹 Identify trends and then determine the behavioral pattern of each group based on the data.
🔻 Determine a number! How many personas do you need?
Some businesses only design one persona, but the main challenge here is that most businesses design several personas for each product or service. Always remember to focus on just one persona. There is no magic number for persona design, as a rule of thumb, 3 or 4 personas should be enough for most projects.
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Describe the characters
Draw a character based on the behavior patterns obtained in the previous step. Don't be tempted to add too much detail to the document at this point. Too much detail can be distracting, most businesses create more than one persona for each product or service. Most products have multiple user groups, so it makes sense to define multiple personas.
🔻Prepare the personas, situation and scenario
Personas by themselves will have no value. They become valuable when tied to a great scenario. A scenario is an imagined situation that describes how a user would interact with a product in a specific context to achieve an end goal. Scenarios help businesses to discover the mainstream of user behavior patterns. By combining scenario and persona, you gather user needs and use these needs to design products and services. Note that the scenarios should be written from the perspective of the persona.
🔻 Make persona available to different teams
All team members, as well as your business stakeholders, need to positively relate to and value the persona(s). Once the team gets to know the persona(s), they will start talking about them as if they were real people. A well-crafted persona can become a team member. All associated teams must have a copy of the persona. This work is necessary because it helps them to always have a model of the target audience in front of their eyes in various processes.
Presenting the persona in the form of posters, cards, figurines and other real and tangible methods will be more effective for teams to communicate with the persona than a digital version or a PowerPoint file. These versions can help to maintain the persona in the mentality of the team members.