The French proverb ‘le client est roi’ sums up the key to success for all marketing initiatives. “The customer is king,” marketers know it all too well. They are fully aware that their success and failure depend on how satisfied their customers are. As a matter of fact, most companies know that knowing their customers intimately is the only way to please them. But it’s complicated to “really” know customers. It’s not clear how to extract that data in a meaningful way.
The struggle is real.
But why do companies struggle so much to collect this information, especially in this digital age?
Most companies encounter one or more of the following challenges when trying to blend their market data with their selling process:
- Companies with small budgets lack the resources to conduct market research that would help them better understand their customers.
- Larger budget companies, on the other hand, have the resources and have likely conducted market research. However, it’s not about just collecting the data – it’s about activating it and making something meaningful out of it. How does the data tell a cohesive story and solve a problem?
- How to utilize technology to answer questions and collect information correctly.
Regardless of your company’s size or nature, it is fundamental to know how to gather market data as a first step. Even companies with small budgets can find tools that enable them to conduct market research. But what’s more important is how to use the data to communicate effectively with customers and site visitors.
Although this article is about personas, which is a method of creating that “actionable” form or documentation to activate into something meaningful, I would argue it’s not always necessary to have personas. If you can use that data to derive actionable insights about what needs to happen on your site to persuade the different market segments, then there is no need for a persona.
Ultimately, every company needs an effective way to collect the correct information. Many find that creating personas helps them consume and use information more effectively.
And like any other documentation or research, personas are only effective as the data provided in them and the way they are utilized. Like anything else, they are tools or data points. The type of information that they contain and their exact usage are key components.
The aim of writing this article is mainly to discuss the importance of building a data-driven website with solid market research. We will hone in on the method of personas: how to collect meaningful data, create effective personas, and use them effectively. It will also explore how to use personas to bridge the gap between business objectives and users’ goals and motivations. Understanding how to use personas can help enhance products, processes, website copy, design, navigation, and other elements.
There are two distinct stages of the persona creation process, the first step is to understand your visitors through in-depth market research, analytics assessments and online behavioral monitoring. The next step is to develop empathy towards your visitors by translating all of the data you’ve collected into actual personas.
What are buyer personas?
Imagine a situation where you are invited to one of your relatives’ birthday parties, and, of course, you are not going to show up empty-handed. You will automatically start wondering what you could possibly bring them as a gift.
You will start scrolling through all the possible gifts you can get, then, after a while, you’ll narrow it down to three or four choices and ultimately choose one based on your knowledge of the birthday party person. If you know them well enough, you’ll get them something that they will be fascinated by, but if you don’t, you’ll probably fail to pick the right one, and you’ll end up offering them something they don’t appreciate.
Now, imagine the same situation, but this time with a large number of people, all expecting that you bring them the right gift. Boy, with one person, we struggle to find that special something, so how about an entire group?
But businesses face this predicament every day. They are selling a product or service to people who aren’t family or friends, but rather visitors to the site. The question is, how do you deliver the right information and products they seek or desire? How do you give them an experience they’ll appreciate?
For any business, this is a constant problem. Because while you may address the needs of one segment, you may completely ignore others.
What’s the difference between user and buyer personas?
When it comes to personas, there are different types that will be appropriate for different aspects of the business. And you’ll hear a lot of different names thrown out there: Design, marketing, buyer, and user personas. Many of these are actually overlapping types of personas. Ultimately, the biggest difference is whether you’re targeting the user persona (who will use your product) or the buyer persona (who will buy it).
For example, the children’s toy is sold to both mom and kid, but the ultimate buyer is the mom, the user, and the nagger of the product is the child. In this case, you’d want to keep the user persona in mind because the buyer needs to see their child using and loving the product. But at the same time, you need to persuade them enough (i.e., through education and by keeping things tidy) to move forward.
