Gorillas have personality, you just need to get to know them. Customers can also be put into personality segments and given one photo to assign attributes to that segment. They are called personas.
A persona is a tool used by advertising media agencies like YouCom Media, to characterise customers into segments by creating a fictional person. Brands will have approximately five personas created for them and then they or their agency can assess whether their website journey or other communications would be likely to meet that persona’s needs.
Personas need information. ‘Jane Doe from I don’t know’ won’t be at all helpful to you. Essential data for a persona includes: Name, gender, age, job title, location, dependants. Expanded data sets will also include: Details about their job role, salary, education, family, goals, values, fears. Example: Jane Collins, 40, Business Analyst, Manchester, single mum.
Of the five personas you create, there should be one that supersedes all others. If that persona is satisfied, then the others are likely to be satisfied.
Each persona will reflect a different scenario. This will help the brand ensure their website caters to people who seek information, or people who are a new customer seeking to purchase etc.
The primary persona and a secondary persona are the most likely to be the brand’s customer type. They will drive the most revenue and therefore all communication channels need to be most suited to those personas.
The others are less common custom but which if the website is tailored to them could gain the brand additional revenue streams and can often help marketing managers / agencies to think outside the box.
To begin it is best to start with ‘some’ data. Run your website analytics tool and see which ‘locations’ your visitors came from. What keywords did they use to find the site? How many pages did they look at before they left your site? This is key strong data for creating personas.
The early persona profiling can also gain good insight from social media listening to find out what potential customers are saying about your brand online. As well as customer surveys, to hear from the customers themselves about their values and fears, key decision-making drivers.
The agency and marketing manager can design personas quite well, but why not gather a wider team. Announce what you’re doing and ask for one volunteer from marketing, customer service, R&D, HR and others. Anyone who interacts with customers and customer data should be involved in sharing their perspective on what makes your customer personas.
Using those key personas your team can then develop the factors that will achieve success, perceived barriers, decision-making criteria and their buyer journey for each segment. The brands user experience team and website developers will take over from there.
Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.
Required reference:
YouCom Media News, Nov 2019, London, ‘Personas Success.’