User Persona Creation Best Practices for 2020 (Get to Know Your Customers Day Special)

Creating a user persona begins with understanding and reaching out to your customers and end-users. Here are some best practices for user persona creation that you could put to use this Get to Know Your Customers Day.

At the start of every quarter, the third Thursday is Get to Know Your Customers Day. This quarter it is celebrated on 16 January 2020. Get to Know Your Customers Day reminds businesses to understand their customers better. This includes asking questions, following up with them after purchase, being proactive in learning what pleases or irks them, and understanding their shopping habits, preferences, and challenges.

Overall, this day offers a vast opportunity for businesses to create and update their ideal user persona. So let’s get started with some best practices for user persona research and development.

Learn More: Persona Driven Marketing – Why (and How) You Should Create Buyer PersonasOpens a new window

What Is User Persona and Why Is It Important?

User personas, buyer personas, or customer personas are the data-driven, ideal customer persona models that a business creates to support marketing decisions. They are a semi-fictional representation of your target end-users (customers) based on existing customer profiles. This includes basic demographic information as well as in-depth information like shopping history, online search behavior, spending pattern, mindset, and even their hesitations and limitations.

Needless to stay, user persona creation becomes extremely important to understand your customers’ needs and expectations and to deliver a precise and relevant marketing message. A user persona is not a stereotype but a real profile – a model customer based on insights derived from your real customers’ data. Let’s find out, what the best practices for an ideal user persona development are.

User Persona Development – Best Practices for 2020

Defining a user persona begins with thorough research, insights, data, and accepting that you do not ‘completely’ understand your customer. Here are some of the best practices for your user persona development.

1. User Persona Research
 

Research is one of the most critical elements of user persona development. This includes identifying who your target customers are, your existing customers, lost prospects, customers who may have left you, and even your competitors’ customers. Gather necessary background information and demographics to learn more about them.

A common pitfall is to build your customer persona around purely demographic information. Do some digging to explore what lies beyond the ‘ideal’ customer and understand the characteristics and traits, habits and routines, likes and dislikes of the ‘real people’ this persona represents.

One of the primary reasons to research and build user persona is “that it encourages teams or organizations to think about communicating the benefits of their product or service in terms of the actual people who will use it. It forces you to think of them as people, not just users or customers or some abstract concept. This also helps you think about how to provide real value to your customers, which is ultimately what they care about,” as Tabitha Naylor, at Business.comOpens a new window puts it.

2. User Interviews and Feedback
 

You cannot know your customers until you interact with them. Segment your customer base (prospects and those who have left) based on their common characteristics. Prepare a unique set of questions for each segment and schedule interviews with them to understand them better and gather their feedback.

Here are some pointers for questions to ask in your customer interviews:

• Demographics: Gender, age, location, profiling based on the type of accommodation, geography, neighborhoods, etc., profession, income, education
• Their interests, likes, what they like to do over the weekends, their favorite genre of music or books, their diet preferences, whether they like to cook, etc.
• Information about their social life, how they spend time with their peers, when they meet with family, family origins, etc.
• Financial information like where they like to spend money, do they like to save or splurge, are they impulsive buyers or do they focus on experiences
• What influences their decision-making process – what kind of research they do before forming an opinion, would they trust a stranger for a recommendation, or would they try things for themselves, etc.
• Browsing habits and content consumption – their favorite social media platforms, the time of the day they prefer to network, do they use social media for networking or sharing images or viewing (or creating) content, the type of content they prefer – videos, blog posts, memes, etc.
• What makes them buy or continue to use a product? What matters to them more product price, service, or experiences? What would cause them to write negative feedback or discontinue using a product?
• Learn about their responsibilities and daily activities. What is a typical workday, what do they do while commuting, how do they manage their daily chores, what motivates them, etc.
• Their challenges and pain points in their day to day life to fully understand their frustrations, and how they expect their problems to be simplified
   

Such interviews and feedback can give you in-depth information about your customers, their preferences, and the kind of marketing message that will appeal to them.