A B2B example is selling software to a small or mid-sized company. Likely, the CEO won’t be “using” the product; however, they’re buying it, so you need to find an angle that appeals to them. And he will also be assessing the actual users of the product, such as marketers or designers, etc.
But if I’m deciding to optimize my website, I’d hope those who created the product or services have already thought of the “user persona.” Now my focus will need to be on that buyer persona.
The power of personas
The power of persona creation depends on how precise and accurate the information you integrate into the creation process. It is needless to say that the process of persona creation requires a lot of attention to detail and sophistication, and, first and foremost, believability.
As Alan Cooper put it in words in his famous book, ‘’The Inmates Are Running the Asylum’’: “The great power of personas is in their precision and specificity. To deal in aggregates saps that power.’’ This seems pretty simple when put that way, doesn’t it? Nothing is quite that simple, actually, and indeed the devil is in the details.
A large number of marketers and designers fail to meet their customers’ needs when integrating market research with detailed persona descriptions. Sometimes the personas include unnecessary details and information. It’s important to remember the objective and the reason you’re creating the personas. If you want to understand the motivations and obstacles your website visitors face, those details are the most important to focus on when putting together the persona.
What are the fundamental steps for gathering the right data?
The first blunder most people make during any segmentation is in the research phase. The digital era made it easier to collect more data, and a lot of it, but all that data made it more difficult to extract meaningful information. How can I effectively combine my analytics data and survey data to gain a deeper understanding of the customer?
We’ve written an entire guide on this topic, and we recommend that before you continue with this article, you go back and read that guide.
Here is an overview of the different tactics you can deploy to collect meaningful data.
- Surveys
- Polls
- Focus Groups
- Usability Studies/Tests
- Customer Interviews
- Quantitative Data
- Analytics
- Heatmaps
- Video Recording
- AB Testing
- Social Media Analysis
- Zip Code Analysis (Census Data).
After collecting this data and noting your observations about the market, you can identify specific segments based on noticeable trends in the data. This is by no means an easy activity. It’s a team activity with many members where the data is mapped out and categorized.
The way you group target market segments can vary, and it has a lot to do with the product or service you offer. You can use many of these strategies, or limit your segmentation to only a couple. The more granular you get, the more success you will have.
- Psychographic: Grouping them based on social status, lifestyle, personality type, and cultural commonalities.
- Decision Makers: Grouping your customers based on who makes the final purchase decision. This is especially relevant for b2b.
- Behavioral: With so much behavioral data, grouping customers based on how they navigate the site, their tech savviness, how much they use the app, etc., is also a very good way to segment them by product usage. For example, light, medium, or heavy users. This stage also factors in brand loyalty and the type of user.
- Geographic: Because you collected geographic data through the census and zip code analysis you conducted, this may be helpful. Grouping them by region can also lead to socioeconomic grouping by default, since most small regions share that commonality.
- Distribution: Grouping visitors by their preferred method of receiving your product is preferable. Another grouping within this description can include how they contact, renew, cancel (via phone, web, chat, little to no interaction with cs, much interaction, etc)
- Demographic: The most common grouping, which can be dangerous because grouping by demographic only is not granular enough, but it is definitely a starting point. Demographics include age, income level, gender, family size, religion, race, nationality, language, etc.
- Don’t define your segments too broadly. This will give you a greater opening to a competitor who targets more narrowly.
- Organize your business by market segments. Many begin by establishing market-focused teams or groups, which later get organized into a market-focused business model.
- Manage your segments globally. Sometimes a regional organization can set you up to be blindsided later by a more dynamic global economy.
- Complete your analysis and research (strategic market segment portfolio), then be bold about attacking those segments.
Again, this should be a group activity, because, as you can see, there is a lot of information and data. As with most CRO activities, you need more than one set of eyes to review data and draw better conclusions.
Once you’ve gone through this exercise, you should have 4 – 5 detailed segments.
About market research
According to Alan Cooper, a great source of raw data is your actual users, and the investigation phase is a very useful way to collect the information you need to know them better. This includes both contextual inquiry and ethnographic research.
