Personas are fictional characters created upon data-driven researches in order to represent different users’ profiles. They are developed according to their demographics, psychographics, behavior, priorities and goals to help companies understand their target audience, having a reliable and realistic personification of them.
With personas defined, you will be able to identify different needs and expectations from your key audience aiming to develop personalized marketing actions and effective recommendations to them.
Companies usually have more than one persona to represent different segments of customers, however it´s not recommended to have a big number of them. The suggestion is to establish between 2 and 5, maximum, but it will depend of the type of the business and the product or service that will be developed.
For any successful project, it is very important to have personas defined on the initial phase and to keep them as a reference throughout the whole lifecycle of it. It’s also recommended to update your personas from time to time in order to track your customers behavior, preferences and choices. Changes always happen and we need to keep the eyes on what our target users are demonstrating, so we can ensure that our efforts are being effective.
Development and decision making are much easier when you know your customers and what they need.
4 Easy steps to define personas:
1 – Utilize your real data. If you don’t have anything to start, make researches about your market audience such as users’ interview. Select the questions that you will utilize to collect the data.
2 – Analyze the data that you gathered and identify patterns.
3 – Create your personas including:
Photo – Choose a photo that better describes the profile of your persona.
Name – Give your fictional character a name.
Description – Include characteristics of the character as the background, education, lifestyle, goals, desires, motivations, expectations.
Problems – Describe here the types of problems that this persona has. Put him/her in some situations or scenarios which he/she would probably use your product or service. Think about what need to be solved to offer him/she a better life.
4 – Share your personas to your workmates. It is important to let everyone knows who your target audience is. Having this knowledge, they can have better relationship with your clients!