When it comes to building your brand effectively, it’s important that you and all those involved in your business have a clear understanding of who your target audience is.
Without this, your products, brand messages and more will lack focus and may fail to resonate with the right people - negatively impacting the long-term growth of your business.
This is why cultivating your very own brand user persona is essential - and we’re here to take you through a simple 4-step process for building a multidimensional persona based on your ideal customers.
The result will be a clearly defined user profile that allows you to tailor every element of your interaction with your users to meet their needs and eliminate lucky guesses around what your customers want and need.
What are user personas and why do they matter?
In a nutshell, a user persona defines your ideal customer’s needs, goals, behavioural patterns and pain points, formulating them into a structured user profile.
Each buyer persona is given a fictional name, but the rest of the persona is based on factual research data that’s used to create an accurate persona of your ideal consumer.
Whether you’re designing a new product, building a website or strategising a marketing campaign, having a user persona can play a vital role in your decision-making. Without one, you may struggle to identify and communicate with your target demographic effectively and ultimately fall short of solving their wants and needs.
But that’s not all. The persona building process also helps to humanise your consumers, allowing you to better empathise and relate to them and their needs.
From a practical point of view, the right buyer personas will help you make informed decisions on:
- Product development: personas can identify specific paint points or needs that can guide product development roadmapping
- Content creation: from content formats and placement to target keywords and calls-to-action, your persona can create targeted content users will love
- Lead nurturing: identifying potential customer pain points and challenges, you can better tailor sales pitches and lead nurturing to solve them
- Customer acquisition and retention: with buyer personas in place, you can work to provide better customer service and experience by knowing what users’ main issues are in advance
Defining a user persona
In the past, business plans and marketing strategies have often been built on assumptions about the end user and internal bias. However, in today’s data-driven world, it’s possible to build a persona that’s based on facts rather than fiction.
Building a user persona requires in-depth research to build an accurate picture of your audience. This doesn’t have to be limited to just one profile, though, as your research may highlight a number of different key demographics to target. If this is the case, be sure to create separate personas for each one rather than grouping them all in one.
The persona-building process involves 4 key stages which we’ve broken down into easy-to-digest steps below.
Step 1: Create your header
Your header acts as the core foundation of your customer persona - helping to provide a memorable snapshot of your user to keep strategies focused.
At this stage, the header should be short but structured, so you can further build on these elements later.
Your persona header should include:
- A fictional name that fits their persona
- A stock photo of how you think your user would look (optional)
- A quote that details how their needs tie in with your product
For example, if you’re promoting a shopping list app, your user persona could look something like this:
Name: Emma Jones
Summary quote: “I find shopping a chore and never have time to write a proper list, so I always forget things.”
By identifying the pain point in this topline summary, you then know this should be the resolution focus when tailoring services, content and customer service.
Step 2: Create your demographic profile
The next stage is to flesh out your persona with key demographic information that helps to give the persona more of a realistic personality.
Unlike the header, this information is formulated using real-life data gathered into four main subcategories:
- Personal background: this covers key details such as age, gender, ethnicity, relationship status, education and persona group (retired, stay-at-home mum)
- Professional background: includes their occupation, income level and work experience
- User environment: looks at technological, societal and physical aspects of their lifestyle, such as what technology they use, how social they are and where they spend most of their time
- Psychographics: focuses on behavioural traits such as attitudes, habits, interests, motivations and pain points
To gather this information, you can take several different approaches, leaning on different data sources to help you paint an accurate picture of your consumers. Some key resources include:
- Customer feedback: getting feedback and reviews directly from your customers will give you a first-hand account of consumer perspectives. This can be from existing reviews, or you can carry out a customer survey asking particular questions to help you really get to heart of their frustrations
- Sales team: if your business model uses sales representatives to generate leads, these frontline employees can provide a wealth of valuable information to help you formulate buyer personas
- Digital data: your website will be a treasure trove of data that can be harvested for valuable insights on new and existing customer behaviour. A must-have data analysis tool is Google Analytics, although you can harness data from other sources like social media and customer management systems to find insightful data on customer interests, influences and other behavioural traits
- Market research: casting a wider net (to include competitor research that explores user personas for brands offering similar products or services) will help you align your ideal customer with the market and help you win customers from competitors
Adding this key information can help you fine-tune your products or services to bring them in line with these key characteristics.
When it comes to organising and analysing your data, it can feel overwhelming, so it’s worth spending some time establishing the key attributes you want to focus on initially. From there, you can expand your data net further as you go.
If data analysis is a completely new concept to you and you’re not sure where to start, seeking some professional help will give you the direction you need.
Step 3: Create an end goal
The whole aim of having a user profile is to help you pinpoint users’ needs and understand how your products can solve customer problems.
To do this, your user persona needs to have an end goal - outlining exactly what users want to achieve from using your product.
In order to define your user persona’s end goals, ask yourself the following questions:
- What is your user's main goal?
- What’s stopping them from achieving it?
- How does your product help?
So, with the above example, Emma needs a shopping list app that she can continually add to throughout the week while she’s on-the-go. This will help her to keep track of all the items she needs when she thinks of them, making sure items aren’t missed.
Her main goal is to not to forget important items on her shopping list. The barrier is time to write a list and the fact that she finds the process a chore. The solution is a shopping list app she can quickly add to on-the-go to make sure she buys all her essentials.
With a continued focus on this, you can ensure all your efforts go towards helping users achieve the end goal.
Step 4: Create a lifestyle scenario
The final stage of creating your brand persona is to give them a ‘real life’ dimension.
To do this, add in a ‘day in the life of’ scenario to your user persona to contextualise their lifestyle along with how your product or service can benefit them. Giving your personas added depth and context makes it easier for you and your team to relate to the end user and tailor efforts to them.
These lifestyle scenarios are typically written from the fictional customer’s perspective. Detailing the what, where and hows of their daily life, this process helps strengthen the real-life persona - making it a more powerful tool for product development, marketing, sales and customer service.
If you’re striving to take a more strategic approach to your business growth, tapping into the numerous benefits of brand user personas could be the perfect place to start. From website design to social media marketing, with strong brand personas in place, you can make sure that every facet of your business is fine-tuned to hit the mark with your consumers.
However, this process can also be an effective way to help you identify real-life customers who fit the same profile, which can validate your findings and keep your business’s design and marketing strategies dynamic and on-point.
Following the above 4-step process, we hope you’ll be well on your way to building a multidimensional user persona. Of course, if you need a helping hand to guide you through the process, or simply make sense of reams of juicy data, our expert team is always ready for the challenge. Simply drop us an email with more details or run us through your needs by calling the Land Digital team on 0191 511 1014.