Contextual inquiry and ethnographic research are both qualitative research methods that help gather firsthand data and gain an in-depth understanding of users’ behavior in their natural environment.
When conducting ethnographic research, it is highly recommended to be an active participant in the activity atofstage. The aim behind launching this kind of research is tousers’rpractices fores of tinterpretation be later interpreted and to generate more data.
Contextual inquiry revolves around interviewing your users and asking them open-ended, well-planned questions about their interactions, and trying to understand their side of the experience and what they are going through when using the product you are offering. Note that contextual inquiry research is usually conducted as a one-on-one interaction with the user in their own context.
Criteria to Consider When Crafting Your Personas?
The power of persona creation lies in the fact that it focuses the spectrum of visitors, helping conversion optimizers and marketers see through the customer’s lens. Taking that market segment and creating a persona out of it requires time and consideration:
Specificity
Personas are mainly about developing a close-enough, overall description of your users and what they are trying to accomplish, and why they are pursuing that specific goal. In simpler words, the more specific you are about your personas, the more useful they are as tools to help you drive more customers through the conversion funnel.
Some argue that personas need extra specificity: for example, persona David isn’t just a vice president of an unknown company; rather, he is the VP of the company ‘the digital squad’. Generally, David has extensive expertise in digital marketing; however, if you want specifics, you can say he has been working in this field for 19 years. And you can go on forever, however detailed you want to be.
However, in our experience, we recommend that you don’t spend so much time crafting these details. It helps clarify that person, but being so specific about your objective as a conversion optimizer is unnecessary.
Precision
The idea is that creating personas that are alike, especially at an idiosyncratic level, is a clear indication that you probably have missed something during the data analysis process. It is unlikely to have personas with identical descriptions for the same product.
Generalizations
An oversimplified persona is definitely not what you are looking for. Otherwise, stick to using market segments. A good persona description is never simplified or tosses around generalizations of any kind. But rather, it reflects, first and foremost, the personality traits description, along with the desires, goals, and wants of the market segment it represents.
Every visitor is unique. So how can one persona embody all the personality traits of an entire market segment?
How are the four temperaments related to the creation of Personas?
Historically speaking, creating a categorization of the many human personalities out there into just a few main groups has been controversial because humans are so unique and diverse. However, you can draw many similarities from them in terms of personality traits and overall temperaments.
Aristotle’s vision of the four temperaments was unique compared to that of later philosophers and psychologists. However, his classification was a great source of inspiration and insight for those who came after.
According to him, despite all the uniqueness and differences people have in their traits, they can be categorized into these four temperaments: hedonic, proprietary, dialectical, or ethical.
Years after him, these concepts have shifted a bit to shed light on more or less the same typologies, but this time from a different angle, mainly the four functions when interacting with the outside world: sensing, intuiting, thinking, and feeling. In his book Psychological Types, Carl Jung describes the sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic temperaments.
Jung also noted the distinction between introversion and extroversion in personality types:
- Introverts have an inward focus, with a strong sense of self and feelings.
- Extroverts have a focus on the outside world.
Another classification emerged with David Keirsey; in the early 1950s, he established a relationship between the 16 personality types and the four temperaments described by Galen and Plato. Keirsey focused on human behavior and divided the four temperaments as follows:
- Artisans are observant and pragmatic. Keirsey describes artisans’ primary objective as “Sensation Seeking.”
- Guardians are observant and cooperative. Keirsey describes guardians’ primary objective as “Security Seeking.”
- Idealists are introspective and cooperative. Keirsey describes idealists’ primary objective as “Identity Seeking.”
- Rationals are introspective and pragmatic. Keirsey describes rationals’ primary objective as “Knowledge Seeking.
Image Source: wikiHow
Each of these temperaments requires careful consideration throughout the persona-creation process. You must keep in mind also that each of your personas will have one or more of these temperaments because humans naturally fall into two or often three of the different temperaments.
