Defining Your Target Audience with Personas

Personas are a common marketing and design tactic that help to focus your marketing campaign or project. They’re character sketches of individual audience members that define who the website, product or service is for in order to bring the user into the project development process. Personas help marketers visualize their audience and better understand their needs in relation to the campaign.

Christina Wodtke, a usability expert, explanations persona development in her book Information Architecture: Designing for the Web. She refers to persona development as “playing Barbies.”

Just like when you were five years old and played Barbies by creating imaginary lives for Barbie and Ken, creating personas is about creating make-believe lives for your audience members.

Ultimately, personas help to move you away from what the project team wants and towards what the persona wants. Instead of saying “I like the colour yellow, so we should use it on our homepage design” you can say “Bob will have trouble reading yellow text and we should choose a colour that makes it easiest for Bob to complete the task.”

The persona process that we’ve developed is built from Wodtke’s book, Information Architecture: Designing for the Web, “Chapter 6: From A to C by Way of B.”

Preferably, a project will have both primary personas - common user types that are important to the business success of the project - and secondary personas - user types that are very different from primary users but whose needs still need to be addressed for the success of the project. This helps to ensure that all user needs are outlined.

We recommend creating 3 primary personas - common user types that are important to the business success of the project - and 2 to 3 secondary personas - user types that are very different from primary users but whose needs still need to be addressed for the success of the project - for every project.

Ideally, you should start with audience research. Take a survey, talk to your fans on Facebook, find any way you can to get to know your target users.

Once you have your primary data, begin creating your personas by starting with the user’s name, demographics and psychographics. This should include age, gender, location, family life, likes and dislikes, and his or her location in the adoption curve (innovator, early adopter, early majority, or late majority).

Build on this to develop the user’s professional and personal background (including job title, job history, role in the company, leisure activities, and hobbies); a quote that encapsulates the persona’s attitude towards your product or service; internet or technical profile (that is, how often they use the web and how comfortable they are online); and their favourite websites (this gives you an idea of what types of design they’re comfortable with and how they are interacting online).

Build your persona out further by outlining his or her goals with I need / I want statements. Goals are the crux of your personas because they determine what needs your project or campaign must meet.

When developing persons, don’t skimp. Building personas takes time. When we develop personas we generally allot 2 to 4 hours development time for each persona and we do this knowing that investing time at this stage will save us time in the end. The more real your personas are, the easier it is to develop a successful project or campaign.

Once your personas have been developed look at your project or campaign from the perspective of your personas. How would Bob interact with your product? What paths would he take through your site? What is easy to do? What’s difficult? Can Bob achieve his goals?

Sample Persona

Ruth > Publisher

Basics: 50-something, female, publisher of a mid-size press. She is a publisher with a huge amount of industry experience. She handles all of the long-term planning for her company, controls the purse strings and has various departments reporting to her.

Ruth says she understands the online world but needs to be convinced of new ideas. She says she wants to see the numbers when asked to part with her money, but it’s realy about needing to see credible sources and something she can relate to before she can learn something new.

Professional and personal background:
Ruth has a wide range of interests both professionally and personally. She is interested in books, magazines, art, design, interior decorating, traveling and staying fit. She likes to lead the pack and make recommendations to friends and family. While she used to be an early adopter, she is now part of the early majority.

Quote:
I want to spend my money on proven methods that I understand and I can’t afford to jump at every new opportunity. I’ve been working in the industry for over thirty years and while I understand that things are changing, to me, a book is still a book.

Technical Background:
She thinks she understands the web but only uses it at a basic level. She has email, visits news and book websites, and is aware of social media tools like Twitter and Facebook but has never used them.

Ruth uses/enjoys the websites:

• http://www.touchwoodeditions.com/
• http://booknetcanada.com
• http://www.nytimes.com

Goals:

• How do I choose well?
• Who should I read given limited time?
• Be my filter so I save time

I need / I want:

• I want to see case studies from companies I know
• I want to see value in where I spend my money
• I want to see reporting/numbers on where I spend my money
• I need credible sources that I can relate to
• I need to know how online fits in to the bigger publishing picture
• I want validation and an increased profile for my company
• I want to network at “C” level
• I need to quickly see if it is relevant or how it applies to my situation

Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here

Filed under: • Internet Marketing Strategy
Permalink

How To: Use Facebook Questions and Places – Part 2

Facebook Places
Facebook Places was announced August 19th and is currently only available in the US. Similar to Foursquare and Gowilla, you share your location by checking in to where you are by using your smartphone.

What’s All the Excitement Over Location-Based Apps?

Autumn Morris from Ignite Social Media, explains it best (quoting her professor):

Imagine you are driving down the road and you pass by Starbucks. If you are carrying your phone with you, then services with location based technology have the potential to send you a coupon at the exact moment you are passing by that store. Would that be valuable to you as a consumer? Yes. Would that be valuable to you as a marketer? Absolutely. In both instances, the consumer and marketer are allowed communication at the most optimized moment - right before a potential purchase.

How Places Work

Places is meant to be used on a smartphone but can also be used from your laptop or iPod. To use Places, go to the Places tab on the iPhone app or, if you’re not using it from a smartphone, go to touch.facebook.com. The first time you use it, you’ll be asked if Facebook is allowed to access your location, click “Allow” and then you’ll be brought into Places. From here you can share your location, see where your friends are (if they’re checking in with Places) and find places near you.

Your check-ins will appear on your profile, in your friends’ news feeds and in that location’s activity stream.

While you’re checking in, you can also check your friends in. If they haven’t used Places before, they will have to approve the check-in before it appears in their newsfeed. Next time they’re in Facebook, they’ll be asked to allow or deny the check-in.

There have been privacy concerns over friends being able to check-in others in as well as who can see your check-ins. If you’re concerned, here’s how to opt out of Places. 

Places for Business

Companies can now use Places to claim the location of their business. Your location can be added to Places by you or another Facebook user but needs to be verified by uploading an official document, like your business license. If another Facebook user adds your location to Places, you can go to the Place Page and click on “Is this Place Page your business?”, claim the location and verify it. Facebook users can like your Place Page and you can post updates to fans, as well as update your company’s information.

Although Place Pages are currently independent of your Fan Page, Place Pages are meant to eventually replace Fan Pages.

How To Use Facebook Places in Your Marketing:

• Offer special discounts or promotions to people who check-in to your business with Facebook Places.
• Generate word of mouth. Encourage users to post reviews or share information about your business through Facebook while they are checked-in and about give discounts to those that do. People’s networks tend to be bigger on Facebook than other location-sharing sites so there’s more opportunity with Facebook Places for word of mouth to spread.
• Encourage customer loyalty by giving fans special discounts every certain number of check-ins.
• Advertising. Soon Places will allow marketers to target people who check-in with relevant advertising. Places is built into Facebook’s advertising platform so you can choose to show ads to Facebook users who have checked into specific locations. If you’re interested in advertising, Facebook has a Places for Advertisers FAQ. 

For more information about Facebook Places, Mashable has an extensive Facebook Places Guide.

While both Facebook Questions and Places are still in the early stages, it will be interesting to see whether or not they take off within the Facebook community. Facebook Questions has the potential to be an effective networking and lead generation tool and Places may be bring location sharing into the mainstream. What’s your opinion about these new features?