Personas or Avatars should be the foundation of your marketing and UX process. They are highly important as they assess your customer’s requirements, problems, objections to purchasing, product education level, status and their future issues.
All of these are needed for successful customer acquisition and long-term retention. I notice some people when teaching persona creation keep the UX and marketing personas separate. I don’t as I believe the UX has to be tied into the marketing to ensure a high level of users who come in contact with the product end up at the goal state which is a fully paying customer, who has a high level of knowledge about the product and will act as a product advocate.
There are 4 steps to creating personas:
The analysis is carried out in the form of a survey which has two parts:
Quantitative research – is a research strategy that focuses on quantifying the collection and analysis of data. The results of which can be depicted in the form of numerical. After careful understanding of these numbers predict the future of a product or service and make changes accordingly. Basically, this part is going to get the demographics of your user’s age, location etc.
Qualitative research – relies on data obtained by the researcher from first-hand observation, interviews, questionnaires, focus groups, participant observation, recordings made in natural settings, documents, case studies, and artefacts. The data are generally nonnumerical. This part will figure out why they are buying, how they brought, what objections they had to buying and what they want in the future.
Let’s look at what data we need to collect to create the personas.
This will enable us to create a persona in the state they are at at the beginning of the sales process and then we create the persona in the goal state. Below in ‘figure 2’ you can see a web flow and email sequence for customer acquisition. Let me go through and show you how you get the data to create the persona to build this out.
In this flow, the email sequence starts the moment the user opts in on page one regardless if they finish. The reason we get them to opt in straight way is due to the 20/80 rule that at any given time only 20% of your target audience will buy at the present moment. The 80% of your big sales are made needs to be nurtured. The information required to get them to become a customer will be discovered while creating the personas. Let’s say for this example we are getting them to opt in via a webinar funnel. They give us their email and we will then send them two emails. One containing the webinar link and the other an account welcome email. So you need the content for the webinar. You have to create a survey which is. in two parts. The first is demographically based and the second is the more in-depth questions outlined above. You then send this out to your existing clients or if you are a new company you can go through a market research company that will find you your target audience. You need these questions answered:
As the filled-out questionnaires start to come back in you need to create variables/categories of the answers. For example one of your questions could have been ‘What are you using the software for?’ The replies could be ‘generate leads’, ‘acquire new customer leads’, or ‘feed my sales CRM with leads’ so you group these as ‘lead generation’. In total, you will probably have between 15 and 25 different categories. You then want to start mapping these out in a spreadsheet. You will start to see clusters and you segment these off. This becomes the foundation for your personas. You will be able to see who is buying from you, why they are buying, how often they are using your product and what objections they have to buying from you.
As you create the personas name them using an alliteration format for instance, you could use ‘Joe the Tech Guy’, or ‘Carla the CEO’ which will make it easier to know who they are.
You should now have your personas which you can build your marketing message and UX from.
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