Table of Contents
- User Persona: An Overview
- What is a User Persona?
- User Persona Trends
- What should a User Persona consist of?
- How can a user persona boost the revenue of your company?
- How to research User Persona?
- How to create a User Persona?
- Conclusion
User Persona: An Overview
Have you ever talked about stocks, shares, and investments to a person who is disinterested in the topic and doesn’t care about how stocks perform? In such a case, you must have noticed how they try to dodge or divert the conversation.
This is precisely what happens when you try to market your product or service without realizing whether or not your message is relevant to your customers.
The marketing effort, which needs to be backed by proper research, will likely be ignored and eventually become futile.
You can’t just suddenly tell people about your product or service.
You have to think from your potential customer’s perspectives and what might interest them so they are enticed enough to try out your product or service.
A user persona is just like the disinterested party who could be your potential customer. Researching these personas will help you to decide the right products or services to promote.
These personas can help you gain crucial insights into what might interest them so that you know how to approach them and convert them into customers.
This blog will give you a perspicuous idea about User persona and how you can leverage it in your product journey.
What is a User Persona?
Let’s get the basics first,
A user persona is the fictional representation of the customer you need to know to create content and marketing campaigns.
This information is used to guide your marketing and product development efforts.
This persona includes where they live, their age, gender, occupation, and family status – all the information that could be relevant when researching this persona.
User personas are detailed descriptions of your ideal target users. They help you understand your users’ needs, motivations, and goals.
A user persona is a research-based model of a specific group of users that represents their goals, experiences, and behaviors.
User persona represents your ideal customer or client.
Most effective marketers will always research their target clients better to understand their needs, behaviors, smart goal setting, and decision-making process.
Stating that user personas are a crucial part of the successful business today due to their ability to maximize ROI (Return on Investment).
Marketers use user personas to better understand and provide user experience (UX) based on their needs.
For example, when researching a potential target market, marketers generally focus on users’ demographic characteristics such as age, education, marital status, occupation, and income levels.
Marketers use this information better to understand their behavior, interests, and priorities. Knowing these details lets, marketers determine the most effective content for their campaigns.
The importance of User Persona has been reported time and again by big conglomerates. For example, according to Demand Gen Report.:
- Buyer personas outperformed campaign benchmarks by 75% in the case of Intel, and they were 48% more cost-efficient than the average campaign.
- In the case of Thomson Reuter, buyer personas resulted in a 175% increase in revenue attributed to marketing, a 10% increase in leads sent to sales, and a 72% reduction in lead conversion time.
Businesses also use personas when researching people already paying customers for a product or service.
When listening to customer feedback, businesses should look for commonalities in what customers can positively share about the product.
This standard information forms the basis of user personas that help businesses attract customers like these existing customers by researching their online behavior and preferences to determine which content they connect with.
User Persona Trends
Before diving deep, let’s look at the trends,
User persona trends are essential for understanding how your target audience is changing and evolving. By keeping up with user persona trends, you can make sure that your marketing, product development, and support strategies are aligned with the needs of your target market.
As technology evolves, so do user personas. A user persona is a model that represents a specific type of user, based on data and research. They help companies design products that meet the needs of their target audiences.
Over the years, we’ve seen user personas change and evolve as new technologies emerge.
Here are some of the latest trends we’re seeing in user personas:
- More specific personas: User personas are becoming more and more specific. Companies are using data to segment their audiences more finely and create more targeted personas.
Some companies that are using more specific user personas are Google, Facebook, and Harvard University.
While every company is different, some are particularly good at using specific user personas in order to better target their audience. L’Oreal, for example, uses user persona to target different segments of the beauty market. Another company that does this well is Nike, which targets athletes and fitness enthusiasts with its advertising.
These are just a few examples of companies that are using specific user personas to their advantage. If you want to learn more about this topic, there are plenty of resources available online and in libraries.
- More lifelike personas: User personas are also becoming more lifelike. They now include things like photos, names, and even quotes. This makes them more relatable and easier for companies to connect with.
Some companies that are using more lifelike user personas are Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.
- More customizability: Users are now able to customize their persona to better reflect their unique needs and preferences.
Different companies have different user personas that they target. For example, a company that sells winter clothes may target people who live in cold climates, while a company that sells beach gear may target people who live in warmer climates. Some companies may even target people of specific age groups, genders, or interests.
- More dynamic and fluid: User personas are now more dynamic and fluid, reflecting the ever-changing nature of our online lives.
- More inclusive: User personas are now being created with a more inclusive perspective, considering a wider range of demographics and user types.
Inclusive user personas take into account all users’ needs, regardless of their background or identity. This includes users with disabilities, users from different cultures and ethnicities, and even users with different genders and sexual orientations.
