Episodio 02: Users Buyers Personas.
Timestamp
0:00 - Introduction
1:05 - Topic: User Persona or Buyer Persona
4:40 - ¿What’s a User or Buyer Persona?
7:35 - Step by step on how to establish your User Persona.
8:20 - Step One: Gather Information
9:40 - Step two: Creation of hypothesis.
11:48 - Step three: Identifying how many User Persona you want to create. 12:12 - Step Four: Describe the type of User Persona you’ve found.
13:22 - Step Five: Prepare and describe possible scenarios for the User Persona just created.
14:20 - Step Six: Adjustments of the User Persona created.
Read about this episode:
Hello! Welcome again to another episode of Digital Jump. Today we will talk about a topic I learned when I was a software developer. Since that moment I have been using this, not only to develop platforms but also while thinking about marketing strategies. I always suggest this to entrepreneurs when they are looking to build something or while having trouble converting users to paying users. This topic is called Users Buyers Personas. Typically in the tech world, we call it User Persona, but in this context, I’d like to call it User or Buyer persona because we’re focusing on the buyers.
In this episode, I’ll talk about what it is, why it is important, how we go about creating one, and how we can apply it. I don’t know if this has happened that you’re selling a product or service and you notice there are a lot of people interested in it, approaching you and liking your social media pages, but they’re not really buying the product. Maybe while thinking about the content you want to add in your social media you might feel a bit overwhelmed thinking about a number of elements and you go from being minimalist and modest to more casual and welcoming. In the end it becomes a mix of everything and it’s hard to choose only one path. Is it what I like? Or maybe what the User likes? Sometimes we forget that the user is, in the end, an individual and we think of it as a community. E.g all of these users want this! This is clearly a hypothetical situation but we should start thinking about the User as an individual. It’s important to consider unique user experiences that really help to convert your User into a Paying User.
It’s really important your User knows we Understand their needs and challenges. Because we understand them, we are able to provide a solution to the problem. More than 50% of consumers expect your brand to customize their needs to what we are offering. We offer something thinking it will give value and enough information for them to choose it over our competitors when actually it doesn’t really connect with them. Then it’s important to use the concept User Buyer Persona because it will help us connect with customers and choose what type of content to share with them.
Commitment, credibility, and trust are three really essential things to convert a user to a buyer user. At this point, you might be wondering what is this User Buyer Persona? When we talk about this term, what we’re actually doing is building this fictional character based on research, representing different types of users that could potentially buy our products or hire our services in a similar way, so we know which kind of users are connecting with us. When we create a user buyer Persona, we are actually making the process of understanding the needs we’re trying to meet and also understanding what type of experiences and behaviors our users have. This allows us to take ourselves out from our own bubble and see who is the one we’re connecting with or who’s having the problem we’re trying to solve. This will facilitate your marketing process and product development, it could even improve your social media. Depending on the size of your company it could do much more. If you are working with web designers, they will understand what’s a user persona, so you can use this knowledge and even give it a name. Let’s say John the compilation of what you know about your users. So John is 20 years old, he’s into wellness and natural products. As a team, you can all make decisions based on John's lifestyle. Your team can think about strategies like hey! I think it might be helpful because John is an XYZ type of person.
I’ve created 6 simple steps to build your User Persona. I’ll go briefly with each of them but if you want to know more you can go to my webpage Digital Jump and I’ll also put a link in the description below.
Let’s start with the first step which is to Collect Data. The research phase is often the first step. Collect as much information about the user as possible. Performing high-quality user searches of your actual users or your target users. Once you have as much information as possible you can go ahead and analyze it. In this step you could go to your social media and try checking analytics like demographic, where are my users coming from? Who’s attracted to my product? Then try checking Google Analytics. Besides demographic there's also the possibility of understanding which page they spend the most time in, what is it they click right before buying your product, or even at what time they shop the most!
That way you know what time is best to connect with your users. You can analyze out of your social media and website what calls the most attention. What’s the most eye-catching? Perhaps the brand, price, type of products, a reference, a testimonial...Surveys are also an awesome way to collect information. Share the survey through different channels asking questions based on your own assumptions and check with your customers if those assumptions were real.
Once this information is collected we can move on to the second step which is the formulation of the hypothesis. With data, you can establish a more precise theory about the type of users you’re trying to focus on. How’s this possible? By asking questions. E.g In the background category you can try questions like:
-What's your gender?
-What city were you born in?
-What’s your age?
In a more educational field:
-what schools did you go to?
-How was your performance in school?
-What type of job do you have?
-What industry do you work in?
-What’s your ideal job?
-How long have you been working in your current job?
In tech, it’s important to think about what type of device your customers are using. How often they are using them. What social channels they’re using the most.
I have a list of all these questions available in digitaljump.com if you want to check it out. Having the answer to those questions will help you to create an accurate Buyer User Persona. Remember, you can create a name for every type of user persona if characteristics are different. My suggestion is trying to minimize the number of personas which takes us to the third step: establishing a number. You need to decide the right amount of user personas. Try to choose the one that will be your primary focus. Too many will be a lot more complex.
The fourth step is describing this persona. The purpose of working with this idea of Persona is to develop solutions, so you know exactly what type of niche you’re trying to sell your product to. By describing this persona we’re trying to find a way to manifest enough understanding and empathy for our users. Here you can work with the answers to the previous question like education, interest, lifestyle, goals. You can include fictional details to give a face to this character. E.g John is 20 years old he recently had surgery and after the surgery, he completely changed his lifestyle. There’s no John, but he condenses the majority of your customer's characteristics and gives a face to the name. Typically I do 1 of 2 description pages for each persona.
Now let’s move to step 5. In this step, you will prepare a situation for your newly created persona. You need to describe a specific situation where the user is actually choosing our brand. For example, a customer is going through a difficult moment that makes them think I need this specific product. Think about why they would choose you over other similar brands. Think about any situation your customers might be facing that could trigger their needs of buying your product or solution.
The last step is about adjustments. Now that you have your persona and scenarios set up; you have a description, a name, and a challenge, a good practice is to reevaluate your Persona bit by bit. Things are constantly changing. For example, now with COVID19, the entire lifestyle of many people has changed so if you already had a persona, take the time to redefine whether the information or challenges your persona has been the same as it’s now. The situation might be different. Your priorities might be different! If your situation changes, adapt it to your customers. Maybe the way you deliver products, add services, or create a different type of message. This is your chance to refund what you’re offering, the tools to attract people, and open new doors.
Those were 6 steps to create your User Buyer Persona and know more about your customers. I hope you find it helpful and use it to start creating your own version of Persona. If you already have it try to rethink it taking the steps into account. Get inspired, read about it, there are many blogs talking about Buyer Persona online. There are many ways to reach and empathize with your users, not focusing on your assumptions but in thoughtful research to consciously understand who you’re targeting. Feel free to drop me any questions, comments or ideas in the comment sections below! See you in the next episode!
Gabriela
