Why & How to build personas

Jennifer Thomas
5 oct. 2018
4 min de lecture

Dernière mise à jour : 8 oct. 2018

Personas are fictional, generalized characters that encompass the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers. They help you understand your customers better. Creating personas allows you to segment contacts, assign them to workflows, and import contacts with a persona.

I love this description of a marketing persona from Ardath Albee:

A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.

In other words, you could imagine a Mr MARCEL guy who would be a great costumer of yours. That is for all the Mr MARCEL guys that your product/service exists.

Thus you, and all the persons working for Mr MARCEL's experience, need to know him really well to make sure you meet his expectations and even more. So he loves the experience, which means he likes your brand and can be loyal to it.

How beautiful is that virtuous circle ?

Ok, I give you that in reality. It is harder to :

- make sure everyone on the different touch-points with Mr MARCEL share the same right information

- Have the right information at the right moment

- Know what to do with the information

- know how to get the data

- ect.

But building personas can help you structure your needs, the knowledge you have of your costumers and get a vision where to go and work to get Mr MARCEL a great experience.

A bit of methodology :

Step 1 : DATA

There are many sources of user data and here are a few to get you started:

Using whatever info that you already got at hand. You might have some ideas about your customers. Whether you have done some research in the past, or you just know something for sure.
Making assumptions. If you’ve been working on a product for a while, you may have enough knowledge to make quite accurate assumptions about your users.
Web analytics of your platforms. This one is a goldmine of user data. Take the best of it.
Conducting interviews with users. Nothing beats talking to a real person. Just make sure you use this technique along with other sources.
Surveys

Have a smart look at it and do not let yourself drown by the amount of informations.

Step 2 : SEGMENT and DRAW A FACE

It is important to keep in mind that a persona is a collective image of a segment of your target audience (TA). It cannot be the face of the entire TA. Nor can it be just one person. You need somewhat of a golden middle.

You need to get enough information to be consistent and effective when you "talk" to him/her.

How much information :

To the question "How many to I need to build" ? I am happy to say...I do not know.

It depends on the data you have and the means to address you have.

We are in the middle of "the more the better" because you personalized the experience as much as you can. But also "Do less but better". In my opinion, it is better to have fewer personas but great customer's experiences and strong/clean/efficient scenarios for the few. Again, prioritization is essential, and not getting lost in more confortable to do your job.

What type of Information :

Depends on your business. First, they help force the creators to get into character. Specificity is a good way to push the process deep enough to facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your customers. We are not all naturally good at this, and it’s important for a persona’s effectiveness.

Second, it can help you find previously undetected tactical opportunities for your product, service, or institution. These can make what you do more useful and relevant in your customer’s lives. Where does your product or service constructively intersect with what Sally does or what Sally cares about? Once uncovered, these are very valuable insights.

Examples here both in B2B and B2C :

(please zoom in to see better, and contact me if you consider that it is not readable enough)

Step 3 : VALIDATE your persona and SHARE it

Here, I want you to remember that usually different departments and services are working for the same customer. For the customer there is just one brand. Thus, it is important to agree on who are we all working for in the company.

Pin it to the walls if necessary. To remember that when you need to take action, set up marketing plans, customer success action plans, ... look at the wall and ask yourself "is that important for this guy/woman/kid/pet...?".

Be sure to include the whole team in coming up with these personas as everyone brings a different perspective and different information to the table. Then once you have your personas in place, act on them by using specific messaging with your content and by empathizing with customers as they go through your funnels.

The results will be a better experience for the customer and a more engaged user for your business.