What are Personas?
Personas are semi-fictional detailed representations of a segment of your ideal customers based on data and research.
Other names for Personas:
Personas are also often called:
- Customer Personas
- Buyer Personas
- Marketing Personas
- User Personas
- Audience Personas
- Customer Archetypes
- Buyer Profiles
- Customer Avatars
These different terms are sometimes used in specific contexts. But they basically mean the same thing.
What are Personas used for?
Personas help businesses understand and relate to their customers in a more effective way. They help to understand more exactly what your business needs to do to attract and satisfy your target market.
This can lead to more effective strategies: products that better meet customers' needs, and sales and marketing processes that are able to communicate this to customers more effectively.
Who should you develop personas for?
You can develop personas for everyone involved in the buying decision, buying process or consumption of the product.
For example:
- In a B2C environment for children's toys, you might consider the children who will play with the toys, the friends and family who buy the toys for them, and the parents who supervise their play.
- In a B2B environment for enterprise software, you might consider the people who evaluate and choose the software, the people who install and configure or integrate it, the people who will use it, and the people who sign off the budgets and payments.
- In a B2B2C environment, you might consider not only the customers but also the distributors who provide it to them.
What information do Personas include?
Customer of buyer personas typically include the following types of information
- Jobs-to-be-Done: Things your customer needs to achieve. See Jobs-to-be-Done
- Unmet Needs: Things your customer needs (to achieve their jobs to be done) which are not currently available.
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Demographic Information: This includes age, gender, income, education, and family status. For example, a persona might be a 30-year-old, university-educated female with a mid-range income.
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Behavioural Traits: This covers the customer's attitudes, motivations, goals, and pain points. For instance, the persona might prioritize eco-friendly products and have concerns about product sustainability.
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Professional Information: Relevant for B2B personas, this includes job role, industry, and company size. For example, a persona might be a marketing manager in a small tech startup.
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Psychographic Details: These are the psychological attributes like values, interests, lifestyle, and hobbies. A persona might value health and fitness and spend free time in outdoor activities.
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Media Consumption: This covers where the persona gets information, such as specific social media platforms, magazines, or blogs. For example, they might be active on LinkedIn and follow tech news sites.
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Purchasing Decision Process: Understanding how the persona makes buying decisions, what the role in the purchase process is, what factors are most influential, and the role of reviews or recommendations.
Some organisations give their personas fictitious names and photographs to make them seem more vivid.
Corporate profiles
In B2B and B2B2C environments, in addition to the personas, it can be useful to provide corporate profiles of the organisations they represent. Corporate profiles can include industry, size, target market and how they add value, etc. If your business sells to other businesses, you should develop personas for those businesses as well as for the people within those businesses that you will have to deal with.
Additional information
Additional information you might want to include is:
- Differences in personas at different stages of the buying process. For example:
- Awareness, Interest, Decision and Action (AIDA), or
- Prospects, existing customers, past customers, detractors, doubters, influencers, etc.
- Anti-personas. Anti-personas are descriptions of the type of people you don't want as customers.
Your persona descriptions should be as vivid as possible. This helps to bring the segment alive.
Where to find Personas in StratNavApp.com?
In StratNavApp.com you can capture persona descriptions in the Customer Segment descriptions. These can be found on the:
Sign up or log on to StratNavApp.com now to start adding your customer and buyer personas to improve your business strategy.