Some companies that are using more inclusive user personas include Google, Microsoft, and Apple. These companies have all committed to making their products and services more accessible to everyone, and they are constantly exploring new ways to do so. By using more inclusive user personas, these companies can design products and services that meet the needs of a wider range of users.
Each of these methods has its own advantages and disadvantages, but they can be useful for understanding user persona trends.
Once you have a good understanding of the trends, you can start to make changes to your strategies to make sure that you are staying ahead of the curve.
What should a User Persona consist of?
You have a succinct idea about user persona, So let’s elaborately understand what the User persona consists of.
Look at an example first:
User Persona: Phoebe, a UX Designer
- Name: Phoebe Miller
- Occupation: UX Designer
- Demographic: 42 years old, previously lived in Boston, Massachusetts, but moved to Chicago for a new job with a startup company. Has a high-income level. Married with three kids.
Phoebe’s story:
As UX Designer for a startup digital marketing company, Phoebe’s aim is to create the best possible interaction level between users and the company’s product through great marketing strategies. Since an experienced employee like Phoebe is very much needed within this new organization, her boss has high expectations of Phoebe and her capabilities. Phoebe is aware that conducting user research is a significant step that will enable her to fulfill her responsibilities, but she feels she isn’t given much choice in the matter.
Above is an example of a user persona
It’s necessary to address a few crucial questions beforehand,
Following are a few questions:
- What are the demographics of our user persona?
- Who are they exactly?
- What are the needs of your customers?
What are the demographics of our user persona?
Understand the age group, gender, and geographical location they belong to. Try and dig out as much information as you can about them.
A few examples: What are their interests? Who/What do they follow on social media? Where are they located geographically? How many hours a day are they on the internet?
Who are they exactly?
It is essential to understand what type of people your user persona is. What is their job, social background, educational background, and so on?
A few examples: Do they work full-time or part-time? Are they stay-at-home parents trying to make ends meet while looking after their children? Are they new mums on maternity leave and want to keep up with the latest news?
The data you find researching your user persona may be different from what you expected, so this is why researching user personas is essential.
You need to know precisely who/what you are targeting; otherwise, it will influence your content and how you deliver it. It is up to you which type of revenue you choose, but the most important thing to remember is that your goals must be clear and achievable.
What are the needs of your customers?
Understanding what your users want from the product or service you are researching. This information is necessary to create content that can meet their needs.
You need to consider all of the core features and how they benefit your customer, not just the ones you think are necessary or beneficial.
You should include your competitors in the research phase to understand their customers’ offerings. User persona plays an important role there.
An effective marketer will always invest more in knowing their customers and understanding their needs instead of convincing them ‘Why’ they need their product.
So,
When creating a persona, you should include information such as:
- Demographics: age, gender, location, education, etc.
- Psychographics: interests, lifestyle, values, etc.
- Goals: what does the persona want to achieve?
- Challenges: what challenges does the persona face?
- Behavior patterns: How does the user typically interact with your product or service?
- Motivations: What are the user’s needs and goals?
A persona necessarily should consist of the following:
- Name
- Description
- Photo or illustration
- Demographic information
- Goals
- Use cases
Creating a user persona can help you better understand your target market and make more informed decisions about your business.
Considering these factors, you can create a well-rounded persona that accurately represents your target user.
How can a user persona boost the revenue of your company?
What is the need for you to work arduously and create a user persona? Does it have any value?
Let us clear this qualm and discuss the benefits of user persona in detail in this section.
Keep really, and you will know the importance,
Researching User persona has numerous benefits, from bringing the right product into the market to saving unnecessary waste of time and hassle. From raising market standards to getting maximum traffic, the list goes on.
Let’s look at some statistics:
The following value was found by a MarketingSherpa case study when buyer personas were added:
- 900% increase in the length of visit.
- 171% increase in marketing-generated revenue.
- 111% increase in email open rate.
- 100% increase in the number of pages visited.
Creating a user persona for your business can help you boost your revenue in several ways.
Therefore, researching user persona is a must for every business owner. Follow this blog post to learn more about the benefits of studying user personas.
Here are our top ways researching user persona can prove one of your best investments in the company’s success.
- User Persona helps understand customer problems, needs, behaviors, and purchasing habits. (Psychological benefits )
The psychological benefits are rooted in identification with the personas
Every company’s success depends on the number of customers it caters to and how well it can serve them.
Researching user persona helps companies gain customer insights, which further helps in understanding why a product or service is successful and what the customer wants from them. You can use a questionnaire to collect the specific persona’s data and validate it from a product perceptive.
This helps in marketing products better and adapting products according to market trends.
- It helps in developing your product/service according to the customer’s needs
Personal research helps provide a clear picture of the customer and helps in knowing their target audience, thus helping create products/services that are precisely what your customers want.