Let’s take a closer look at the four temperaments and adapt them to the online world to see what each requires.
The Guardian Persona (Logical)
This persona trusts logic above all else. He is always meticulous, methodical, and detail-oriented. This persona is skeptical, self-contained, and focused on problem-solving. A persona of this kind pays close attention to detail, asks questions, and expects them to be answered in a logical, systematic way. This persona comprises 40% to 45% of the overall population.
The Artisan Persona (Impulsive)
An impulsive persona focuses on the here and now. This type of person is spontaneous, optimistic, and unconventional; they will take on tasks others might consider risky and do whatever it takes to accomplish their goals. This persona comprises 30% to 35% of the overall population.
The Idealist Persona (Caring)
A caring person is concerned about others; they are dependable and helpful. He is focused on credentials and traditions. Those with a caring persona enjoy spending time with their friends and families, but they are very serious about their responsibilities. This persona comprises around 15% to 20% of the overall population.
The Rational Persona (Aggressive)
These individuals are competitive, ambitious, and get things done. They trust their intuition and are always looking for ways to get ahead. They are highly motivated and goal-oriented. Those with an aggressive persona are on a constant quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement. They hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. What is different about them is that they comprise only 5% to 7% of the overall population.
It is common for your primary personas to have a mix of temperaments that will definitely serve your needs. However, the more complex the design, the more you will need to include secondary personas to reflect a more holistic consideration of all users, regardless of the nature of what you are offering.
Primary and secondary personas
Designing for unknown users or for all users at once is like being on a wild goose chase; you are simply wasting your time, effort, and money, and the results are predictable: you are going to fail.
One absolute truth you should keep in mind is that you are designing for single users, one at a time, but each with different sets of goals, wants, needs, and desires.
Because it is almost impossible to design for the whole range of users in the market, it is crucial at this point to make a distinction between the various typologies of personas.
Primary Personas
These personas represent the main focus of the design, and your ultimate goal is to satisfy their needs and wants. They are your primary concern, and you should help them fulfill their goals by designing an interface for each persona. You might have more than one primary persona; nevertheless, having so many is a clear indicator that you are having a big problem at a certain level.
Templates of Primary Personas
John Lacoix
Executive Vice President of the Magnets Company
‘’Go big or go home”
Personal Data…………………………………………………. ……………………
Age: 49
Education Level: The Ohio State University
Income Level: $640,000
Residence: Columbus, Ohio Area
Marital Status: Married and Father of two
Work Experience: He started working in IT Development and industrial design in 1997 and continues to do so to the present, with much greater enhancement and dedication. He has been working with different companies.
Work Experience ………………………………………….. ……………………
Executive Vice President charged with business strategy, marketing, brand management, customer relationships, product design, and niche business development.
Partnered with full-cycle marketing and sales, responsible for consulting, network management, and outsourced solutions uniquely designed for mid-market companies and non-profit organizations.
Key Motivations to Using Digital Squad Services ………………………….. ……
- Deliver ongoing value for his firm’s loyal clients.
- Creative solutions and the ability to provide more than one option to solve a problem in IT development.
- Deliver the best enterprise web solutions
- Increase revenues
Key Objections to using Digital Squad Services……………………………..
- Can I validate the Digital Squad ROI?
- Does your approach validate the kind of expertise and knowledge I need?
Material he likes to read……………………………….. ……………………
- The latest updates on IT strategy development
- Industrial design material in general
Summary……………………………………………………….. ……………………
John is exceptionally professional and acutely knowledgeable about the business activities in the local IT community, and he operates with a high level of integrity with his clients. From ongoing network support to IT strategy development and implementation of the plan, his wisdom and insights have helped a lot of small non-profit organizations stay on top of technology.
Persona Traits……………………………………………….. ……………………
- Aggressive
- Logical
Valued words include………………………………………………..
