Persona Development
Understand your customers and get your organization moving in the right direction.
Personas are customer archetypes that represent hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people boiled down into one fictional representative with a name, a face, and a personal history. Persona Development is the process of synthesizing massive amounts of data - quantitative and qualitative - identifying the most common attributes of each customer segment, and creating a common language organizations can use to streamline internal processes, craft more effective marketing messages, create new products, enter new markets - the sky's the limit.
Persona Development provides new insight into who customers are, what makes them tick, and what causes them to engage - or not engage - with the organization. And the applications of that knowledge are endless.
The eBoost Way
We consider Personas the foundation to great marketing strategy. If you are truly going to develop a sustained competitive advantage you must look at your customer. Kenichi Ohmae posits that clients are the base of any strategy therefore your primary goal should be to your customer’s interests and not those of your shareholders. By putting customer interests first you will automatically take care of shareholder interests.
The tools used to look at customers’ interests: focus groups, case studies, analytics, blind tests, mystery shoppers, call monitoring etc. all lead to one thing: a substantial amount of data. Data is typically not a problem for most organizations. The challenge is presenting the data in a way that is both meaningful and actionable. This is where the strength of personas becomes very apparent.
Personas can be created from existing internal data as well as from external sources of data. At eBoost Consulting, we typically look to first utilize internal data gathered from interviewing key stakeholders within an organization. Sales staff, marketing team members, and receptionists can all be great sources of first hand information on your customers. For a more comprehensive approach, data gathered from internal teams can be combined with website analytics data, data from research institutions, surveys, and interviews with existing and past customers.
Once the data gathering phase is complete it is time to segment the data into personas. To be effective you want to limit this to somewhere between 3-7 segments. Segments typically become apparent in the data gathering phase. Personas are then created around not only the demographics, psychographics, and topology of each segment but their unique needs, wants, and demands as well. The end result is distinct segments for each persona with detailed information on that segments pain points, goals, behaviors, and influencers.
The deliverable is an actual Persona bio representing a segment of data, complete with picture, name, age, and all accompanying details. Personas are accompanied by a fictional narrative that incorporates data from the segment they represent. Their pain points, goals, influencers, questions, and how they make decisions are all included in their persona document.
Persona Development gives an organization a common language. Employees in customer service, product development, and sales can now communicate more clearly, referring to one customer as a "Paul" and another as a "Debbie." Just that one association represents a massive amount of data that can then be used to inform all kinds of company decisions, including the most important one - addressing that customer's unique needs.
Personas help an entire organization get on the same page and moving as one in a common direction. All other marketing activities, not to mention other functions, benefit immensely from this foundation.
Next Steps
eBoost Case Studies
Conversion Design Case Study
One of the first in the home decorating products category, Home of Decor's marketing communications needed consistency and its organizational team needed to be on the same page. Its website was outdated and not reflective of the company brand. ... read more »
eBoost Articles
The Brand Your Brand Could Look Like
'Hello ladies. Look at your man, now back at me, now back at your man, now back to me. Sadly, he isn't me.' Does this sound familiar? That's the power of fantastic branding. When Old Spice rebranded with their "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" campaign they increased sales by 125% and stood out among all other body wash products available. ... read more »
Did You Know?
Personas provide a common language allowing Customer Service, Sales, Executives, and Marketing to communicate more effectively about customer needs, wants, and demands.
