By Fred Ackourey
For me all marketing decisions stem from the customer, every product we sell, message we communicate, every channel we choose is for them. Knowing who your customers are at a deep level gives you your greatest chance of sales nirvana. Developing personas is part of that process. Personas help you understand your customers and build communications, media and offerings that will interest and engage them.
Personas help you:
- Create a compelling and engaging UX
- Tailor your brand voice and imagery for your specific customers
- Share and communicate emotional, situation and lifestyle information about customers to focus stakeholders and keep them on the same page.
- Help develop “stories” that customers will related to be interested in
- Hone your marketing segments and optimize marketing channels
Many marketers assume their customers are just like them, creating a business that they buy into. Sometimes they get away with it because they are selling to similar people, however, as they attempt to expand their business they find it stalls as their offering and communications fall on the deaf ears of a more diverse customer pool. For instance selling a smart phone to a 25-34 year old techno-geek male is much different than selling it to a 45-54 year old active mom. Having the knowledge personas give you helps you to tailor your marketing for the multiple personalities that exist in the real world and especially your markets.
Once your personas are created a tailored UX can be developed and your branding architecture can begin. By no means are personas the only tool we use, however, they are one of the most important. For instance web designers creating a responsive mobile site might use the fact the young female persona they are developing for has smaller fingers and thus links and buttons can be made smaller. Similarly, knowing your female customer is passionate about vintage styles helps brand imagery to be shaped accordingly. An art deco motif might be use and an active sports style would be muted or avoided altogether.
As often is the case marketing and media departments are spread out around the world. Having an informational center piece is critical in keeping everyone focused on the main elements of the project. Personas allow us to communicate intricacies about the customers that can be shared in a way empirical or analytical data cannot. The persona allows you to give a “sense” or “essence” about the subject. Personas fill in the color about the customer, where analytic reports give you the black and white outline.
With the color filled in marketers can develop stories for their personas. Brand or product stories are more engaging and compelling than simply features and benefits about a product. Stories can create interest, make the customers ask the questions about the brand you want them to and keep them wanting more. I like to build my marketing around stories that our customers can relate to and find useful, if not entertaining. Personas help me architect and create content that interests our customers.
Finally, knowing various attributions about your customers like when they are likely buying online or simply browsing helps us to place the right message in the right channel. If we know they like to do their buying Monday through Thursday evening between the hours of 6 and 11 pm, our messages can be more direct sales oriented and placed in search and email channels. On the other hand, if we know our customer is browsing during lunch on her cell phone in social media or video we can place brand building display or video messages in those channels to help us construct the sales during the buying hours.
Creating Personas
Here is an example of a persona we used in our digital marketing:
Victoria McGill
Victoria is a 24 year old caucasian female who lives with her 25 year old friend Julie in North Hollywood, California. Victoria attended and graduated from Cal State Northridge with a degree in kinesiology. Victoria aspires to be a physical therapist but is waiting to get into a program, which is crowded and difficult to get into. Currently, Victoria is working as a certified physical trainer and building clientele. She also has a freelance writing job for a fitness website, but the work is not steady. Victoria’s parents supplement her income by continuing to pay for her auto and health insurance as well as her cell phone. Victoria drives a Volkswagen Beetle which she had before college. As soon as she is making more money she will take over the payments her parents currently cover. For now the extra money is a help and gives her some discretionary income. Victoria’s expenses include rent, gas and food; other than that see is debt free as she is very careful not to drive up the balance of her only credit card. Victoria is passionate about fitness and spends some of her free time doing fitness activities like playing tennis, doing yoga and running. Her and her roommate are also best friends and spend a lot of time together. They like to watch TV together some evenings and have an obsession for crime TV watching A&E and Investigation Discovery. Sure they are into social media, but as a communication tool rather than a way to spend free time browsing others lives. Victoria spends about 10 hours a week online browsing from the desktop in her room and another 30 hours a week searching and browsing from her cell phone whether at home or at work. Victoria likes to visit a wide range of sites online including kinesiology, dating, cooking, home & style, fashion & shopping, news and events, social and art (list specific sites here). Victoria uses apps for all sorts of things including communicating, music, casual games (like solitaire & frogger) and fitness; she also has some shopping apps from Gilt & Victoria Secret. Victoria also loves movies and gets to the theater about once a month. Her and her roommate share a Netflix online account and catch a lot of interesting shows and movies their rather than on cable. Victoria brings home about $1800 a month which pays for $750 rent which includes utilities, $500 in groceries and $250 on gas, subscriptions and misc., leaving her about $300 to spend and save. Victoria tries to save about $100 a month but ends up holding onto about $50. She goes out to clubs occasionally and eats out with friends. Victoria does not have a singular boyfriend but hangs out with a few of the guys she knows from school and the apartments where she lives. Sometimes her friends buy her drinks at the clubs helping to cut her entertainment costs. Victoria wants to be married and have children someday, but until she meets the right person she will stay focused on her career.
