If you want to have a successful branding or marketing campaign, you need to understand your audience first. To do that, it’s better and easier if you have a user persona. Yes, we said user not buyer because a buyer isn’t necessarily a user, but they can be. Basically, a user persona is a semi-fictional representation that personifies your ideal users. It’s usually applied in the early stages of product development or product redesign.
Why Should You Create and Use Personas?
When you’re planning to develop a website or an app, you need to make sure that said website or app can be easily accessed and used by your users. That means you must learn about what your users need when it comes to accessing and using website or app. This is where personas come in because it can help you make the right design decisions. Personas will give you many benefits that will ease your process during the website or app development.
- Provides your team with a shared understanding of users
- Tells you where you demographic spends time online, what resources they go to and what pain points they often face
- Gives a deep understanding of users, which will create more empathy and make your product more relatable
- Helps designers develop site architecture more accurately
How to Create Personas?
To create personas, you need to collect accurate data on your users using certain tools. One of them is Google Analytics, which gives you information about your website visitors, including their age range, how long they spend their time on your website, etc. As an additional source, you can also generate data from social media that offers analytics features, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Through this analytics, you’ll know more about your followers, their demographics, and their preferences.
Based on the data you’ve gathered, there are some important elements you need to include when creating personas: age, sex, location, education, interests, income level, job position, status (single, married, etc), their concerns toward certain issues your product wants to address, experience goals (how personas want to feel when using your product), and their frustrations with current solutions already available.
The next step is conducting interviews. Begin with any current customers or prospects in your funnel. Prepare a list of in-depth questions so that you can create the best personas possible. If possible, make sure to conduct a one-to-one interview so that the respondent’s answer isn’t influenced by other respondents.
[Recommended Read:] A Guide to Creating User Persona
What to Do with Your Personas?
Now that you have personas in hands, what should you do with it?
You can do many things with personas. Let’s say you want to redesign your website. You can consult your personas to get a better understanding of your target audience and enhance ability from certain features. Or, if you want to launch a new app, consulting your personas will allow you to get insights into what will capture your target users’ interests and what they will identify with. As long as you understand your audience well, you can create anything that’s relevant to them. Creating user personas will allow you to understand your potential users more deeply.
Personas are essential to the strategic decisions you make since it provides an accurate representation of your ideal customers. We hope this simple guide can help you create the best personas for your website or app!