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.

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Required reference:

YouCom Media News, Nov 2019, London, ‘Personas Success.’

The post Personas Success appeared first on YouCom.

Brands often turn to agencies for user experience testing, finding that something as simple as where a ‘buy’ button or ‘next’ button is positioned, can make all the difference between a 12 percent click-through rate and a 90 percent click-through rate.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) covering the psychological aspects of human-computer interaction, state in their standard ISO 9241 that “user experience includes all the users’ emotions, beliefs, preferences, perceptions, physical and psychological responses, behaviours and accomplishments that occur before, during and after use.”

This demonstrates a point that many factors can influence your customer’s user experience. These factors can broadly be placed into three categories; a user’s state and previous experience; the properties of whatever system they’re engaged with (Website etc), and the usage context (the situation in how they are engaging).

When User Experience testing analyses representative users and reveals their working environments, their interactions and emotional reactions, the brand has a better chance of creating the perfect system environment for achieving more sales/engagement with their customers.

The perception of the customer experience with your brand (offline as well as online), will affect your brand image.

That user experience can be broadcast off your radar creating a negative spiral of a decreasing customer base.

User experience can also change over time, new factors can appear which mean a certain function of your website or store no longer connects with customers and breaks the careful steps of the customer journey creating a disconnect.

Often where that ‘break’ is can be very difficult to identify.  All senior management know is sales are down and a clear reason why isn’t forthcoming.  This is where some form of user experience testing is required on a periodic basis.

Website can fail with broken links, confusing phrases, poorly positioned ‘next’ buttons, long registration forms, phrases in headings, headlines and tags which don’t give immediate understanding to value and journey.

User Experience testing will discover which content is better suited to which customer segment you wish to target.

User Experience analysis will determine how to make content easy to find (good internal links from landing pages), which design layout generates greater click-through percentages and what leads to a faster page load (even what is the minimum page load time required for customers).

YouCom Media UX has found the following factors ensure continued customer website interaction;

• The Content Factor: the right, good quality content will generate AIDA
• The Navigation Factor: Careful positioning of buttons, next step commands, scroll bars, clearly identified journey paths to shorten the customer journey
• The Speed Factor: Fast downloading, fast page loading, choosing the right content that achieves that goal
• The Daisy Factor: A Daisy will only last a day or two without new water or sunshine. Google’s search spiders and customers will begin to find your website user experience less relevant to results the longer there is no new content or updated information

User Experience testing is affordable and vital.  It can be all-encompassing or target specific areas which you feel are creating a problem.  Contact Kelly in Account Services to learn more.

Follow the YouCom Media news posts to see the next developments.

• Our Facebook news
• Our Twitter news
• Our Pinterest news
• Our LinkedIn news

Glossary:

AIDA – Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

UX – User Experience

Required reference:

YouCom Media News, July 2018, London, ‘User Experience.’

The post User Experience appeared first on YouCom.