Where to Start
Post Assumption – Before you decide to enter any business its important to know if a viable market exists for your proposed product or service. Even then you have to be able to create an experience with your product or service that adds value for the customer beyond the competition. For the purpose of this post we will assume you have an ongoing viable business.
Here are the steps to creating a persona:
- Observe and collect data
- Analyse and strategize
- Construct the Persona
- Enhance and continually improve
Observe and Collect Data
Observing your existing customers is the place to start. We use surveys to gain insight into the nature of our customers. We have created games, apps or contests for our sites that require customers to answer several quick survey questions before they can access the candy; this technique works very well especially if you can link it to rewards that get them to buy. You can also use canned survey apps and get great results, but my experience is that they tend to take more traffic to gain a statistically significant sample. Also, as a side note surveys can provide other more real time opportunities but that is for a different post. The results of the surveys are collected and will provide answers to questions you had about how customers behave and their preferences.
Most companies have customer service departments where reps can provide information about the customers they talk to. Formal data collection is great, but customer service reps can casually ask survey questions during conversations with clients and record the answers in simple data collection apps you create. But impromptu and common sense discussions with reps about customers can provide some interesting new insights. Interviewing the reps can help you find situations or instances that tend to repeat from caller to caller. This information can be compiled and used in creating your personas.
Social media and its social graph are perhaps the best way to gain insights into your stereotypical customers. If you find that 99% of your likes come from Women, you either cease selling to men or figure out why men don’t engage your products. Creating apps that give you access to social graph APIs can be very helpful in querying insights. Knowing how your customers spend their time, what their interests are and their basic demographic (age, sex, geo, etc.) information are key. But finding attributions about when and where they are online, their relationship status, education or interests can be pulled from your applications social graph or by doing some manual browsing work through your community. Placing the collected data in a database and analysing the reports is most insightful, however, browsing the data with the naked eye can help glean insights that the data might miss; I suggest you do both.
Site analytics from Google Analytics also provide valuable information about your customers. Traffic flows, time on site and which pages are most viewed at what times are some of the factors you can use in creating personas. Also, information from Compete or Hitwise can provide valuable traffic flow data about what is happening outside your site. Compiling this information and applying it to your persona creating is a key element in helping you not only understand UX and advertising factors, but how well your designs are doing. At the end of the day it will be these site analytics that will monitor and measure the results of your efforts and ultimately shape the continual improvement of customer communications.
Analyse and Strategize
Once all your data is collected and organized it can be analysed and used to help create your personas. Data needs to be taken into context. As I mentioned before social media data collected from mainstream networks and forums works great for creating personas. Since personas are not created from purely empirical data, images and posts can help you color in details about your persona. However, facts from surveys, analytics and customer order data will lay the foundation for the persona.
I usually like to use the empirical data to create the structure of the persona. Factors like age, sex, browsing and buying patterns, geography and income let me draw the personas picture. Ideas about the persona’s lifestyle based on age, friends, school, how they dress, their lexicon and what their living environment might be like come from social media and customer rep interviews. Combining the facts and ideals allows us to formulate the complete picture.
The purpose for creating the persona must be made clear. If your site sells apparel then the persona might be drafted with those facets pertaining to style and fashion, whereas if you have an education site the components most relevant to a student will be focused on. Thus, when creating your strategy you need to start with a clear purpose or stated goal. From there you can create a person that meets your goals.