Transformational benefits relate to challenging the established perceptions about the users within the organization
This increases the chances of your product or service becoming successful. Also, keeping an eye on competitors and researching their target audience will help you take steps to innovate and come up with better products/services.
To develop a product or service that meets your customers’ needs, you need to understand those needs. And the best way to do that is to talk to your customers directly.
Customer surveys and focus groups are two popular methods for collecting customer feedback. But there are several other ways you can gather customer insights, including interviews, observations, and user testing.
No matter your chosen method, the key is ensuring you’re listening to what your customers say. Only then can you develop a product or service that meets their needs.
Developing your product/service according to your customer’s needs is vital. By doing so, you will be able to meet their needs better and provide them with a product/service they are more likely to be satisfied with. It will also help you better understand your customers and their needs, which can benefit your business in several ways.
It has been observed that Apple has enormously used User Persona to develop their product and services.
- It aids in segmenting your marketing efforts
Researching one persona will help you learn about your target audience. This aids you in making targeted marketing efforts.
But every individual has problems, issues, and needs. So researching more personas will help you better understand the different types of customers.
This insight helps you segment your marketing efforts to various customer groups, thus creating a better customer experience.
For example, let’s say you have a product targeted toward small businesses. You can create a user persona for a small business owner that includes characteristics such as age, income, business size, etc.
Personas can help you create better marketing campaigns. By understanding your users’ needs, you can create targeted campaigns that are more likely to resonate with them. This can lead to increased brand awareness and more customers.
It is based on the idea that by understanding a specific customer’s needs and wants, you can create campaigns that are more likely to resonate with them.
While you can use user personas for any marketing campaign, it is handy for digital marketing campaigns. This is because digital marketing allows you to track the performance of your campaigns in real-time and make changes on the fly. This is essential for creating truly effective campaigns.
Keep a few things in mind if you’re considering using a user persona to create your next marketing campaign.
- First, you need to make sure you have a good understanding of your target audience.
- And then, you need to create an indeed targeted campaign to their needs.
It has been observed that Zipcar has enormously used User Persona in segmenting marketing efforts.
- It ensures all the teams work together in synergy to reach the targeted audience
While researching the user personas, you will come across new information which may fail your marketing strategies. However, studying user persona helps all the teams work together in synergy.
It ensures that team members can maintain quality to reach the targeted audience.
User personas help you design and define the type of content your audience requires to engage with your product/service. It enables you to configure appropriate and relevant content, drastically increasing conversion chances.
A well-configured and informative content leads to the creation of brand awareness and trust among the targeted audience.
User persona research helps all the teams within an organization work as a single unit to make the product succeed and gain popularity among its target audience.
This helps build the overall content strategy and identify, research, and craft user stories that target specific audiences.
- User Persona helps you create better products than your competitors.
Personas can help you create better products. By understanding your users’ needs, you can create products that meet those needs. This can lead to more customers and higher sales.
The Research part also includes digging into your competitor’s products and services. This will automatically prompt you to make superior-quality products.
It has been observed that Goodbye Crutches has enormously used User Persona in segmenting marketing efforts.
- User Persona helps you create better customer service.
As the market grows, customers are getting more aware and sensitive. Usually, the companies with better customer services triumph in the market.
Personas can help you improve your customer service. By understanding your users’ needs, you can create a customer service experience that meets those needs. This can lead to happier customers and increased customer loyalty.
A user persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and accurate data about your existing customers. When you create a user persona, you can better understand your customer’s needs, wants, and motivations. This understanding can then be used to improve your customer service.
- User Persona helps You to Pre-Qualify Leads.
User persona helps you to pre-qualify leads by giving you a clearer understanding of your target customer. By defining your ideal customer, you can more easily identify which leads are more likely to convert into paying customers. This provides you with a push in the competitive market.
With the information of Use-persona, you can then pre-qualify leads by identifying which ones match the user persona you have created.
If you need help figuring out where to start,
Keep reading,
The next section will help you understand how to research and create a User-person.
How to research User Persona?
Now that you have a fair idea about user persona, it’s time to get down to the brass tracks and understand a few things in detail.
According to Persona Studies 2018, vol. 4, if researched properly, following are the benefits reported in various industries that have created an in-depth User Persona.
| Category | Description |
| Communication | Personas help teams within an organization communicate with each other and with users. |
| Psychology | They create an environment that allows designers to think ‘for a person’ instead of dealing with complex and vague target groups. |
| Transformation | Personas also help to identify any existing assumptions about customers that may exist and guide decisions when trade-offs need to be made between conflicting customer needs. |
| Focus | Ultimately, personas help focus design decisions on user goals and needs rather than on system attributes and features. |
Creating a user persona can be a bit of work, but it’s worth it in the end. If you’re unsure where to start, a few resources can help you. Once you have your user persona, you’ll be on your way to creating a product that your target audience will love.