“The top, the best, most recognized, experts, IT latest strategies”
Activities………………………………………………………… ……………………
- John works long hours and spends much of his holidays at his firm.
Others…………………………………………………………….. ……………………
Web Usage: Very tech-savvy and well-read.
Secondary Personas
Users who fit the primary persona, with a couple of additional desires and needs, should be added to the primary interface as long as it doesn’t disenfranchise your primary personas. Usually, these personas are used frequently, and having more than three or four secondary personas simply indicates that your product has a broad scope that requires consideration and focus.
Template for a Secondary Persona:
Elizabeth M. Kessels
CEO of XLADY company
“If you want something said, ask a man; if you want something done, ask a woman’’
Personal Data…………………………………………………. ……………………
Age: 53
Education Level: MBA, Harvard Business School
Income Level: $430,000
Residence: San Francisco, Bay Area
Marital Status: Divorced, a loving mother of three
Occupation: Owner and President
Work Experience ………………………………………….. ……………………
Elizabeth has more than 20 years of experience in the high-tech industry. She currently runs her own fırm ‘ XLady’. She has been recognized for many of her accomplishments in the world of Tech. She also attends and speaks at Web Summits and many other annual conferences in the technology world.
Key Motivations for Choosing Digital Squad Services……………………………………
- Benefit to clients
- Innovations of tools used
- Positive rapport with the marketers at her agency
Summary……………………………………………………….. ……………………
She is a sophisticated businesswoman; she is too careful about details. She is dedicated and caring in her job and with her clients; she is always keen to make her first-time clients loyal. She is regularly sought out to speak on leadership and technology.
Persona Traits……………………………………………….. ……………………
- Aggressive
- Logical
- Caring
Valued words include: “The top, the best, most recognized, experts, sophistication”
Alternative solutions:
Elizabeth has been very frugal and has been able to have her company and do much of the work in that firm without using outside tools. However, she also values time and effort, and if she finds a solution for her clients that saves both, she won’t hesitate to take that leap.
Activities………………………………………………………… ……………………
Elizabeth works long hours and spends much of her holidays in her home office. Her daughter spends a lot of time with her in the office as well. However, she does enjoy the occasional vacation once or twice a year to a tropical location to relax and unwind.
Other………………………………………………………………. ……………………
Web Usage: Very tech-savvy and well-read.
What could you possibly gain from marketing to individuals through Personas ?
Personas are a tool to help those with visual types to familiarize themselves with the customers they are marketing to. It’s ultimately deep marketing research taking a more personalized form for better results. Here are some other benefits that personas offer a business:
By creating personas for your market, you can clearly see the scope and nature of the design problem. It is very common to find designers and marketers lost among possibilities. Personas offer an opportunity to help crystalize the focus of the designs and campaigns.
Personas actually allow you to limit that scope and give you a sense of control over the possibilities and choices out there in the market, and what you are supposed to cater to in order to satisfy your visitors.
Why are personas misinterpreted?
Companies are fully aware of the importance of personas in market segmentation. However, only a few of them are bestowed with the know-how to build them, while the rest either don’t know how to do that or run short of the means, tools, and resources to do so, and eventually end up with what they think are personas, and while they are all wrong in origin, in concept,t and in details.
One of the common mistakes designers make is keeping their personas hidden in the dark—on their laptop screens and behind the company’s walls—where they have never had the chance to step into the sunlight and learn about them. If you want to get it right, you have to get out of your chair, get out into the real world, and find out who your users are, what they are trying to accomplish, and what motivates them to pursue it.
Despite the fact that the actual user is definitely a great source of information during the investigation process, they should never affect your final decision directly. Collecting information directly from your actual users instead of investigating what really matters to the actual users and what doesn’t, and prioritizing what’s valuable and what’s not in their answers.
