Creating personas for the different users or customers interested in — and buying — your products can be a beneficial way to understand and recognize the likes and dislikes of a consumer group. Every company should take the time to evaluate who its typical (and atypical) customers are and what needs you should target to get their business.
Crafting these customer personas takes time. The better you can drill into who your customer is and what their desires are, the better you will be able to develop a persona that accurately reflects your ideal consumer.
Below, 15 members of the Forbes Agency Council provide the most important initial considerations for crafting an ideal persona. Here is what they recommend:
1. Know The Difference Between User And Buyer Personas
Differentiating between user personas and buyer personas is very important. For enterprise products in particular, the buyer is often very different from the product user. For example, the buyer of a marketing data platform is likely a CMO concerned with how it will drive sales. However, the users, likely campaign owners or data scientists, are more concerned with usability. - Preethy Vaidyanathan, Tapad
2. Apply Pareto's 80/20 Principle
There is no doubt that your product appeals to a wide variety of people. Most business owners have a hard time coming up with a specific audience because it's easy to get distracted by the exceptions that come in on a daily basis. Here's a good starting point: Use the 80/20 rule. Develop your personas around the 20% of your customers who account for 80% of your income. - Ahmad Kareh, Twistlab Marketing
3. Talk With Your Customers
To build out your personas’ psychographics, your best bet is to talk with your existing customers. The most effective way to do this is to pick up the phone or survey them with the help of a simple tool like Survey Monkey. Understanding what motivates your customers to buy will help you more effectively communicate with similar people. - Laura Cole, Vivial
4. Talk With Your Sales Team
They are the ones on the front lines selling your products and services every day, so it’s important to ask them for insights. This may seem obvious, but many marketing people forget about this valuable internal resource. - Megan Shroy, Approach Marketing
5. Don't Neglect Your Vision Board
When creating your ideal user persona, it takes more than just significant thought and careful consideration. It requires discovering exactly who you want to cater to. The best place to begin is envisioning who that person really is. Create a vision board of their interests and life. Then back up your vision with data, research, surveys and interviews, and establish their goals and challenges. - Peter Boyd, PaperStreet Web Design
6. Start With The "Why"
The first thing is to understand the need for user personas. One of our app development projects began with app positioning features and was followed by creating user personas. Our desired outcome was to develop groups of users in order to ensure a successful gamification process, which helped our customers find the "perfect present" quickly. Our objective? Develop engaging user experiences. - Alannah Tsimis Sandehl, IDM Brand
7. Look To Facebook Insights
Start building out a more holistic view of your potential consumers by leveraging Facebook and its expansive user data. Export your customer (or prospect) email list. Upload that list into Facebook as a custom audience, and voila! Your customer profiles are immediately expanded to include income ranges, relationship status, job titles, purchase behaviors, spending methods and much more. - Jon Clark, Fuze SEO, LLC
8. Understand Your Customers' Problems
When creating your ideal persona, the most important consideration is determining what problem the user has that your product or service solves. By understanding their problem or challenge, you can determine how your product or service can best help them, where they may be typically seeking information on how to solve that problem, and even brainstorm content ideas that will engage with this persona. - Elyse Flynn Meyer, Prism Global Marketing Solutions
9. Find Your Brand Truth
An authentic persona requires a deep exploration into the brand's truth. Truth is not marketing speak or brand attributes. Instead, it is the pure reason for a consumer or customer to care. Consumers today expect that a brand persona be honest, human and true, but all that can be bolstered when the brand shows it really cares about higher-order ideals like community, humanity or citizenship. - Daryl McCullough, Citizen Relations
10. Don't Try To Reflect Your Perfect Customer
Think of the most distracted, overscheduled, mildly interested, take-it-or-leave-it prospect, and craft your personas around them. Then, when it comes time to craft the user experience, if you keep this persona in mind, you'll be forced to create something so compelling that even the worst-case customer should be motivated to convert or purchase. - Justin Daab, Magnani Continuum Marketing
11. Always Think Ahead
Ideal personas should withstand the test of time and be nimble enough to encapsulate future changes in your industry. Being nimble doesn't mean it doesn't have to have a strong identity, it just means that it should be able to adapt as your brand and your goals progress. - Priscila Martinez, The Brand Agency
12. Know When And Where To Reach Them
When you develop personas for digital marketing, one of the most important things to consider beyond who they are, where they are in the buyer cycle and how they make their decisions, is where and when to reach them. Considering the platforms, channels, times of day and overall communication method that is best for each persona will help ensure your ads are optimized for that audience. - Ben LeDonni, CreativeMMS
13. Treat Your Personas As A Hypothesis
Too many teams build personas and then treat them like the truth rather than a hypothesis. Personas are meant to be the backboard for all of your experiments. With this in mind, we try to fill our personas with questions rather than definitions. These questions become the guide for the experiments we run in both messaging and targeting. Most importantly, we revise these personas over time. - Jacob Johnson, Gitwit Creative
14. Identify Mindset
Persona alone is too shallow. In 2018, an ideal persona cannot be created without an understanding of recent psychological research on the importance of mindset. Each persona could have one of two mindsets that need to be engaged very differently, or you risk turning off your prospect completely. Take time to understand mindsets, how to recognize them and how to communicate with them effectively. - Elizabeth Edwards, Volume Public Relations
15. Don't Try To Create Just One Persona
It is essential that you do not try to create one blanket persona to summarize your audiences. You must consider their variations to create segments and subsegments of consumers to understand which groups you want to prioritize and which are not of value. From there, you can better research and map out how each persona thinks, feels and acts to best target them. - Nina Hale, Nina Hale, Inc
