Persona Creation The Right Way
Customer persona creation has become a MUST for any product manager, designer, or marketer. It helps them synthesize the essentials about their target audiences and how to approach them. Unfortunately, instead of applying solid principles to focus on real customer problems, I have seen too many persona-creation activities derail. The result is lost time and energy, misalignment between departments, and merely a loss of touch with reality.
Yes, personas are fictitious representations of your customers, but that doesn’t mean you should invent it all! Reality and serious research have to be at the origin of Personas. If you think you know what’s essential to your customers, well, think twice and keep digging deeper!
Multiple sources and sites will guide how to best go about persona creation. It can be confusing and overwhelming though. To help you get started, here are the five fundamental persona creation principles to keep in mind when undergoing persona creation. These principles primarily apply to user persona creation, but they also work if you want to work on your buyer persona, although some of the techniques will differ:
Principle #1: Get It From Real Target Customers
You might get started and have no existing customers. Or maybe you already have active customers, but only a vague idea of the problems out there. No matter what, you will need to start with a set of hypotheses on what questions you believe you have to address and who is facing them. Write these down, get out of the office (sometimes literally!) and speak to the people out there.
That reality check is your best chance to successfully identify the big hairy problems (see also my other post on identifying the big hairy problems). And yes, these have to be qualitative insights, you’ll need to dig deep with a handful of target customers. Let them talk first and ask them the right questions.
Principle #2: Get Into Your Customers' Minds
I have seen many product teams and marketers spend countless efforts articulating their personas’ demographics, lifestyle, or social groups. These aspects are useless! What’s critical is understanding what’s on your audience’s mind. What are their real problems and desires? How do they achieve their goals or do their job TODAY?
You also want to note the language they are using and the resources they go after. All these elements will help you down the line to get your solution right. In addition, your messaging will highly benefit from it and become as authentic as it can be, because you know what matters to them.
Principle #3: Gather Enough Insights To Identify Clusters
While you don’t need to be statistically correct, you should gather your insights from enough people to start understanding patterns and trends. There’s no magic number, but it’s likely above 20. So get your act together, and reach out to enough people to hit critical mass in your analysis. If you wonder what I mean by reaching out: it is about picking up your phone or Zoom and talking to real people!
Social Media Intelligence, metrics you gathered, and internal opinions, while highly complementary, will not make it on their own! As you have more interviews in your bag and let your customers freely tell their stories, you will soon notice essential trends and organize proper clusters. Then, and only then, should you consider further validation through some quantitative research.
Principle #4: Tell It Like It Is - A Day In A Life
I have seen many formats used to express personas from the simplest to the most sophisticated ones. Quite often, though, most of the representations ended up not being very actionable or were even confusing. There’s one format that I have seen work again and again: the Day in a Life. It can be pretty straightforward: just write it down. Or it can be quite sophisticated: shoot a movie and make it visually-rich. By switching into this story-telling mode, you illustrate the environment, the challenges, and the mindset of your persona.
You can use the very same format later to express how your solutions delight your audience. It helps everyone relate to your audience and see that you are laser-focused, from senior executives to engineers, to sales. One tip here: don’t waste much time agonizing over a persona name, their demographics, their job title. Just stick “verbatim” to sharing what your customers actually said and how they said it. It will save you a LOT of internal debates!
Principle #5: Make It A Habit: Update Regularly
Personas should not be set in stone. While fictitious, they originate from real people with genuine problems and specific desires. Things change, stuff happens, and you need to reflect these in your persona work. Frequency depends on your category and type of product. So think of continuously interviewing your audience (mark your schedule, do one interview per week if you can, or one per month at a minimum!).
Different types of research will also help you gather complementary insights. Don’t hesitate to cross-reference some of your key hypotheses in more quantitative exploratory surveys or customer satisfaction tools. It will feed your analysis and cluster work when the time comes.
In Conclusion
Applying these five persona creation principles is critical for success! The many tools, techniques or templates proposed out there by marketing experts have some relative value and will help you format your thinking. But most importantly, keep these five principles in mind and remember that persona creation is not like any other research.
By doing so, you will have reassurance that you have done your homework in trying to truly understand your customers. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s critical to help you build and grow credibility with your target audiences.
I’m genuinely interested in getting your feedback on this topic! How successful have you been in creating your own personas? Which other considerations worked for you? Just comment on this blog or drop me a note on The Product Sherpa site!
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