In a saturated, competitive online market like today’s, businesses must continuously have their fingers on the pulse. They must prioritise finding new ways to promote their products, services and brand in order to stay relevant and trusted. User personas offer the opportunity to help website designers and marketing personnel to build strong brands and create winning products. But, what is a persona? In this article we’ll define what a user persona is, unveil some user persona examples, and provide you with a user persona template.
Getting to grips with user personas can help you better market your business. In turn, this will help you get a better return on your marketing investments, be able to improve your website’s key messaging, UX (user experience) and user journeys, and bolster your wider marketing efforts.
In website design and user experience, the user persona definition is specific. Your user persona is a semi-fictional person who is most likely to use your product or service. You develop the user persona by utilising data collected from both market and user research. It’s an empathetically creative process where your marketing team and/or UX designers put themselves in the user’s shoes. The answers to the user persona template questions create general characteristics you can apply to a larger target audience. The questions asked obtain answers regarding your user’s behaviour, their goals, attitudes and skills, and ultimately their pain points (the problems they need solving).
User personas are not buyer/customer personas. These personas are created from those users who actually buy the product or service. This is different from the potential group of people who may actually use the product or service. Whilst they can be the same semi-fictional person, they aren’t always interchangeable. So, being aware of the differences is another facet to prioritise and consider.
Now you know the user persona definition, why should you prioritise developing yours? A user persona will help you:
KIJO Pro Tip: It’s likely you’ll need to create multiple user personas for your product or service depending on the scope of your business offerings. However, be mindful, as too many user personas will dilute their effectiveness. Stay specific for strong, useful user personas.
Your user persona template should consist of at least three questions:
Through utilising direct feedback forms and other forms of research like customer surveys, you can answer these questions with precision. Remember, guess work has no place in the user persona development process; it’s semi-fictional, not made up. All of the answers to these questions should be specific. Anything too general won’t be useful to your UX designers or marketers.
The questions you ask of your potential user can be close to this too; we don’t have to hide our intent too much from our user. These questions might look like:
Thanks for checking out our product/service! We’d love to learn more about you and your interest in us/brand name/service/product.
By gathering data like this, you can then analyse it, and create your user personas.
We recently started working with a UK business that hires out classic cars to the public and film studios. We identified, via extensive competitor research and establishing their own understanding of their client base, that they have two key user personas. These were:
Here are the user persona examples that we generated for them:
Notice how we’ve captured their anticipated age range and the circumstances they find themselves in. We’ve also generated a potential image, quote and named the user which all adds to humanising them and, importantly, getting specific about who these users are.
Then, we’ve broken down their persona further. We’ve established their goals and needs throughout the entire customer journey. We’ve done the same with their potential challenges and pain points. These all help identify things we need to communicate, explain or pull out for the client on the website to help resolve any anxiety. Then, as this is part of the website design service we’re providing for our client, we’ve gone on to identify the opportunities and features we could implement into these designs to satisfy these typical, anticipated user personas.
As established earlier, it’s the specificity in these user persona examples that are what’s key here.
As the world changes and your business grows, your user personas will also develop and alter. Be prepared to add new customer personas and update your older ones; this will help you stay on track with your marketing and conversion goals. Any changes in consumer behaviour or to your company’s size or product/service offerings will most likely impact your user persona profiles.
If you’re looking for insights like user personas and help with reaching your target users, you may want to check out our service offering KIJO Optimise. Looking at 113 data points, our expert team will pinpoint exactly how to make your site rank higher on Google, boost traffic, and increase conversion volume and ratio. This service can include user personas! Get in touch with our expert team today.
