All about personas
What is a persona?
A persona is a detailed description of a type of customer you may want to serve. Instead of treating “all customers” as the same, you can improve profits and customer satisfaction by realizing that specific types of people or businesses have their own different needs, problems, and goals. Think of each persona as a character in a story. Think of their background, what they care about, what frustrates them, and what they’re looking for. This will help design your product, remove unimportant features, and target sales messaging that speaks directly to personas.
How to define personas
Personas are defined by what they ‘say’ and ‘do’ and how they ‘feel’ and ‘think’ relative to how this group of individuals would choose and then use and benefit from your product or service. Personas are usually given a relevant nickname, like “Jake” or “Elisa” for easy recall. There is usually a summary, similar to what is shown below of how they feel and think and what they say and do relative to your idea and how these actions, thoughts, feelings, etc. would impact what the persona would find most important in choosing and loving your product or service.
In the B2B world, personas are referred to as market segments. Each segment has its own needs and wants relative to a specific product and that impacts marketing and sales strategies, materials and actions. Within a given market segment, there will decision-making and user-operator personas that will characterize the details of how your product or service needs to be designed to be used by workers as opposed to be used by management. There are personas that can be discovered that reflect how the heads of departments that might implement your software think and feel and what they say and how they act. Their personas will be very different than those of the people that work in the department and who would actually use your product. Even those these workers may come from very different backgrounds, there will be similarities in how they think and feel and what they say and how they act, because they work within a specific work culture that rewards certain behaviors and action and discourages others. You should be able to discern these different personas within the market segment you are serving based upon all the potential customer interviews you did as described in sprint 3.
Finding personas in your data
Make a list of all the things the people you observed and interviewed indicated would or could make them happy if you implemented your idea. By each of the things listed, put the name or description of all the people that it would make happy. Look for clumps of similarities in the descriptions of the people tied to each thing listed. These clumps are personas. Continue by looking for patterns of similar desirable things based upon age group, gender, profession, background, type of business or any other grouping you think should lead to a different set of needs and desires.
How much data do you need to find and properly define a persona?
In sprint 3, we discussed how many interviews you need to do to feel comfortable that the potential customer group you identified actually might love your idea to give you the confidence and lower the risks to proceed to making your product or service a reality. The numbers discussed should be good enough to confidently split the groups you identified as potential customers into 2 or 3 more detailed personas. You may be able to see a few more potential personas in your analysis, but you will need to do additional interviews to get enough understanding of the feelings, actions, and thinking of the smaller persona groups. You need at least a dozen examples from your interview group to give you enough detail to identify a specific persona. With a dozen examples you can have the confidence to invest money and time into marketing to them.
An example of two different personas and the insights they trigger
If you were starting a meal-delivery service:
Persona 1: “Busy Professional” – In their thirties, works long hours, wants healthy food fast, doesn’t mind paying more for convenience.
Persona 2: “Health-conscious Parent” – late thirties to late forties, has kids, cares about nutrition, wants affordable family meals.
Both could be your customers—but what you say to each, and the features they care about most, and what they are willing to pay for those features might be different. Using this simple example, you might want to estimate how much more Persona1 is willing to pay for your service to be open later versus the costs of operating longer hours. You would compare that to how much you can save by closing earlier but having to charge lower prices in serving Persona2.
You would market your services differently to these two personas, perhaps focusing on ads in local papers for Persona2 and ads on top of taxicabs if going after Persona1.
These are only two of many ways you might optimize profits in this business by understanding personas. Both the survival and prosperity of a startup of any type will depend on how well you know exactly what will make your initial target persona happy enough to gladly give you their money in return.