Personas

What is a Persona?

When creating your Journey Map, it’s critical that you flesh out your Persona and their goals first, before heading deeper into the process. It’s from this specific lens that you’ll need to view your customer experience.

A Persona is a semi-fictional representation of a group of your customers, boiled down into one character.

Personas bring your customers to life through both demographic and psychographic details. Based on research and data from your existing customers, a persona is a mental shortcut that represents an important segment of your buyers.

Personas are often met with opposition because they’re a lot of work to assemble, and once assembled they are living, evolving things and must be maintained. Like people, buyer personas change over time with the market, the ties, the ebbs and flows of products and services. They absolutely require work, but they are entirely worth it. — MarketingProfs.com

Customer focus during Persona development is crucial. You’ll need to listen to what the data says about their lives, beliefs, and actions. Avoid cherry-picking to support pre-existing assumptions about your customer. Don’t let confirmation bias blind you from the truth about who they really are.

Take a look at the example Persona below:

Example Persona Text
Name: Katie Voase Location: Richmond, Virginia (USA) Relationship Status: Single Occupation: Teacher Salary: $45k per year
Goals: Katie’s always on the lookout for a new adventure but she also needs to snag a deal, and she’s willing to work a little harder to find one.
Quote: “I’m always on the lookout for an exciting new place to travel that’s different than the “trendy” places. Money is a concern, so I can’t always jet see off to exactly where I’d like, but I am able to take extended vacations so that helps me pack more in for less.”
Background: Katie has two passions in life – travel and her career. In fact, a large part of her decision to become a teacher was so she could spend her summers seeing the world. Travel and planning for travel are Katie’s favorite hobbies. However, she isn’t able to plan as early in advance as she’d like, because her budget forces her to take advantage of last-minute deals much of the time.
Motivations: Katie loves the feeling of being free, so she loves brands and products that make it easy to pick up and leave, pause, or cancel their service easily. Katie loves sharing her travels with family and friends. The more interesting her adventures, the better – there’s a lot of people living vicariously throught her oneline! Risk is something that Katie loves, but in small doses. While she won’t be climbing Mt. Everest any time soon, she does love to off the beaten path when she can.
Frustrations: Between work, keeping fit, online courses, and her side gig Katie doesn’t have a lot of time to go shopping. She needs brands that come to her, and relies on subscription services to taste-make. Although Katie has been teaching for a while, her income never seems to keep up with her taste for travel. She’s always on the lookout for last minute deals, friends to travel with, or ways to make her dollar go farther overseas. Airline tickets are Katie’s biggest expense, so the longer she can make her total trip, the better. That way she only has to fly international once, but can then see lots of local spots without spending too much more.
Technology: iPhone 8 (2017) Apple iPad (2015) Macbook Air (2016)
Channels: YouTube Instagram Facebook Pinterest Mobile

What makes a good Persona?

A good persona makes it clear who your customer is, why they buy, and the areas of friction they face when dealing with your brand. It also gives you insight into how to talk to them in ways and places that are relevant for them.

Is there proof that we need to use Personas?

Yes, there is proof that Personas can create better results and increased ROI. In fact, in a case study by NetProspex they found that their personas resulted in:

900% increase in the length of visit
171% increase in marketing-generated revenue
111% increase in email open-rate
100% increase in the number of pages visited

Great Personas are Based on Data

This is key. The real danger with a customer journey mapOpens in new window is that you’re not populating with data, instead you’re relying on your gut to fill in the blanks. Although marketers and designers are not generally known for empirical thinking, if you don’t take the time to dig through and rely on hard data here, you’ll never get to problems at scale. This is where the “fictionalized” piece of your Persona comes in. The trick is, your Persona (let’s call her Sally) may start to become an avatar for yourself or someone you know. The problem comes when you start looking to scale – data can tell you where the biggest opportunities are, and a Journey Map does need to manage to the majority in most cases (so long as that majority is in your Persona segment).

So as a point of example, if Sally is a mom who visits Target for her weekly grocery shop, and there are 100 million moms that come in to Target to do their weekly grocery shop, there’s going to be some different need states that drive them in. It could be that 60% of them are “value shoppers”, driven in because Target has everyday low prices. 20% of them could be “status shoppers” who go to Target because it’s perceived as “classier” than Wal-mart.

The remaining 20% could be “health-driven shoppers” who go to Target looking for the latest health brands and organic produce. In that case, the Sally persona should take on the attributes of a “value shopper”, because she makes up the majority of the “mom” segment.

Too often, [Personas] are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data. Defining markets based on demographics – data such as a person’s age, income, marital status, and education – is the legacy of 60 years of selling to the mass market. — Adele Revella, from her book “Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business

Three (3) Common Mistakes When Creating Personas

As with any big research project, there’s a myriad of ways Journey Mapping can fall down. But there are a few common mistakes I see in the Persona portion of the exercise. We’ve covered these in detail in previous sections, but make sure you’re avoiding the following when building your Persona.

Being obvious and purely demographic. Go beyond the facts here. By bringing in unexpected insights and fleshing out your Persona (without getting too detailed), will help bring them to life.

Focusing on your ideal customer and not your real customer. Don’t get caught up in who you think your ideal customer should be. When brands start to reject their core customer, it’s often the start of a slippery trip downhill. Unless there really is a broad, organization-wide reorientation of the business happenings, don’t let your ego be bruised by a core Persona that may be value-focused, older, or otherwise “uncool”. Not every brand can or should be hip, Millenial obsessed, Instagram-driven companies.
Relying on your gut, and not allowing the data to tell a story. I could write for hours about how marketing has become an industry that relies on “experts” far too much and “data,” “education” and “research” far too little. However, for now I’ll simply refer you to the Harvard Business Review article “Don’t Trust Your Gut”, that explains it far better than I could.

Ten (10) Key Questions to Answer When Developing a Marketing Persona

Is your core customer male, female or an even mix of both? If efven, why did you choose a man or woman as your target (and does it matter)?
Is your persona single, married, or co-habitating?
Do they have kids now? If so how many and what ages? If not, are they planning on having kids soon?
How old are they?

What’s their income level?
How much expendable income do they have to buy your product? Do they have to make trade-offs to be able to afford it?
What are their 5 favorite sites, social networks, and brands?
If they could describe your customer experience in three words, what would those words be?
What kind of environment do they live in? Are they living with roommates, renting, or own their home?
What responsibilities and recurring costs do they have? Pets, a car, a mortgage, going out every Saturday night with friends, pedicures, etc.?

When your Persona is complete, remember to refresh it

Customer personas represent, by necessity, a snapshot in time and will evolve. Once your journey map is complete, you’ll need to revisit this exercise from time to time. Given the proliferation of touchpoints, changes in the economy and your business, a yearly gut check of your persona is necessary.

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