What is a persona and why is it useful?
A persona is basically the profile of your ideal customer. In other words, a persona is the representation of the person that has the need that your product/ service is addressing. Knowing who your persona is, is very important to define what the target segment will be. Sometimes it is hard to keep in mind your entire target segment because it is made up of a lot of people and it can seem abstract to us marketers, that is why using a persona is so helpful.
Personas help us understand whether there is a real market need for changes to existing products, line extensions, or for entirely new products that you could be thinking about developing. For example, imagine that you are a company that produces beverages, but is looking to extend its product line, however, you don't know if your customers will like it or not, and since all of your customers are different it is hard to visualize whether or not this extension will be successful... What can you do? USE A PERSONA that is able to profile your customers or your ideal customers and put yourself in his/her shoes to see if that person would actually be interested or not.
How can you create a persona?
Since your persona is a representation of your target segment you need to identify who they are and interview them! The only way to know what your customers desire if by asking them, there are various different interviewing techniques which we will cover in later posts but some of them include focus groups, online surveys, in-depth interviews, etc.
When you interview them you HAVE TO KNOW what answers you are looking for, asking the right questions is essential. Keep in mind that you want to identify what things your customers have in common regarding your product/service, what need are they trying to fulfill with it, what do they desire or have to get done that you could help them with? How can you solve your customer's problems in a unique and valuable way?
Once you have all the information you need, you can create your persona! This is a very fun task, make sure your entire team gets involved with this so that everyone "knows" who the persona is and always thinks about him/her when making decisions to see if they are suitable for the persona or not. Try to be as specific as possible, name the persona, give him/her specific demographic details, a background, family, story, job, values, taste, likes/dislikes, etc. Some marketing firms give their persona a face and paste it on the door or anywhere that is visible to help the team stay focused by always keeping in mind who their target audience is. Other firms chose a real customer that fits in perfectly with the characteristics of their ideal persona, but change his/her name.
How you create your persona is up to you, just remember to be specific, to have fun with it, and to include your entire team when creating your persona!
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