How to create user personas...

User personas

read on rasmus.beehiiv.com

What's up, companions and aliens?

Proved you wrong, eh? I'm back with another one. 🕺

Today at a glance:

• Step-by-step overview of user personas

• free 🎁 at the end

Creating a user persona for marketing

So I've been pondering on how to create actually useful user personas for more effective positioning and targeted content creation... But first of all, what is it?

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on your current (or ideal) customer. Personas can be created by talking to users and segmenting by various demographic and psychographic data to improve your product marketing. (“What Are User Personas? | Hotjar Blog”)

But do they actually work? What are their benefits? Are they commonly used in the marketing mix? Let's find out.

1. What are the benefits of user personas?

They're usually created to help marketers, developers, and designers understand their target audience's needs, behaviors, and goals. By creating detailed user personas, marketers can tailor their messaging and campaigns to specific segments of their target audience. Product development teams can benefit from user personas to better understand their target audience, and thus, build products and features adapted specifically to them.

2. So, do they actually work?

Personas are a representation of your target audience, not a replacement for real customer data and insights. That's why user personas have to be, which are merely brainstormed in a workshop session, taken with a grain of salt. But if existing data is used and further surveys are done, they can bring a lot of clarity to crafting products, features, or content to better serve your target audience.

Create user personas to capture the right kind of audience and users.

3. Collecting data for user personas

There are two types of data that can be used to create user personas:

1. Quantitative data make user personas more understandable;

Gather as much data as possible about your user base like demographic and geographic data. This type of information can be gathered through surveys, CRM data, traffic data ( like Google Analytics/Mixpanel), metadata, etc.

If you're looking to run anonymous surveys, I recommend trying out Blocksurvey - they're end-to-end encrypted and utilize blockchain technology to keep user data safe. I'm using that platform for anonymous surveys (end-to-end encrypted) with existing clientele, gathering demographic and industry-specific data to make better personas and just get a better understanding of our audience.

2. Qualitative data make user personas more believable and identifiable on a personal level. Gather qualitative data by conducting 1-1 interviews with your customers, through direct observation, asking open-ended questions from your target audience, or stepping in their shoes and going through user flows/use products familiar to them yourself.

Then take all of this data and analyze them to create your user personas that benefit from both types of data collection methods.

3. Segmenting the data

Data-driven segmentation makes creating user personas easier and more effective because it removes a lot of guesswork in figuring out your user segments.

I found a neat algorithm used in data science to take existing data and help segment customers/users, K-Means Clustering. Clustering is a process of dividing existing data into groups based on the patterns in the data. K-Means Clustering is apparently an excellent method to use for more accurate segmenting. It has its limitations since you must already have gathered customer data and information about the users already using your product. And it takes extra effort and time. But that should be ABC and every successful business collects all kinds of data to make better data-driven decisions.

I decided to share this clustering method here although there may not be a need to even use it (tools like SparkToro, survey firms or in-house data scientists can do the data work for you). I found it unusually interesting during reading about user personas and left it in. 😅

4. Creating the user persona

Now it's time to take all of the gathered information and arrange it in an easily digestible format.

Ignore the fluff that a lot of user persona templates out there have and focus on adding only:

• information that actually benefits your team in their work;

• information taken from your previously talked about data and research;

• multiple/segmented user personas only when you're actually going to market to all of these audiences;

• add references (to the data you used) that prove your assumptions about the persona.

Ignore:

• going too specific with your ideal customer which makes you ignore and leave out a big chunk of your audience who is ready to buy your product;

• data that is just guesstimated or based on random assumptions.

You can use the step-by-step builder by HubSpot for making the final user persona:

During the process of putting it together, be mindful of who you are creating it for - what details are needed that benefit the person/team the persona is created for.

If you'd like to go more in-depth with user personas, here is a list of tutorials/walkthroughs that I've used for writing this post or that have helped me in the past: Guide to Creating User Personas - UXPlanetMarketing Personas are almost always a boondoggle, but they don't have to be - SparkToroCreating User Personas for a Cryptocurrency ExchangeUser Personas - HotJarPersona Types - nngroup

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What's my jam?

Just finished Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" which I think I'll keep as a book to skim through every now and then for a reminder - it packs a lot of communication tips that I repeatedly forget to put into practice.

I picked up "Traction: How any startup can achieve explosive customer growth" by Gabriel Weinberg a while ago. Never finished it. Going to fix that. The book promises to familiarize the nineteen channels one can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for a business. I'll share my key takeaways about it in the next edition.

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