How to define your persona to launch your business
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Do you want to convince your investors that your digital solution matches your users’ needs? Are you launching a new fruit juice and want to break into the market? Are you planning to soon put a sightseeing website online? Do you have the ability to give English lessons? … Before designing your product or service, have you taken the time to define the people you want to reach? Your users’ journey, their use of your product/service, and the interactions carried out with them should guide your thinking so you can respond as precisely as possible to their expectations.
As consumers are exposed to a variety of messages, attracting and retaining them is a major challenge for companies. Indeed, your product or service may be based on an excellent initial idea, but if it is not grounded in users’ needs, your idea will be discarded. So how can you align your value proposition with lived experiences? One action to undertake is defining an appropriate "persona."
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What is a “persona”?
Let’s start with the Latin origins of “persona.” This term initially referred to a mask worn by actors. Gradually, it expanded into professional fields to express a representation of a target customer. This semi-fictional character is assigned human traits and behaviors close to expected prospects and users. Its description is sometimes so realistic and coherent that, when reading it, one may feel it truly exists.
One might think that building a “persona” applies only to marketing and is included in the design thinking process (in the empathy phase). Yet it is also useful for other departments of the company. Indeed, defining the typical person to reach offers all employees of a company (existing or in the making) a clear advantage. By relying on the “persona,” it is possible to better understand how users function, offer them a suitable product or service, and provide them with a quality customer experience.
Focusing first on your “persona” means starting from users’ needs to develop an idea. Take the example of Heinz ketchup, whose bottle design changed according to consumer usage. Perhaps you have already bought the famous glass bottle? While the product looked very nice, using it was nonetheless not very practical, as it did not allow consumers to control the flow or quantity of ketchup. Consequences: they often had to use force to get ketchup out, ⅓ of the sauce remained stuck in the bottle, and splashes on clothing were frequent. So Heinz launched a product, this time in recyclable plastic. The objective: encourage their customers to continue buying products from their brand.
How can you gather your personas’ opinions?
Observe user behavior
The first action is to conduct research on user behavior. Keywords, online discussions, and performance indicators are all traces you can use to identify your typical customer profile.
Observe keywords generated by users:
Searches carried out on Google are real leads for building your persona. Especially since on this search engine, you can easily obtain a wealth of information. Indeed, thanks to queries displayed in the search bar, the number of results, the “people also ask” section at the top of the page, and the “related searches” at the bottom of the page, you can get closer to user needs. To complement the elements obtained and benefit from keyword suggestions, other paid tools also exist, such as Semrush, Answer the Public, or Google Ads.
Take a look at forums and groups:
In these private or public spaces, you can identify the most recurring trends and issues. The language elements observed will then allow you to use them later to align as closely as possible with your users’ expectations.
Analyze the performance of your communication channels:
Your website is a powerful channel you can rely on to understand visitor appeal both for your design and your content. Is your bounce rate identical across all pages? Do you know your competitors’ average bounce rate? Do visitors mainly come from mobile or desktop? Do you know which colors drive the most clicks on your site? When used well, all the information collected will allow you to infer usage patterns, friction points, and help you build your persona profile.
Likewise, observations and data from social networks will be particularly useful to you. You noticed that one specific type of post performed better than another in the fashion field—perhaps you could do the same? You noticed that during September, the number of likes, comments, shares, and saves was particularly high—perhaps that is information to consider for your future projects? So listen to what the numbers have to reveal!
Get in direct contact with them
Interacting with your users and collecting their feedback in the moment or later remains necessary to begin building your persona. To obtain this, you can:
Create questionnaires:
By asking the right questions to your current customers, your network, or a database, you will obtain useful viewpoints to propose a suitable project. When designing your form, alternating closed questions (where one or more answers must be chosen from those provided) and open questions (where users state what they think) will allow you to identify percentages of common responses as well as verbatims. The larger the sample of people, the closer the percentages will be to what your typical users truly think.
Interview prospects and customers:
To obtain more precise answers and refine your questions according to the information shared by respondents, conducting phone, email, or in-person interviews can contribute significantly and complement sending the questionnaire. Here, the quality of responses is expected, rather than quantity.
Exchange informally:
Discussions, even informal ones, can also serve as customer feedback. Have you received a private message from them on social media? Are certain phrases regularly repeated during discussions with your users? We encourage you to note all messages so you can make use of what you obtain. Also, do not hesitate to look back at your previous written exchanges and write down somewhere the key phrases that stood out to you.
Ask for the opinion of external people
Beyond direct exchanges with consumers, seeking input from individuals other than your users can be a plus:
Talk with colleagues in direct contact with prospects and customers:
If you are in a company with a sales team and/or a customer service department, this means your colleagues have a wealth of information to use. Your coworkers may have identified key characteristics of your consumers in a tracking table, or even noted typical phrases that regularly come up. Ask them for access to certain information in order to refine your targeting and identify your “persona.” You may be surprised by what you find.
Schedule brainstorming sessions:
During these informal meetings, colleagues (sometimes from different teams) gather around a common theme to stimulate their creativity and generate as many ideas as possible together. The facilitator then ensures that exchanges are as spontaneous as possible and that self-censorship is reduced. In the context of building a persona, brainstorming is valuable because it allows certain ideas to be explored, refined, and developed.
Talk with people close to you:
Even if those around you are far from your typical user profile, their fresh perspective can still help you get unstuck and shed light on avenues you would not have considered.
How can you organize all the information in the persona profile?
Once your investigative work is done, you still need to sort the information collected and select relevant elements to format into a persona sheet, but above all to rely on these elements when choosing your actions regarding them. In this file, the following information is often included:
their age
their gender
their socio-professional category
their passions
their lifestyle habits
the activities they do in their free time
their preferred communication channels
their planned budget
their payment methods
their digital habits
Let us clarify that depending on what you offer, some information will be more useful to you than others. For example, if you have an online painting workshop booking site, knowing their previous painting experience (beginner, intermediate, advanced) will help you create level-based classes. On the other hand, if you are organizing an automotive event, knowing your prospects’ connection to painting will hardly be useful. It is by relying on precise and concrete data that you will build a “persona” (even several) close enough to your typical customer.
A tip for creating your persona sheet could be to describe your “persona” to someone close to you (or by speaking to yourself out loud) as if they existed: “Passionate about video games since middle school, Victor is now 32 years old and loves following several gaming YouTubers’ adventures once dinner is over. Evening is a time dedicated to his passions, such as watching these videos but also playing online games, reading novels, and writing. Not very present on Instagram and LinkedIn, he prefers Facebook to follow his friends’ news and chat with them via Messenger. He also uses the WhatsApp application to talk with people close to him, but he remains a loner at heart. Thus, meeting people, communicating in public, or going out regularly are not activities he enjoys. Because he knows it would be better for him to open up more, he is currently looking for new activities to do, this time collective ones.” The more details there are, the easier it is to visualize the “persona.”
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Building one (or more) persona sheet(s) is certainly painstaking work. However, taking care to do it well makes it possible to craft more precise messages, reach the right target, and save time afterward. Is there a brand that caught your attention because of how precisely it matched your needs?
