What is a user persona and how to create one?

A user persona is created keeping in mind the potential customers who might like your brand, buy from you, or use your services. The demographic questions like who are your customers and what they do and psychographic questions like their buying habits and needs can be answered by using a user persona. 

The qualities of your buyer persona should be based on facts from well-conducted user research as it assumes the qualities of real people and customers that will engage with your brand and products. You can get important facts about your customers by observing or talking to them directly through surveys, interviews, quizzes, etc. It is advisable to create 3 to 6 user personas at a time, especially if you have a diverse customer base.

User personas are required for improving user experience, product development, and re-strategizing your marketing campaigns. You can focus on improving your business or products to suit their needs as they help you understand your potential customers. Having a user persona will help you understand your target audience whether you are trying to sell a product or aid the design process of a mobile website.

Some of the benefits of using user persona for a brand include:

User persona helps brands create exceptional products or services which is one of the major benefits of it. You can answer essential questions like, who will use your products? Where do they live? from where they buy their products? and What are their needs? when you have a user persona. You can create products that will satisfy your user base easier by understanding this which will ultimately help you to build a successful business.

A perspective on your potential target audience can be gained by using user persona that makes it easier to build empathy. It will be easier for you to understand the needs of your user and how you can help meet them by identify your users as real people with needs and frustrations.

A good user persona can help make better decisions for your brand and there is a higher chance of success and generating revenues for businesses that make data-driven decisions. For example, you can figure out that the tone is too casual for your professional audience or the joke is too extreme for your millennial audience if you want to run a marketing campaign. User persona can also help you make better decisions about your business, including  location, price, and products.

A user persona is created to help you understand the needs, goals, lifestyle, interests, and observed behavior of your user. Therefore, a user persona must contain elements that help you understand your potential customer better.

A user persona should answer questions like Who is my ideal customer?, What are the goals and needs of my potential users?, What pain points or challenges do they currently have? and What is the behavior pattern of my potential users?. The five key elements of a user persona are:

Characteristics like Age, Gender, Job Title, Educational Level, Location, Marital Status, etc. are highlighted here.

It gives a face to your user and humanizes the details in your user persona by adding a picture. For example, is your ideal customer prefers a ponytail or a braid girl?

You need to describe the personalities of your user to help you understand their lifestyle and interests. For example, Do they spend a lot of time outdoors?, Do they use social media often? or Are they vegans.

It is best to understand the end goals of your user as the goals will determine whether your brand or products will interest them or not. Yu should know if there is something they need, and what is the end goal they desire from a product?. For example, a team leader may may need a collaboration tool where he can have every team member onboard if he aims to improve communication within his organization.

The best way to build products or services that solve their needs is understanding the pain points of your users. You should understand what is their problem, and how can your product provide a solution to these problems?

A little effort is required for developing a user persona as long as you know the proper steps to create one. Some critical steps involved in creating an accurate buyer persona for your end user include:

Making a rough definition of who is likely to buy your products and highlighting what you think their persona would be like is the first step to creating a user persona. For example, the first that would come to mind is women when creating a persona for a brand that sells bikinis. So, you can roughly create a persona based on a woman, then assign characteristics like age group, needs, occupation, location, etc.. Having multiple personas of different categories of women that may interact with your brand is also a good idea. 

You need to ask your team or yourself about the kind of people that use your product or brand, and then start creating a persona based on this.

Conducting user research to understand certain things about your audience, including their behavior, motivation, and needs is the next stage of creating a user persona. You can conduct actual research through social listening, observation, surveys, interviews, diary studies, focus group discussions, and so on, to collect information about your users.

Validating your data and building an accurate user persona is a good tip is to collect information using two or more sources. You can create a persona based on the existing qualities that you already know about your potential customers when you do not have time or the budget to conduct an interview.

Questions you can focus on during your research include:

You should now analyze the data collected to help you identify behavioral patterns after having information about your target audience. You need to highlight all behavioral similarities and behavioral variables to do this.

The trends identified around the behavioral pattern and persona descriptions need to assembled now. You need to group the users according to their similar persona, backgrounds, interests, age group, lifestyle, career, etc.. One persona will be represented by each similar description and the behavioral pattern and more user groups can be created based on other characteristics. You must assign a name to each persona to make them more realistic.

It is important for you to be careful when grouping your customer base, as participants may not have identical qualities. For example, you need to group them based on the most important factors like interest and challenges since although different people may have the same interests and challenges, but belong to different age groups and live in different locations.

The next step is to create a bulleted list or summary for each persona at the end of your grouping. Important characteristics should be highlighted and the qualities need to be tweaked until it reads like you are talking about just one individual. It is a representation of your potential customer base.

Your persona can be finalized by revising the draft until it expresses enough details to understand your users. Too many attributes of your user persona need not necessary to add in it to make sense as too many details may become confusing, which defeats the purpose of a user persona. It is best to prioritize the user personas by defining which one will be the primary and secondary persona if you create multiple user personas.

There is no value of persona unless you use it to improve your business and make better decisions. Therefore, it is important for you to get familiar with your personas and find out the ways you can improve your business based on what you now know about your ideal customers.

Tips for creating an accurate user persona for your business include:

You can leverage already existing user persona templates and tools to efficiently create your buyer persona. Questions and qualities that you need to fill in to get an accurate user persona are already highlighted in some templates.

A single user persona can not capture the qualities and demographics of your target audience in some cases. Therefore, you need to create more than one user persona in these cases to best represents different groups and profiles of your target users. Up to six personas can be created depending on your type of business and the range of data collected.

Working with other people on your team is essential while creating your user persona to get accurate results.

Revise your persona as many times as you can since you may not get your persona right the first time. You also need to keep updating your persona to accommodate new information about your customers as your user persona can change over time.

You can humanize your user persona by introducing a scenario. You should create a story with your ideal customer as the main character and also define the goal, their needs and the action they might take.

Visualizing your user persona using pictures and graphics is one of the ways to make it memorable. Consider using a different color scheme for each persona if you have multiple personas.