Personas matter.

Personas guide customers’/prospects’ thinking and behaviour. 

Personas are a standard marketing tool that should inform you of exactly what you need to do to improve your product and service design and marketing outcomes.

How would you feel if once a day, every day, you received an email from someone new who wanted to work with you? You didn’t have to chase them down. They just showed up on your doorstep, eager to work with you.

Personas can be elaborate constructs based on research and data. Or they can be constructed quickly with the data and information you already have.

Not everyone is the same, and you should not treat them as such if you want to maximise your marketing efforts.

Demographics and psychographics.

Personas are becoming very important because their motivations become your action plan for generating leads and retaining customers. You probably know a lot about your personas’ gender, ethnicity, geographic location, marital status, age, and so on, which comprise their demographics and psychographics.

But there’s another component needed to understand your prospects and customers. How do they think and behave? What is their lifestyle like? What are their habits and hobbies? What values and opinions do they have?

The answers to these questions are psychographics. You need to know this information to understand who’s buying what you’re selling.

Designing your products and services.

The persona is intended as a repository of all the knowledge gained about your users during research, knowledge that will be useful for the final product and service design. 

When designing your products and services, the persona isn’t usually necessary. However, having a ‘person’ to refer to, talk about, and design for is important. What’s valuable is the information that it conveys.

There are several ways to capture this information, of which personas are just one. Organise your user research so that it will transition to design. That is the key, not the persona itself.

What specific personal information will improve your marketing? Perhaps our Knowledge Base can help.

Quotable Quotes.

“Making Breakthroughs” Demographics explain ‘who’ your buyer is, while psychographics explain ‘why’ they buy. Knowing what the day in the life of your buyer persona looks like is undoubtedly valuable when creating an integrated marketing strategy”. Maggie Hibma

“You need an accurate reflection of any market segment you are targeting to guide their thinking and behaviour and your responses”. Peter Sergeant