Constructing a Persona
Remember your persona is a stereotypical representation of just one customer segment. Beginning with your strategy and goals you organize your data around the objectives. As I mentioned I use the facts to first anchor or outline the persona. Next I color in facts with the ideals and insights we have come to know through the process. Some marketers really hang on to the empirical data and provide very little color. The results are usually black and white personas that lack character and inspire few; this is why its important to provide insights and some intuition (based on your research).
For instance, in the example above we mention Victoria’s age as 24. This age was chosen because this website has a large number of female customers who index very high in the 18-24 and 25-34 year old category. The catch here is that the 25-34 year old category makes 60% more purchase than the younger group. Also, of the 25-34 year olds the 25-29 year olds spend more than their 30-34 counterparts. Knowing this we wanted to aim our marketing for this segment a little younger to get the 18-24 year olds on board and at the same time grow business in the high spending 25-29 year old group. This logic weighed heavy in make Victoria a 24 year old; and was mostly derived from factual data collected from customer records, surveys and analytics. On the other hand we mention that Victoria was athletic, playing tennis, doing yoga and running. This data was pulled in from social graphs from social media. Interests in running, yoga and tennis were a running theme when polling the data from this group. It was supported by Likes, books, discussions, posts, photos and more. We use this data most to help us build voice and imagery for all sorts of communications. It really works and helps us to differentiate our clients from the rest of the pack. Once the persona is constructed and approved it is posted in our plans and distributed to all stakeholders creative or otherwise. Since life is not static, personas do change. In the next section I will discuss adapting and updating your personas.
Adapting Your Personas for Change
Nothing in marketing is static, especially online. One of the risks you run is becoming irrelevant to your customer base. I have seen companies become paralyzed trying to decide which data to use or direction to take. Obviously this is more of a management issue than marketing, but I felt it had to be addressed here. The winner always is the one who gets there firstest with the mostest – perfect or lowest risk never wins.
Keep your content new, interesting and relevant to your customer base and your sales chakra will open and glow. This is why its important to keep your personas up to date. I am not saying this is a daily chore, rather someone within the organization needs to be responsible for monitoring and updating them. In reality, I find that once the persona is created the organization first gets an idea of who they think their customer is. After this awareness organizations seem to automatically adjust the persona in the short term as the new data arrives, adjusting campaigns and modifying content. Then there is a period of familiarity with the customer and you begin ending their sentences. Over time this familiarity stays with the stakeholder even though the customers change. The reason for this is that they are informally updating the persona on their own and in their work. Unless there is a data hoarder or information natzi running a muck marketing stakeholders tend to get the customer after a full persona creation cycle. BUT, the persona must be updated periodically to insure that changing information about the customer is incorporated and new stakeholders are given the right information to use in their efforts. I recommend assigning the personas to one person in the organization who will, once every month or two, poll the rest of the crew and update the persona information. This way up to date information is passed on to the rest of the organization and sales will have at least a fighting chance of flourishing.
Using Personas
Saying that there are best practices for using a persona is ridiculous in my opinion. Its like taking an art class where every draws the exact picture of the model in the room. It just doesn’t happen. I can’t believe how many marketers copy our stuff and think they are will be successful; simply differentiate or die, I will leave it at that.
I consider and use the persona for most every creative marketing decision. As is the case with Victoria I would look for models of her age and appearance when creating campaigns. I will choose fonts that would appeal to her vintage size when selling her apparel and perhaps pull something from pop-culture when developing brand advertising for her. I will appropriately place ads and media in the places she visits. I will incorporate story that appeals to her place in life and even use the characters that surround her. As results come in from sales and analytics I will shift the story and messaging to optimize the campaigns; and update the persona. I channel the persona putting myself in their shoes, talking to the people they might have in their lives, going to the place they go to, and if possible do the things they do to get a sense of their reality. I then use all the internalized data that I have experienced to create as compelling campaigns as I can. So far, this has not let me down, so far each experience has been a stepping stone on the path to sales nirvana.
If you have any questions about personas or have an experience with using them please let us know about them in the comments below. Your input, no matter what it is will be valuable. Even if it a bunch of links to Chinese sneaker sales sites or how to find a Russian Bride, which seem to be my biggest fans.
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