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When developing a user persona, your goal is to describe your ideal customer. Who are they? What problems do they have? You use these descriptions to understand who will buy your products and services.
You can start by performing user research about actual users of your products, to represent your target audience. You can also use surveys to research consumers as a whole.
Demographics (like age, location, and gender), psychographics (like personality traits or interests), technographics (segments based on technology used), and other traits are valuable inputs to your user persona development. Surveys, customer data, purchase transactions and other data will provide meaningful quantitative data about your users.
However, a user persona isn’t just a group of statistics. User personas, buyer personas and customer personas all need descriptive data that helps you empathize with them as real people. That’s why it is important to add names, stock photos, and lifestyle descriptions that bring each persona to life.
User personas were first developed in the 1980’s by Alan Cooper, a computer software programmer and author, to help him keep his user in mind as he wrote a project management program.
Alan performed his user research by talking to a woman named “Kathy” at an advertising agency. While playing golf, Alan would role-play discussions with “Kathy”, about what she needed from his software program to have a great user experience.
User personas are used commonly by software developers, design engineers, marketing and advertising professionals.
User personas should:
Marketing and advertising companies now create user personas to describe their customers and buyers. By performing market research surveys, they discover who their ideal customers are and create vivid descriptions about their behaviors and motivations.
Target your market with SurveyMonkey's Audience panel and find where your ideal customers are.
User personas help you create an archetype of people who will buy your products and services. It describes real life behaviors, needs, values, concerns, pain points, and challenges.
When are they most useful for marketing to your customers? It starts by understanding who your ideal customers are.
Customer segmentation divides large groups of people into small groups with common traits. For instance, there are millions of people who drink tea, but which people would most likely buy your new caffeine-free green tea?
Surveys help you collect demographics, psychographics, and lifestyle information to identify customer segments of people who buy products and services. By conducting a survey, you will better understand many customer segments and what their tea drinking habits are.
Once you define customer segments, you will develop buyer personas like Lily the Yoga Lover, Herbert the Herbalist, and Cate the Commuter. Each of these personas will have reasons why they drink tea, and your descriptions will bring them to life.
Target marketing is the practice of focusing on a single customer segment that is mostly likely to buy your product or service. Based on the buyer personas you developed by segmenting customers, you will choose a few persons that have the highest possibility of buying your new tea.
Audience targeting surveys will uncover more information about your persona’s buying habits and motivations. You can also gather data of both domestic and international respondents to give you a global perspective.
Concept testing is a great way to test your new ideas with your target audience. Concept testing surveys let you test specific ideas with your target audience. Before launching a new brand of tea, your audience will let you know their ideas about your product idea, pricing, flavors, and product name.
Over 30,000 new consumer products are launched each year. Concept testing with your buyer personas lowers your risk of going to market with an untested idea and a product that no one will buy.
Package, logo, and website design can also be tested with your ideal audience. Buyer personas are frequently used in the design process to see if it attracts the eye of the customers. Surveys can help you quickly understand if your packaging, logo, or website will be used by your ideal customer.