Creating a user persona is not tricky, but it does require some thought and research. You’ll need to consider your target market, your existing customer base, and your company’s goals. Once you have all this information, you can start creating a profile of your ideal customer.
Remember that your user persona is not meant to be a perfect representation of your customer base. It is intended to be a tool to help
you better understand your customers and create better customer service.
Two of the most prominent problems marketers face today are researching users and understanding their requirements while building user personas for product development.
From website analytics and social media monitoring tools to recent surveys, there are various ways in which you can find out what interests your user personas. However, researching your user personas can be a time-consuming process.
Each persona is elaborated in more detail. Experts suggest that a description of a persona should be captured in one to two pages consisting of goals, skills, attitudes, environment, and a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life. The number of personal details must be balanced. Too much “personality” is in the way.
Here are our top ways you can do that.
1) Gain insight into the demographics of the persona you wish to research.
2) Understand their interests and media habits.
3) Focus on researching online sources rather than Google – this gives you specific results tied to the user persona you wish to study.
4) Pay attention to what your competitors are researching and seeing. This will give you an insight into the direction of the industry.
5) Analyze where they engage online – understand which social media channels they like and explore forums, blogs, and communities that fit your persona best. Then join in on the discussions.
6) Use specific hashtags to target your research – and so on are broad hashtags that will not return targeted results for research users. Instead, use hashtags that are more specific to your user persona.
How to create a User Persona?
Once you have done the research, it’s time to create a user persona.
Traditional approaches and methodologies for User Persona creation.
| Approaches | Methodologies | Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Quantitative | • Factor analysis • Principal component analysis • Cluster analysis • Correspondence analysis • Association rule mining | • Grounded in data from a large user community • Easy to explain | • Lack of contextual richness |
| Qualitative | • Ethnography • Grounded theory • Affinity diagrams • Expert panels • Latent semantic analysis | • Rich contextual information | • Potential lack of credibility and rigor • Take very much time and many resources to develop • Quality is inconsistent across different persona designers |
| Current Mixed Quantitative and Qualitative | • Creating groups of users quantitatively and adding richness to those groups qualitatively | • Grounded in data from a large user community • Rich contextual information | • Groups are made based solely on quantitative data • Do not leverage the full potential of qualitative data |
According to Creating Rich and Representative Personas by Discovering Affordances, due to the determinants of using just one
method of research it is always advisable to follow a mixed approach of creating persons.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your user persona:
- Design should be Goal-directed
By creating different personas, You can cover the range of behaviors. Ideally, the behavior of the personas should not overlap in order to keep the number of personas to a minimum.
Make sure you understand who your target market is before you start creating your user persona. This means you should consider your target audience’s demographics, interests, and needs when making your persona.
- Behavioral pattern design
Changing behavioral analytics can also be assessed through persona. It provides a realistic and attainable goal.
Please make sure your user persona is perfect so that they’re attainable. Instead, focus on creating a persona that is realistic and achievable. This means you should avoid making generalizations or creating a persona that is too perfect.
- Focus should be on simplistic design
Try to include only a little information in your user persona. This means that you should have as many details as possible so that you can create a persona that is realistic and relatable.
When creating user personas, it is crucial to consider various factors such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. Considering these factors, you can create a well-rounded persona that accurately represents your target user.
Personas are used in user-centered design to ensure that the products and services we create are tailored to the needs and wants of our users.
Creating a user persona can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. By following a few simple steps, you can create a persona that will be a valuable tool in your design process.
Follow these steps to create a user persona for your business:
1. Define your target audience and segment your research accordingly.
2. Research & dig into multiple aspects of your target audience.
3. Identify the needs and wants of your target audience. Also, try to record the smallest of the details in your persona. Most companies only focus on general stuff; if you get a little pensive, it will automatically provide you an edge.
4. Create a profile for your persona. Gather all the details and make a comprehensive persona.
5. Give your persona a name and a face. Don’t just keep it random,
6. There are several online tools that you can use to create user personas. These tools usually ask you questions about your target users and then generate a persona based on your answers.
7. Interviews & Focus Groups are a great way to gather first-hand information about your target audience. You can use interviews to learn about your target audience’s goals, needs, and pain points.
Conclusion
In the tumultuous marketing world of today, if there is one thing that is well-established and uniform, it is that customer satisfaction plays a vital role in determining the organization’s overall success.
Creating a persona is a helpful exercise to ensure that you’re designing for your users rather than yourself. Understanding your users can create a better product that meets their needs. The data has shown time and again that user persona elevates product quality.
Companies focusing on adding maximum value to their customers take a significant lead in the market. That is why it boosts revenue and ensures the product’s overall success.
