The concept of user persona is of vital importance when designing a good strategy for the development and sale of a product or service. In this sense, the better we know our customers, the more possibilities we will have to offer them the product they are really looking for.
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a fictitious representation of your ideal customer. In other words, it is about defining a fictitious user or client that represents, with the greatest degree of detail possible, one of the types of clients you are targeting.
In this way, it is about preparing a file in which you reflect the demographic profile of your ideal client, their needs and preferences, their behavior, the objectives they intend to achieve through your product, etc.
Ultimately, your goal should be to have in mind the potential user of the product at all times. Therefore, the usefulness of the definition of user personas is not limited to the product or service development process, but also to its sale and marketing.
Main advantages of using user personas
The creation of one or more user persona profiles has a number of important benefits for any business:
- Facilitates the implementation of a user-centered design. Adopting a customer centric strategy implies having your users present from the moment you are designing the product or service. Any later stage in the life of your product will be conditioned by this initial phase.
- It allows you to individualize your target audience. The creation of user personas makes it possible for you to specify a series of abstract or statistical data, translating them into the profile of one or more ideal clients. In this way, it will allow you to better understand the needs, interests, environment and behavior of the client.
- Contributes to the design of an effective marketing strategy. Without a doubt, it is much more operative in practice to visualize a person with a first and last name when designing a marketing strategy. In this sense, handling statistical data can be uninspiring when it comes to defining the actions to be taken to attract those ideal clients.
- Allow greater consistency in your communication strategy. The creation of user personas helps to unify any marketing action and facilitates greater consistency in all phases of the customer journey.
How to define a user persona?
When creating the profiles of your user personas, you should start by conducting a preliminary investigation where you carefully analyze what your current and potential customers are like. It is about finding those profiles that best fit your objectives and that also have a greater business potential.
In this sense, any customer centric strategy is based on the premise that not all customers are the same and not all have the same value for the company.
If you have already implemented a voice of customer program, you will start from a very advantageous position to define your user personas.
Main elements for the design of the user persona
A user persona file should contain at least the following elements:
- Header. This section will be the one that facilitates the visualization of the fictitious client to a greater extent and, therefore, helps to have their image more present throughout the entire process. In this sense, the heading must include the fictitious name of the user person, a representative photo and, optionally, a short quote or slogan that, in some way, identifies the client.
- Demographic profile. This point is to reflect the result of the data investigation carried out in the initial phase. Therefore, you must state those demographic characteristics that identify the type of client that the statistical data shows you. In this way, information regarding age, gender, education, personal and professional situation, interests, motivations, etc. will be collected here.
- Goals and objectives, that is, what is it that the client wants to achieve through your product or service. This element is usually one of the main factors in the purchase motivation.
- Context or setting. We refer here to the description of the specific context in which the user will use the product. We will also try to determine how this scenario influences the achievement of your objectives, what options are available to you, etc.
- Behaviour. It is about defining the most probable actions that the user would carry out within the framework of the scenario that you identified in the previous point.
User persona and the need of segmentation
As we said, it is most likely that in your business you address different types of customers. It is very difficult for your users to make up a 100% homogeneous demographic.
Consequently, to maximize the effectiveness of any strategy, it is necessary to segment the potential user base of the product or service. To do this, you will have to define different user persona profiles based on the most valuable user groups that you have identified in the research phase.
Otherwise, you would either be ignoring certain groups of potential customers, or you would be making an excessive generalization by including all your users within the same profile.
Conclusion
In short, as we have seen, the creation of one or more user persona profiles is a very valuable tool when it comes to dealing with a user-centered design. In the same way, commercialization and marketing actions multiply their effectiveness when you have well-segmented and perfectly defined user profiles.
Therefore, if your company wants to follow a customer centric philosophy, it should dedicate time and resources to a good design of user person profiles. Only then will you be able to maximize the efforts made in the design and marketing of the product. Once the users have been profiled, you will be able to focus conversations and communications with them in a more efficient and clear way, always relying on software that helps you correctly manage all the channels with which you communicate with users.
