6 Ways to Bring User Personas to Life
User personas are the first step to creating any successful sales or marketing campaign.
Simple Tips to Help Personify your Target Users
User personas are the first step to creating any successful sales or marketing campaign. In short, if you want to run a successful strategy (sales, marketing or digital strategy), you have to look deeper than just target demographics and begin looking at individual user groups. In this blog post you will find user persona tips and questions to ask before undertaking any website design, rebrand, marketing, SEO or social media strategy. Asking the questions below will encourage you to begin approaching user persona generation from a human perspective. Doing this allows you to create tangible solutions to real problems for your user.
A common mistake amongst marketeers when developing a digital strategy is to ask “what would I do?” It takes time to get out of the mentality of assuming your users are the same as you and want the same things as you do. This is very rarely the case. You have to carefully assess who you users are, what they want and what their typical behaviour is. Understanding this will greatly help steer all marketing and sales efforts.
What Is Their Name?
A fast and easy way to make your persona come to life is to give them a name. A persona name will help to shape the character on which you build your personas. This will enable you to personify the traffic coming through your site and begin to tailor your character to the other questions listed below. A tip when naming your persona is to use alliteration to help you remember each type of user. E.g. Sporty Steve, Marketing Mary, Big Boss Barry.
What Sector Do They Work In?
If your company provides services to various types of customers it is important to identify what sector each persona works in. This will help ensure the terminology you use is relevant to them and the circles they operate in. It is also a key indicator as to where they spend their time online, allowing you target the users more effectively.
What Is Their Seniority?
The seniority of the user you are communicating with is an important factor to deciding the tone of voice to be used. The way you position your brand, products and services should relate directly to your user’s expectations.
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What terms do they use for search?
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What do they expect from the look, feel and user journey of your website?
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How busy are they?
With this information in hand you can tailor your content to speak to your user in their language.
What Do They Do Outside Of Work?
What does your user do in their free time? How do they relax? What are the hobbies and passions? Once this is nailed down it will allow you to assess where the best locations online are to position your brand and messages. If you can hit a chord with a relevant interest with your user it is a great way to build rapport and trust for your brand.
What Are Their Goals and Ambitions?
What are they trying to achieve? Why? If you can understand this then you can begin to understand how they think and what steps they are taking to reach their goals. This will help you when it comes to considering how they behave online. An example of this would be getting a clearer indication of which keywords and phrases to target when planning SEO / PPC campaign.
What Are Their Pain Points?
The most crucial element of the persona creation process. When you can understand a user’s pain point you can begin targeting everything towards helping them solve this. Remember this is specific to them. One of your users might have an issue with which is completely different to another one of your users. You must carefully pick and choose which paint points you are in a position to help with. If you can solve a user’s problem for them it places you in a brilliant position to promote your products and services.
“Look! It’s moving.... IT’S ALIVE!”
The more research and development your user personas get, the more detailed and effective your strategies will be. Look at your products and services and who you currently target with these. Who benefits from the products and services you are providing? This can be done by looking at your existing database of contacts and by speaking to your sales teams as they will be able to provide an invaluable insight into your customers buying behaviour.
Blue Baboon take user persona creation seriously. Very seriously....
User Personas are the starting spot from which we launch any design, development or marketing strategy. We make sure that users are the center point of anything we do, ensuring that all elements of a digital strategy pull towards making your customers happy.
However don’t say we haven’t warned you......you may have bought you user to life, but they may not always act and behave like you may expect them to....
Click Here For Your Free User Persona Template