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What exactly is a User Persona?

It is a fictional character carved out from your target group. These user personas will even have a name like real people. It’s like picking up your ideal customer and listing down their characteristics.

Why is a User Persona important?

Personas give you an opportunity to step into your target group’s shoes helping you understand their problems with better clarity. This way you can produce relatable content, which will engage your audience for sure.

How to develop User Personas?

Before developing user personas you are going to need some really important data. This data should be accurate and will be the first building block of your User Persona exercise. These are:

Intent:

What do you want to achieve by marketing your business? Typical answers would be branding, selling, lead generation etc. You will be required to finalize and write down your objectives in this section.

Audience:

Each of these parameters needs to be identified with utmost precision.

Age: (range cannot exceed a decade)

Location:

Education:

Designation:

Internet Usage:

What would motivate them to purchase/connect with us:

Preferred communication medium:

Formula:

Intent x Audience = User Persona

A user persona can differ because of age, education or any of the other parameters mentioned in the Audience section.

Understand this better with an example. To begin with, I have done this exercise for “DigiChefs – A high-performance creative agency in Andheri, Mumbai“:

User Persona 1:

Intent: Getting leads for digital marketing service business.

Audience: Age 35 – 50

Demographics: Tier 1 Metro (Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai etc.)

Education: Engineers, MBA, Doctors

Designation: Co-founders, CEOs, Marketing Managers

Internet Usage: FB, LinkedIn, Instagram (in that order of priority)

What would motivate them to purchase/connect with us: Trust, Previous client work.

Preferred communication medium: Email, Phone, Whatsapp (in that order of priority)

Intent x Audience = User Persona

User Persona 1: I want to gain Mr.Singh’s trust who is a realtor since the last 15 years. He is unable to expand at the pace he had planned to. Mr.Singh has had a bad experience with his previous agency, hence needs someone with a proven track record, transparency and honesty in their actions.

He primarily is active on FB and LinkedIn but is an amateur when it comes to Instagram. I want to convince Mr.Singh that we are sound scholars of the digital industry and have successfully delivered digital campaigns in the past.  My communication with him will be serious, professional and to the point. We will stay authentic and not oversell ourselves by showing off more than what we can deliver.

Here again, we can have 2 more personas by changing designations to MBA and Doctors.

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User Persona 2:

Intent: Inspire, entertain and attract talent of/to DigiChefs.

Audience: Age 21- 27

Demographics: Mumbai

Education: Engineers, BMS & Commerce graduates

Designation: Interns, Digital Marketers

Internet Usage: Instagram, FB, LinkedIn (in that order of priority)

What would motivate them to purchase/connect with us: Fun at work, career progression, learn/self-improvement

Preferred communication medium: Social Media, Phone, Email, Whatsapp (in that order of priority)

Intent x Audience = User Persona

User Persona 2: I want to entice Aditi, a BMS graduate (1-year experience), that DigiChefs is a fun place to work at, where she would learn and progress much faster in her career than in any other agency.

Since Aditi is from Mumbai, my communication/jokes/memes/slangs can stay around Mumbai, this way she gets more relatable content and connects well. My communication tone with her will be playful, quirky or ‘meme’ish even.

Here, we will have 1 more persona for  27+ age personnel (soon to be married) whose motivation to join would be stability and a good designation in the company.

User personas need not be limited to one, ideally, each of our TG(Client, Employees) should have multiple user personas which may vary depending upon age, and other demographics. Having multiple user personas ensures the majority of the TG is covered.

Also, notice how both my personas have different “preferred communication medium” and different “internet usage”, this tells me that I can be witty, funny on Instagram but not so much on FB and not even a tad bit on LinkedIn.

These personas once identified can then be utilized while writing paid copies, blogs, social copies or any form of content including video production.

You simply have to imagine you are writing for Mr. Singh or Ms. Aditi only.

Generic content is never relatable to anyone, the only way we can come up with relatable content is via this approach. They say, your content consumer should think that this is written specifically for me.

Interestingly, the above formula can be modified and used to identify a Voice for your brand.

((Intent x Audience) = User Persona) + Tone = Voice of the brand

Drop in your email ID in the comments section and we will share an elaborate content piece explaining this formula.

Also read: Brand Owned Website vs. Marketplace: How should a new brand sell online?