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User personas are a foundational building block to any successful marketing strategy. They help you identify your ideal customer and how to most effectively reach them. While researching and creating a series of nuanced user personas can sound daunting or like another dry assignment to check off the to-do list, the research can be eye-opening. It helps to inform your positioning, messaging, targeting, and even product development in significant ways over time.
User personas play into everything you create: from your brand messaging and visual identity, to a campaign strategy and content plan. They capture basic demographics like age, gender and location, and go a step further to capture your ideal customer’s background, interests, and character traits.
The way I like to think about user personas is by comparing them to characters in a movie. As we know, our favorite characters are oftentimes complicated. They have their own unique set of desires, beliefs, and motivations. They have specific wants, needs, and interests. By endeavoring to capture this information, you can more easily vision who your customers are in real life. They are vibrant, complicated, but nonetheless three-dimensional human beings who make purchases for reasons that may not always be obvious.
It’s a good rule of thumb to build out three to four personas. Below, I’ll share key criteria to capture and how to find it.
Demographics
First, gather the basics. Identify the demographics of your existing customer base: age, gender, and location. Use information that isn’t biased. For example, if you’re advertising on Facebook and targeting females only, the visitors to your website will mostly be female. Use a data set that existed before any targeted marketing efforts took place.
Interests
Interests are one of the best (and easiest) ad targeting options on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. They allow you to target those interested in a subject related to your product or service. Facebook generates these interests based on the users’ likes, interests, apps they use, pages they’ve liked, and other criteria as established by the Facebook algorithm. Because interests play a major role in acquiring leads, it’s important to dial these in as closely as possible. One way to identify them inside of Facebook is to go under “Audience Insights” within “Plan” in your Facebook business account. You can also deploy a survey, which we’ll discuss later in the post.
Now, we’ll begin to dig into some of the more nuanced characteristics of your most ideal customer (MIC). This criteria can best be captured by deploying a survey to your existing customer list. If you want to skip ahead to survey tools I like (non-sponsored), just scroll to the bottom of the post.
Background
As evidenced at cocktail parties or when meeting someone for the first time, a person’s background can provide excellent baseline information about the person. Where did you go to school? Where did you grow up? What do you do for a living? Do you have any kids? If so, how many? In a survey we usually see these questions in the form of criteria like household income, highest level of education completed, and family structure.
Activities
Next, capture what customers like to do in their spare time. Do they exercise, shop, cook, go to concerts, watch movies on Netflix? What do they read? How do they spend their time on a typical Sunday – do they go to the local bar to watch football with friends, or do they spend it at home curled up with a book and cuppa?
Goals
The objective here is to capture goals for a specific point in time. In movies this is usually more dramatic, where the goals and stakes are all high (for example: destroying a ring, pulling off a heist, fighting to stay alive). Because a character’s goals are also more complex when it comes to their relationships with others, let’s boil it down to a personal goal for the purposes of this task. Is your character’s goal to keep fit? Is it to save money? Stick to a diet? Do they want to minimize their stress levels? Sleep better? If there is a very specific problem that your product solves, reverse engineer it by identifying the problems your character has here.
Pain Points
Here, you’ll identify what they currently use to solve the aforementioned problem. This is where you can identify what isn’t working about that solution and define how your product is a superior alternative.
Product Values
Customers will give a range of scores when it comes to valuing different aspects of your product. By capturing these, you’ll know what to focus on within certain areas of your messaging and within different character categories. Is it product reliability? Ease of use? Build quality? Does it need to have unique capabilities – what are they? Get this information and segment it out by demographic information and interests to identify trends in the data.
Personal Values
Next, layer in values. What motivates your ideal customer, and what do they value for themselves above all else? Do they live to break their own limits? Do they feel compelled to keep up with the latest and greatest tech trends? Do they want to impress their peers? Is your target consumer self-motivated and ambitious, or are they more aspirational? Do they place a high value on things like creativity, wisdom or endurance?
Characteristics
In character development, characteristics are quirky habits or traits that make a character more believable and tangible in the reader’s mind. What are your character’s strange habits? Do they drive a certain way to work? Do they eat a cookie every morning for breakfast as part of their morning ritual? Here we can capture some of the more nuanced things about them.
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Use the above criteria to help guide the writing of your question schematic, then deploy it to your existing customer base. You can do this using a platform like Survey Monkey or Survata. To validate product ideas or features, target non-customers on your website using a tool like Survicate for Shopify.
Conclusion
User personas play a key role in successful marketing strategies because they help to increase the chances of connecting directly with the person most likely to buy your product or service. Researching and creating a series of user personas can sound like a complicated exercise, but will ultimately help to further inform your strategy over the long-term.
By thinking of your personas as fictional characters, it becomes easier to think of your audience as a series of complex individuals with varying wants and needs. This improves campaign targeting in the end and makes for messaging that comes across in a natural, effective way.