Developing personas for marketing strategy

Personas are an extremely valuable tool for marketers in any field. If you're not familiar with the term, personas are representations of your target audience based on research and interviews. From PR to digital to advertising, any marketing team or agency can benefit from developing client- and/or brand-specific personas.

As an example, let's say one of your target audience types is a 18-21 year old male who likes emo music, skateboarding and high-end electronics. You would come up with a name for this person along the lines of "Nate" and you would find an image of him to use in your planning. When you start making decisions about marketing strategies, you would check back to "Nate" and ask if it would reach him. What would reach him more effectively? What message does he need to hear. That is a basic model of persona development. Here is some more information to guide you through the process.

Why personas are important:

• Personas put a face on the customer. Some persona programs give people names so you can refer to them and see them in a physical representation. The agency Organic creates persona rooms where their people live so the project team can become fully immersed.
  
• Personas remove the tendency to think of yourself as the customer. You have to step back and this gives you the structure to do so.
  
• Act as a guide throughout the process of developing marketing communications programs, cross mediums (print, digital, outdoor, TV, etc.).
  
• Keeps designers, copywriters, programmers on track and avoids waste by remaining focused on the customer.
  

How people screw them up:

• Personas take time and research to get right.
  
• This includes some time in the field and meeting face-to-face with the customer.
  
• People think they know their customer without looking at data.
  
• Personas are often used up front in the marketing strategy process and don't carry through the process.
  

How you can avoid screwing them up:

• Get data. Collect it from the web and third party sources. Analyze web traffic. Do in-person interviews and ethnography. Get a big picture view and then analyze it objectively.
  
• Talk to your customers. Videotape them. Record the audio. Take notes. Come back with a real feeling for who you are trying to reach.
  
• Compare what you saw to the data and look for the insights.
  
• Evolve the personas over time. Adapt them as your product lines change or the economy changes. These should be living, breathing entities.
  

A great sample model.
I found this great model on Idris Mootee's site in a post where he compared the problems that MBAs and MFAs have in the workplace. It's a great start to being able to wrap your head around these ideas.

1. Finding the users
Questions asked: Who are the users? How many are there? What do they do with the system/brand?
Methods used: Quantitative data analysis.
Documents produced: Reports.

2. Building a hypothesis
Questions asked: What are the differences between the users?
Methods used: Looking at the material. Labeling the groups of people.
Documents produced: Draft a description of the target groups.

3. Verifications
Questions asked: Data for personas (likes/dislikes, inner needs, values). Data for situations (area of work, work conditions). Data for scenarios (work strategies and goals, information strategies and goals).
Methods used: Quantitative data collection.
Documents produced: Reports.

4. Finding patterns
Questions asked: Does the initial labeling hold? Are there more groups to consider? Are all equally important?
Methods used: Categorization.
Documents produced: Descriptions of categories.

5. Constructing personas
Questions asked: Body (name, age picture). Psyche (extrovert/introvert). Background (occupation). Emotions and attitude towards technology, the company (sender) or the information that they need. Personal traits.
Methods used: Categorization.
Documents produced: Descriptions of categories.

6. Defining situations
Questions asked: What is the need of this persona?
Methods used: Looking for situations and needs in the data.
Documents produced: Categorization of needs and situations.

7. Validation and buy-in
Questions asked: Do you know someone like this?
Methods used: People who know (of) the personas read and comment on the persona descriptions

8. Dissemination of knowledge
Questions asked: How can we share the personas with the organization?
Methods used: Fosters meetings, emails, campaigns of every sort, events.

9. Creating scenarios
Questions asked: In a given situation, with a given goal, what happens when the persona uses the technology/engages with the brand?
Methods used: The narrative scenario - using personas descriptions and situations to form scenarios.
Documents produced: Scenarios, use cases, requirement specifications.

10. On-going development
Questions asked: Does the new information alter the personas?
Methods used: Usability tests, new data
Documents produced: A person responsible for the persona input from everybody who meet the users.

*Diagram developed by Lene Nielsen of Snitker & Co.

More quality persona resources:

• Usability.gov
  
• Cooper on the origin of personas
  
• Persona ecosystems - David Armano
  
• "Creating and using personas and scenarios to guide site design" - Razorfish
  
• Customer Storytelling at the heart of business success - boxes and arrows
  
• Personas, goals and emotional design - UXmatters
  
• Three important benefits of personas - Jared Spool
  
• Practical persona creation - evolt.org
  
• Yahoo's approach to keeping personas alive - Jared Spool
  

So what else do you do when planning personas? How do you develop them? How do you adapt them? What's the balance between qualitative and quantitative feedback?

 

Technorati Tags:
David Armano, marketing, Matt Dickman, Techno//Marketer, usability, user experience design, UXD, Jared Spool

Comments

[Ed Healy]

Another thought-provoking article, Matt. While I doubt I'm grasping the entire persona concept, it reminded me that data analysis and personal charisma are assets that need to be balanced for a team to perform at the top of its game.

[Tony Zambito]

Matt,

This is a very good post on personas. I especially liked your sections on how people can screw up personas as well as how to avoid screwing up. I have been involved in persona development for nearly 10 years, first through working with Alan Cooper at Cooper Interation Design and then with my own firm, Goal Centric. I can say since personas have grown in popularity, it is disconcerting how lax companies can get about the research that is required to derive quality personas. First though, let me point out that Idris Mootee does not cite the source of the model. This model and the ten steps were part of a thesis that was developed by Dr. Lene Nielson, a woman and professor at the Copenhagen Business School. Alan Cooper and thought leading interaction designers such as Robert Reiman layed out these same steps as long as 8 years ago. Idris Mootee also appears to be highly critical of personas. Which I disagree with some of his assessments. However, it is fair to say that the more people do "screw" up on personas per se', the more of a bad rap personas can develop. So I applaud your post for pointing this out for it is critical to the future of personas. Personas have come a long way in 10 years and I think they have proven their value over this time and will continue to do so. I also hope you will cite my blog www.personainsights.com as a resource!

Thanks,
Tony Zambito

[Matt Dickman]

Ed -- Thanks for the comment. I've added an example to the top of the page that I hope will help you out a bit.

[Matt Dickman]

Tony -- Thanks for the thorough background on this. It means a lot that you liked the post given your extensive background in the area. Idris pointed this out on his post and brought it to my attention. I do believe in the power of personas when done correctly.

Also, please note that I did give credit to Lene Nielson for the diagram below point #10.

[Michael Madej (Digital Marketing Rucksack)]

Matt, I tought this was an excellent and thorough post on personas. A couple months ago I wrote a very brief blog entry on personas that linked to a good SEOmoz video on how to create personas: http://www.michaelmadej.com/2008/02/developing-personas-for-your-web.html

[John-Scott Dixon]

Matt, we absolutely love seeing the top bloggers like you and David Armano bringing "Personas" to the forefront! In the last year, we've been taking them one step further into what we call "Semantic Personas".

Essentially, after you've defined a persona in the way you've outlined in this post, we create a model for how we'll detect when a representative matching that persona has arrived at your website.

Our technology is called Semanticator ( http://www.semanticator.com ). Once it detects the presence of a persona-based visitor, a Semanticator-enabled website will display the most relevant content, simplify navigation, adjust imagery to be more supportive, etc.

This is having a direct impact on reducing bounce rate (visitors entering and exiting the same page) and increasing conversion.

Keep talking about Personas - bringing market segments to life!!!