How To Create A Basic User Persona

You’ve probably heard the term ‘buyer persona’ before. The step one of almost any marketing strategy, new and existing businesses constantly define and redefine their buyer personas to ensure that their company remains customer-centric. In the past few years, personas are being widely used in the UX field by online marketing agencies for the purposes of designing specific, opposed to generic digital products.

A buyer persona is an abstract but realistic and reliable depiction of the ideal customer that is based on both qualitative and quantitative data from market research, web analytics, and existing customer profiles. The goal of generating a persona is to represent the needs of a large but specific group of users. This will help you snag the attention of high-value visitors, facilitate their conversion, and retain them. The two most common persona categories are demographics and behavior-based personas. While demographics-based personas are great for targeting customers on social media and widely used by social media marketing companies in Kuwait, behavior-based personas can offer a much deeper insight.

Creating buyer personas helps businesses understand their potential purchasing audience which in turn helps them make smarter marketing, sales, and product decisions and investments. Some key benefits of using personar are:

They create a sense of empathy with the end-users. By creating a realistic persona, designers are more likely to make decisions that involve the needs and expectations of consumers.
They shape product strategy and settle arguments based on design decisions since the kind of product desired by the user persona has already been defined.
They help ease communication. Since personas efficiently encapsulate the most critical user information, all team members will be able to understand and align with design decisions.
Since buyer persona’s are specific, they will improve customer segmentation and bring in leads that have a higher chance of conversion.
With a deeper understanding of potential customers, marketers can create a more personalized brand experience.
By identifying which social media channels/platforms the high-value leads frequent, distribution and reach through content production can be further streamlined.
Usability testing and feature prioritization becomes far more quick and efficient.

A well-defined buyer persona is beneficial for all members involved in the developing process; leaders evaluating new design features, UI guys developing wireframes and interface behaviors, designers crafting the look and feel of the website, developers taking user behavior information into account before deciding their approach, and content writers ensuring content is tailored to the specific audience.

There are a lot of ways in which digital marketing companies can create a persona, depending on the type of project, the type of data, and the budget. Here are the steps for creating a basic user persona:

1. Collect User Information

Like pretty much everything, understanding your audience starts with research. For research that concerns users, there are quite a few data sources that you can approach:

Conduct interviews: This is one of the best ways to gather information. By conducting actual field research on people that belong to your target audience, you can create a realistic persona. You may even interview former customers to get insight into why they withdrew from your product/service and what they’re using now. After interviewing a decent amount of people, you will start noticing trends, which will serve as your data.
If circumstances do not allow you to interview customers directly, and if you are a large organization, you can interview customer-facing people in your team like sales reps and customer support staff. They usually have a good idea about customer challenges and obstacles as well as their goals and values.
Use existing data: You may also have information about your users that you’re already certain about or that you’ve gathered from past research. If your product is already available on the market, you can also base your persona on web analytics. These personas are called provisional personas and are great temporary substitutes until you have fresh data. Remember though, that while web analytics offered by Kuwait digital marketing services can give great information about customer behavior, you will still need to interview them to get insight into their motivations.
Make assumptions: You may choose to make some well-founded assumptions about your customers especially if you’ve been working on your product for a while. However, you will need to later back up these assumptions with concrete research.
Market research: Finally, you can obtain audience insights from competitor websites that share the same customer profile as yours. You can use a number of online tools to get a list of the biggest market players in your location. You can not only get demographic information of these competitors’ audiences, but can also get deep insight into their interests.

2. Identify Behavioral Patterns

Once you’ve conducted the research, it’s time to analyze the findings. You can do this by looking for trends and patterns in the user data that can make it possible to create groups of similar users. These groups of trends will be the foundations of each persona.

3. Create Personas

A persona’s description should be based on its behavioral patterns. It’s best to avoid adding too many personal details, as it can reduce credibility. Multiple personas can be created for products/services that have multiple user segments, but it’s wiser to not exceed three or four. A general persona template:

Title - Giving your personas titles can make for easy references. You can choose to give human names too.
Image - Give your persona a face that more or less reflects their description. For instance, if it’s a designer, you may want to depict them in a studio and if it’s a student, their background would be a classroom.
Quotes - Using real quotes and comments obtained from customer interviews and surveys can help capture that persona’s attitude towards your product/service.
Demographics - Consumer demographics includes information like origin, age, marital status, level of income, location, level of education, etc. of users visiting and interacting with your business digitally and can be derived from Google Analytics or those offered by an internet marketing company. These will give you an idea of the viewers’ background, lifestyle, and behavioral practices.
Character (Archetypes & Tier) - Archetypes are widely understood identities that make up an individual’s character. E.g: Caregiver, explorer, creator, etc. You can add an additional layer of definition by labeling your persona’s based on the level of engagement they have with your product/service. E.g: first-time users, late adopters, professionals, etc.
Personality - Indicate your user’s key personality traits based on the major personality types. These can be sourced directly from interviews where you can ask consumers whether they’re more extroverted or introverted, more impulsive or cautious, etc.
The story - This includes:
- Traits that show how this persona’s personality is different from other users or potential customers.
- Your persona’s goals for using your product/service. An easy to use web page? Better security? Goals are made up of tasks that lead to the accomplishment of said goals, life goals if it's relevant to your specific business, and experience goals that include everything your persona wants to feel when using your product/service.
- Their concerns and frustrations that prevent them from achieving their goals and how you can change that by refining your product/service.
- A bio or a short paragraph that describes the user’s journey and history as well as aspects of their personal/professional life.
The connection - Put down your persona’s sources of motivation, their favorite and most used brands and websites (which may be your competitors), and their preferred channel for reaching them (traditional ads, social media, referral, etc.)
Purchasing process - This part will reveal the persona’s buying decisions, including their decision-making role in the purchase, how frequently they purchase the product/service, and obstacles that stop them from making the purchase.

4. Find Scenarios of Interaction

The purpose of a scenario here is to describe the persona’s behavior towards and interaction with the product/service in a specific situation. Design solutions can be created with a lot more ease when personas are paired with high-level scenarios written from the persona’s perspective.

5. Share Your Findings

Now that you have a clear buyer persona portrait, all you have to do is document your findings and share them with the rest of the team. It’s important for all company members to see the value in these personas and familiarize themselves with it.

Remember, you can always start with the simplest personas first. As you grow, you will naturally have more resources to conduct in-depth research. When you start using the personas that you create, you will become more user-focused, your product will improve, your marketing will be more relatable, and you’ll view your work as more valuable. At Design Master, one of the best digital marketing companies and social media marketing companies in Kuwait, we employ an experienced team to create user-centric marketing strategies. We strive to understand your ideal customer and aim to create business and marketing decisions that reflect this understanding.

Visit our website to learn more about us and contact us today to get started!