What is a persona?
What is a persona?
Personas are a way to help organisations understand their potential and existing customers in a more personal way.
Personas are detailed profiles of a particular customer, who represents a distinct group of people – in which they share similar behaviour, attitudes, personalities and preferences of your product/service, but are the figure for a larger demographic.
Typically, personas are built by researching and interviewing real people to gain qualitative data, and this information often shapes how a design team develops a product/service and how a marketing team strategize their messaging around it.
In a digital world, your business can still build persona(s) based on current customers through quantitative data – of the kind you can discover in your Google Analytics
Where to start when creating personas?
You need to understand who you are talking to. You need to identify your audience.
You’ll hear this called many different terms: user, audience or customer segmentation – but whatever you call the human being who is actually using your product, the process behind identifying them is very simple, You need to give life to your data.
This allows you to visualise data so anyone can understand it. Building persona building can help achieve many goals…
Reveal buyer’s concerns
Evaluate buyer’s behaviour so you can see their journey
Create content strategy with topics you need to target
What types of buyers are interested in your services (age, location, medium they use, social network preferences)
You just need to break down your data into various dimensions to build characteristics of your current and potential customer.
These include age, location, gender, language and device preference.
How to collect data for creating personas?
Age and Gender
Here is an example of the analytics from. You can see the breakdown of ages by clicking Audience>Demographics>Overview
The largest demographic we have is ’25-34 year-old male’. Here’s where you can start creating your first persona. You can build the group with the highest representation first, but don’t forget that this isn’t your only audience. You’ll also need to build personas for all your high performing demographics.
Affinity
Affinity Category are used to reach potential customers to make them aware of your brand or product/service.
These are users higher in the purchase funnel, near the beginning of the process.
Below, I added the ‘Affinity’ secondary dimension to the Age demographic to reveal the main interests of our 25-34 year-old audience.
In-Market
Within the ‘Secondary dimension’ drop-down menu we can then search for ‘In-Market Segment’
The In-market segment is a way to connect with customers who are actively researching and comparing products or services across the Google Network (YouTube, paid search, display ads,..etc).
Users in these segments are more likely to be ready to purchase products or services in the specified category. These are users lower in the purchase funnel, near the end of the process.
Below you can see what products/services our audiences are interested in…
Geo
You can also filter by language and location in order to see where in the would your audience is visiting from.
To find this filter, click:
Audience>Geo>Language
Audience>Geo>Location.
Keep in mind that language is very important. If your site has a mainly English-US speaking audience, it means that perhaps you should start removing ‘u’ when you write ‘colour’ – something you may need to consider along with your SEO parameters.
Devices
Now you need to find out what devices your audience are using to access your site.
By clicking:
Audience>Mobile>Devices
You can see exactly which brand of mobile they’re using and even what service provider or operating system they prefer.
All above data can be generated using any analytics dashboard, not just Google Analytics.
Just remember that however you obtain it, when you’re putting it together, avoid having it in just a giant spreadsheet, you need to make it look super clear and give it a personality.
Avoid putting these together in a clinical way (by naming them Persona 1, Persona 2,..etc)
Want to know more or discuss further, Contact me.
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