Another frequent mistake made by the vast majority of designers is to start taking real people’s opinions instead of those of the actual users. Many of them choose the shortcut,t and instead they start scrolling around and asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. Asking questions and interviewing real people, rather than real users, won’t help you much in building helpful personas for your conversion rate. It is highly important not to confuse a real person’s personal opinion with that of your actual user and to distinguish between the two.
Probably one of the most common falsehoods about personas, and where most designers go wrong, is in how they express them after gathering the necessary information and data.
Empathy and Personas
Building empathy tforyou users is critical because you are putting all their cognitive and emotional dimensions iintoone vessel, which automatically reduces FFUDand gives them a sense of familiarity twithyou, a sense of belonging, if you wwill They feel they can relate to what you are offering them, and that alone makes them go for it.
Developing empathy towards your users is a great way to guarantee that they’re having a great experience, and he puts it in words:
When personas have been carefully and appropriately crafted, stakeholders and engineers begin to think about them as if they are real human beings and become much more interested in creating a product that will give this person a satisfying experience’
Personas – Putting it all Together
If you are interviewing your users and asking them good, open-ended questions, you’ll end up with their fundamental truths that are common and aligned with their idiosyncratic staff, as well as other information that is simply irrelevant to the main topic.
You’ll also be able to monitor each interviewee’s behavioral patterns and anticipate their reactions and unrevealed thoughts.
The more users you’ll interview, the more clearly those patterns will become obvious, and you’ll be able to separate the inputs that you need from the rest, which includes both idiosyncratic staff and irrelevant information.
Well, the answer to that, if you were not able to see patterns from within five interviews, is probably that you are not focused enough, or you are asking random questions that have nothing to do with what you are trying to do, or probably there is a communication problem between your users and you that you are not aware of.
Once you’ve collected a series of needs, wants, desires, and motivations, it is time to put what you have learned along the way into your personas’ vessels to hold all this data together and bring your actual personas to life.
One way of creating personas is through following these steps that they have set as a result of an extensive practice over the span of hundreds of interactions with design projects:
- Identify behavioral variables: generally, these variables involve the users’ attitudes, aptitudes, motivations, activities, and skills during the interview period.
- Map interview subjects to behavioral variables: this step relates to the previous one in that you start mapping each interviewee to all the variables you have identified and view interviewees in relation to one another.
Image source: About Face 3
- Identify significant behavior patterns: after mapping your interviewees, you look for behavior patterns, and clusters are your first hint at where to look.
- Synthesize characteristics and relevant goals: for each pattern you identify, you must synthesize goals, which are a critical ingredient in the persona creation process. You should also derive details from your input and provide insightful ,detailed descriptions of tpotentialfrustrations and their solutions, as well as the pproduct’s otential use environment
- Check for redundancy and completeness: this stage is as important as the rest of the steps; the whole point is to make sure you are on the right track and haven’t missed anything. Note that you might conduct additional research to find particular behaviors missing in the original data.
- Expand description of attributes and behaviors: the relevancy, specificity, and accuracy of the persona description are highly demanded in this stage. A great persona description should entail all the important details about this certain user during the research phase.
- Designate persona types: this step ends with bringing your personas to life after prioritizing them into the different types we have seen previously. You have now reached the point where you can communicate what you have learned and pour it into an adequate vessel.
Now what to do with my personas?
Congrats, you’ve created personas. Now,, when you are creating marketing campaigns or optimizing the website, you can define your personas and consider their objections and motivations for moving forward.
- signup
- purchase a product
- login
- track order
- Subscribe to a newsletter
Now you need to think of each persona walking through the site and what they’ll experience at different buying stages. While this may seem like a very time-intensive process, it will uncover many issues and considerations for months to come.
Takeaway
- Never shut the door on the persona-creation process—it is a continuous work in progress. Every day you learn more about your market, and trends change, so a persona is never constant. As you test more, you can modify the personas accordingly.
- Relying on old data can be convenient and cost-effective, but you may ultimately be missing important market changes that will impact your bottom line and cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.
