Persona: what is it and how do you define it?

Defining your personality (s) is the basis of any marketing and commercial strategy. In this article, I'll show you how to do it step by step. Follow the guide.

When you start a business — or want to boost it — you want to go fast. With our heads in our handlebars and boosted by ambition, we focus on acquisition channels, we think about our strategy, or even on hacks to grow quickly. But we forget the main thing: its customers. You don't spend much time thinking about who you want to talk to.

“I'm targeting just about everyone”, “I'm targeting urban men and women.” These targets are far too broad and vague. Let's not forget it: it is by aiming at everyone that we are not targeting anyone!

Without a precise definition and knowledge of its targets, failure is guaranteed.

So to avoid this, there is a method: personas.

What is a persona?

A persona (also called buyer persona) is a fictional person symbolizing your ideal customer. It is the robot portrait of your potential target, the one who is most likely to convert.

It is defined by a set of characteristics:

• Socio-demographics (age, gender, family situation, family situation, level of education, income)
• Professionals (status, activity, seniority)
• Psychological (decision biases)
• Behavioral (typical day)
• Its challenges (expectations, goals)
• Its brakes

Why define your personas?

Segmentation is the key to an effective strategy. As mentioned above, it is impossible to target everyone.

A complete and accurate persona profile will allow you to better define your target audience and make better informed marketing decisions.

It is by knowing your target that you will indeed know how to reach them and especially how to seduce them. You will be able to better target your offers, your advertisements, your messages and especially your content. By creating content adapted to your personas, you will attract highly qualified traffic to your site.

Knowing your audience well is also the key to a good Copywriting.

How do you define your personas?

To define your personas, you will have to ask (yourself) the right questions.

Here is a non-exhaustive list:

• Is it male or female?
• How old is he?
• What is his remuneration? CSP+? Junior?
• What is his family situation?
• What are their consumption habits?
• What position does he hold?
• What sector of activity does he work in?
• What are his areas of interest?
• What are his frustrations? Her or her problems?
• What are its goals?
• Is he a decision-maker?
• What digital channels is it active on?
• Etc.

At Growth Room, we use a form of questions to fill out. You can find it Right here. It's a gift;)

Data collection

Defining your personas is a painstaking job. It is not enough to imagine the typical profile of your target audience, quite the opposite. A persona is certainly a fictional character, but it is built on real data, proven facts.

So you have to go a little further in your work.

The basis will be to collect as much information as possible on the audiences you have identified.

To do this, several methods are available to you.

Ask your salespeople (if you have any)

Your sales representatives are directly in contact with your prospects and customers. They know perfectly well their behavior, their expectations, their obstacles, etc. So do not hesitate to ask them in order to gather as much information as possible.

If you are alone at the helm, then try to identify by yourself all the common characteristics of your prospects and current customers.

Interviewing customers and targets

To gather information, the best way is to contact your prospects/customers directly.

In B2B

You can send a form by email with Typeform or Google Forms for example, or you can organize a call lasting a few minutes.

Tips. Don't forget Typeform's “reporting” function, which is super cool in terms of UX to analyze your results.

Another possibility: contact people on LinkedIn by PM (private message) and ask them to give you 15 minutes on the phone. Don't be afraid, most people love to tell stories about their lives!

Here are some examples of questions to ask:

• What activities take up the most time?
• What part of your business do you prefer? Love the least?
• If you had to change something in your work, what would it be?

Note: in B2B, we will mainly focus on socio-professional criteria. This is normal, a B2B player makes a purchase decision that is rational and often does so in a group.

In B2C

If you are in B2C, you can also create quizzes that you share on Facebook groups.

Also ask your customers directly, those from the first hour.

Also, do not hesitate to watch, “spy” on the customer feedback of your competitors on e-commerce platforms such as Amazon.

A few questions in B2C:

• What do you do after work?
• What do you like to do on the weekends, on your own time?
• What do you do outside of work?
• What activities take up the most time at home?
• What is your favorite time of day?

In B2C, the buying decision is less rational. It is mainly based on the emotional. So more personal characteristics are needed.

Whether you are in B2C or B2B, you can also interact on forums (Quora for example), publish posts on Facebook groups, Instagram accounts, etc. By exchanging with Internet users, you can collect very valuable information.

This work is tedious, but it will also be useful for your Copywriting. You will know how your targets express themselves. As a reminder: it is by speaking the same language of your target that you will be able to reach them.

Tips: there is no need to interview 1,000 people. Above all, this exercise must be qualitative and not quantitative. Also, don't waste your time collecting information that you won't be able to use.

Tips. To define the psychological profile of your personas, note that there is a method: SONCAS. Each letter corresponds to a decision bias:

• Ssafety (need to be reassured)
• Opride (ego, stand out)
• NNovelty (focused on innovation)
• CComfort (simplicity)
• AMoney (quality/price ratio, return on investment)
• Ssympathy (person committed to human values)

Try to identify what bias (s) your potential targets are based on when you are in contact with them.

Harvest/Analyze your data

In addition to your interviews, you can use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Google Analytics gives you very useful information about your users: age, gender, where they are, whether they use a mobile, computer or tablet, etc. You can also find out their interests on the Web (outside of your site).

Example for Growth Room:

Google Search Console Indicates what requests people type to get to your site. Very interesting information to gather!

Other tool: Facebook Audience Insights. You can accurately know the demographics of your audience, what people like, what interests they have, etc. At Growth Room, for our B2C customers, we use Facebook Audience Insights during our personality audits.

Of course, don't forget to analyze your CRM data as well. That is the base.

What if we start or pivot? Your data will indeed be quite meager. Then take what little information you have and make continuous updates to refine your personas as you go.

Identify 3 people

Once all the information is collected, you must now remove as many common points as possible, organize them and group them into target categories. Objective: to highlight very distinct personas, those corresponding to your main segments.

Advice: limit yourself to only 3 people.

Why? Because the more personas you have, the more actions you will have to multiply. If you have 10 personas, you will need to develop 10 different content plans, 10 different content plans, 10 different ad campaigns, 10 different landing pages, etc. So imagine the work that needs to be done!

So stay focused on a few personas.

As the other would say: “Whoever hunts too many hares at the same time is likely to catch none.”

“Model” your personas

Writing your personas graphically speaking is also important.

To do this, you can use several tools.

Among our favorites:

• Xtensio
• Make My Persona from Hubspot

These tools are free and have a lot of options allowing you to be quite clear about the profiles you want to target.

You can give your persona a first name and even give it a face. Making it “alive” will allow you to better put yourself in its place.

Update your personas regularly

You have now defined and created your personas. But the work is not done, far from it.

Your personas are not fixed, they are evolving !

Their expectations and consumption habits change over time. You will therefore have to make them evolve regularly. Ideally every 6 months or so.

In a future article, we'll see how to optimize them.

And in another article, I will explain to you how to transcribe your persona to an applicable audience.

It's up to you to play now!

If you need support, do not hesitate to contact us at welcome@growthroom.co. We start all our support with a thorough audit of the personas.