Developing User Personas

A persona? What’s that? 

A persona is a representation(s) of your customer base. You may have one target audience, you may have multiple. Creating user personas allows you to steer your messaging, meet your potential clients/customers where they are, and continue to add value to current clients/customers (so they keep coming back AND tell their friends). Personas also help inform your marketing strategy, determine where you should direct your social media efforts, and even help you determine where you should put your advertising dollars. 

Persona attributes can stretch far and wide and may include:

• Age

• Gender identification

• Marital status

• Location

• Occupation

• News sources

• Education

• Household income

• Social media use

• News sources

• Hobbies

• Favorite brands 

• Goals

• Pain points

Alan Cooper, a software developer, pioneered the concept of user personas and said: “You tend to canvas the user community, collect their requests for functions, and then provide them a product containing all of those functions. I call this the sum of all desired features.”

By understanding who your users are, their preferences and characteristics in life, where they exist in the digital space, what they hope to achieve, and where challenges exist as it relates to your product or service–you can create a fictional character(s) to build a story around. 

You might be asking, how do I find out this information? The easy answer is to ask! Conduct 1:1 interviews, focus groups, or send out a survey to your client/customer base. Be sure to wrap in other questions that will yield other valuable information and provide incentives to encourage participation. You might also have some of this information living in your CRM and can fill in the rest by mining your website and social media analytics. 

Need a starting place? Grab Elevate’s complimentary persona template here.