Learn More: Get to Know Your Customers Day: How Sentiment Analysis and NLP Can HelpOpens a new window

3. User Persona Templates
 

Armed with the interview data you can create user persona templates that are an approximation of your ideal customer. The Alexa BlogOpens a new window mentions how Munro AmericanOpens a new window (a shoe brand) creates their user persona

Image Source: Alexa Blog User Persona TemplateOpens a new window

“To help create their buyer persona, the company interviewed customers and prospects. Then, they included actual quotes to add a bit of reality to the world of their fictional character. As you put together your buyer persona, you may want to add details from your research to give factual credibility to your descriptions. Another way to use first-person statements to craft a buyer persona…Instead of sticking to bullet points, you can add a first-person story to your persona to bring your character to life.”

EconsultancyOpens a new window suggests building a negative persona too:

“This means identifying the kind of person that brands don’t want as a customer. Not to be all ‘Mean Girls’ about it, that is, but by identifying who is not a good fit – companies can avoid wasted resources and misspent budget. Characteristics of a negative persona could involve someone who is overly negative or unrealistic in their expectations, someone who typically abandons purchases, or who has a high acquisition cost. Recognizing these types of customers early on can allow marketers to hone their communication and marketing messages accordingly, and instead target the most worthwhile.”

Pro Tip: Create multiple (three to four) user personas to cater to different user segments.

4. Craft Targeted Content
 

The user personas help you turn your insights into actions. You now know what kind of marketing message will resonate Opens a new window with them. Humor or emotion, long post or a 15-second video, messages with traditional touch or the latest sporting event.

You identify the best channels, platforms, and times to reach out to your target audience. With that, you can create precise, relevant, and compelling content for your persona.

Neil Patel, one of the top marketing influencers writes in his blog,

“With your marketing persona, you can stack up what you are doing and see how well that should perform. You might have been tweeting a lot, but then you find that your persona doesn’t use Twitter anymore. They are on Instagram. Being image-based, you change your format of your content…The persona lets you get into someone else’s shoes so you can better eliminate your confirmation bias. Confirmation bias involves latching onto weak or false signals that prove your point instead of truly evaluating something objectively. Once you do that, you can create more powerful and relevant content for your persona.”

5. Test
 

To create an accurate user persona, it is crucial to test it against your existing user base like A/B testing your content to see if it aligns with your customer persona.

For example, if your customer persona prefers images; test your Tweet and Instagram image (of the same content) against the same audience. If the IG post performs better, your user persona is aligned to your real audience. If it doesn’t, you can seek feedback from your users and revisit your customer data to tweak your customer persona further.

Using analytics tools like Google Analytics or (relevant) social media analytics tools can help you test and analyze the traffic, engagement, conversion rates, and customer insights of your marketing message based on your user persona.

Testing your user persona can help you better:

• Target your audience
• Estimate their content consumption and how to reach them
• Tweak it to better align with your ‘real’ customers
   

6. Refine
 

“Customer personas represent, by necessity, a snapshot in time and will evolve. You’ll need to revisit this exercise from time to time to keep your information fresh, so make sure to plan for at least a yearly update of your personas,” said Jen Clienhens, The MediumOpens a new window .

Once your user personas are ready, integrate them across your teams. Testing, user feedback, and your team inputs can help you refine user personas with evolving customer requirements, behavior, and market dynamics.

Update your user persona regularly and validate them with your current customer base and customer-facing employees.

Pro Tip:  The key is not to assume or create a persona for an ideal customer. But to know that a real customer will change and so will the user persona.

Learn More: Adapt Your Personas to the Emotional MomentOpens a new window

Key Takeaways

A user persona is a data-driven semi-fictional entity that goes beyond demographics to help organizations better understand their end-users.

This Get to Know Your Customers Day follow these tips while creating a ‘real’ user persona

1. Know that you don’t understand your customers well enough and get to know them better.
2. Research, Communicate and analyze to Know them better.
3. Know that ‘the knowing’ never ends and iterate.
    

How has your user persona helped you better understand your customers? Tell us on Twitter,Opens a new window LinkedIn,Opens a new window on FacebookOpens a new window ; we’re always listening!