Marketing Basics! Thorough Explanation Of How To Set Personas

When you are involved in product planning and marketing, you are required to have a user perspective in various situations. “Persona setting” is indispensable for developing a business that is close to the user at any time.

Even when you have a hard time attracting customers or your sales performance does not improve, you may find a clue to a solution by looking back on “Who is the persona”. In this article, I will explain in detail the merits of personal setting and how to make it that you should know when planning and marketing products.

What Is a Persona

A persona is, in a nutshell, a fictitious user image. When providing a certain product or service, setting in detail what kind of person the typical user is is called a persona set.

In the persona setting, not only statistical attributes such as age, gender, and place of residence, but also personality, values, and behavior patterns are drawn concretely.

Difference Between Persona And Target

A “target” is often confused with a persona in marketing. Persona marketing and target marketing are similar in that they think about who their users are, but in persona marketing, the point is to think of customers as individuals who focus on lifestyle and values, not as a group of layers. It becomes.

Let me give you a concrete example. In target marketing, statistical attributes such as gender and age or the market are classified into several layers, and the strategy is considered by deciding which customer group to target.

• Target: Female office worker in her 30s

On the other hand, in persona marketing, we set a user image (persona) that symbolizes a certain customer base and devise a strategy to meet the needs of that person.

• Persona: Jill Anderson (35 years old). Regional Headquarters. He is married and has one child. I fly on business trips about 4 to 8 times a year. The cities you visit are fixed, and the hotels you use are always the same. Nevertheless, I am dissatisfied with having to spend time booking every time.

Why You Need a Persona

Persona setting is a very effective process for accurate marketing.

Even if you try to think of a strategy for a customer base that is divided by statistical attributes such as “female office worker in 30s” and “male in 40s living in Tokyo”, it depends on the person’s social position and family structure. Lifestyles and values ​​vary. 

Even if you try to market with an unclear user image, there are too few clues to come up with specific measures.

Now that products and services that are close to the lifestyle and values ​​of customers, such as D2C (Direct to Customer), are attracting attention, how well a company understands the essence of its users determines the outcome of a business. The argument that “this person needs this kind of product because he lives like this” and “this person has this kind of value, so this kind of appeal method is effective” has carefully crafted a persona. It will be possible for the first time.

Benefits Of Setting a Persona

Persona marketing, which considers strategies while assuming user psychology and behavior patterns, has various merits.

Advantage 1: It Becomes Easier To Discover User’s Troubles

When thinking about a new business, it is easier to create good products and services if you understand what kind of worries and problems users have. By creating a realistic user image with persona settings, you will be able to develop a brand strategy that is close to the user.

Advantage 2: Subjectivity Can Be Eliminated When Making Decisions

Daily marketing activities require a variety of decisions, such as thinking about effective ways to attract customers and choosing themes for blog posts. If you are always aware of the persona you have set, you can make these decisions without bringing in personal preferences or conveniences.

Benefit 3: Share Personas Within Your Team

If the definition of the target is ambiguous and each member envisions a different image of the user, the project will be inconsistent. If you set a persona in advance, all members can have a common understanding and proceed smoothly with the project.

Elements That Make Up a Persona

In persona settings, it is important to set the person in the user image in detail as if the person really exists. The following four points are important factors in setting a user image that is useful for actual marketing activities.

Statistical Attributes

• sex
• age
• Occupation, job title
• income
• Family structure
• residence

Personality

• Personality
• Values
• Habit
• Trouble
• Dream for the future

Lifestyle

• How to spend the day
• Consumption activity patterns
• How to collect information
• Friendship
• hobby

How To Relate To Your Company’s Products And Services

• How to know
• What kind of points do you sympathize with?
• What are the factors that prevent the purchase
• What are the deciding factors for purchasing
• What kind of effect can be obtained after purchase

How To Make a Persona

Here, we will explain how to set a persona on the premise of planning a new product to be sold at an online shop.

Step 1: Gather Information

The first step is to gather information about the user. There are various ways to collect information, so it is a good idea to combine multiple methods to collect information from multiple perspectives.

• Access analysis: Perform access analysis of online shops to find out what keywords users visited the site, what pages they visited, what they purchased, and what they did not. Speaking of access analysis, Google Analytics is famous, but if you open an online shop with Shopify, you can easily grasp the movement of the user on the site by using the Shopify store analysis function.
• Questionnaire / Interview: Hearing users who have purchased similar products, why they purchased the product, what kind of effects and dissatisfaction they have after purchasing, etc. can be used as a reference when planning a new product. Become. Let’s extract the relevant users from the past sales history and investigate. Questionnaires are suitable when a large number of samples are required, and interviews are suitable when seeking qualitative information from a specific person.
• Social Listening: There is a method called social listening to find out the true intentions of users that are difficult to draw out through questionnaires and interviews. Collect and analyze social media posts to understand potential user demands.

Step 2: Sort The Collected Information

Next, organize the collected data. The point when organizing a huge amount of data is to create groups with similar tendencies from the perspectives of “worries,” “values,” “lifestyle,” and “motivation for purchasing.” By classifying information in this way, we can see the characteristics that are common to many users.

Step 3: Finish In The Shape Of a Persona

Once you can see the characteristics of the user, it is finally time to put them together in the form of a persona. Based on the collected data, let’s draw concretely the basic attributes, personality, and lifestyle, and how to relate to your company’s products and services. If you give a name to the user image that emerges and adds a photo, the persona becomes more human and familiar. In addition, it will be easier to share images with team members by devising something that is visually easy to understand using not only sentences but also figures and graphs.

Persona Setting Points  

In order to utilize personas in product planning and marketing, keep the following points in mind.

Point 1: Create Based On Data

The most important thing to avoid when setting up a persona is to create a user image with just your imagination and ideas. Although a persona is a fictitious person, it is valuable as a hint for product planning and marketing because it is created based on the data of real users. The degree of in-depth research that can be done at the information gathering stage determines the completeness of the persona, so take the time to conduct a preliminary survey.

Point 2: You Don’t Have To Focus On One Person, But Don’t Make Too Much

When you see a wide variety of users, you may want to create many patterns of personas. As a matter of fact, if you combine various users into one type of person, there will be patterns that do not apply to that, so you may set two to three personas and think about strategies for each pattern. However, if you create many personas, the user image will not be decided, after all, so be careful not to create too many personas.

Point 3: Be Aware Of The Customer Journey

Just cutting and pasting the collected data into the dark clouds is another step toward the perfection of the persona. When users assemble information while keeping in mind the customer journey of where they know the product, what they think and act, and how they make a purchase, hints for solving problems in the lifestyle and values ​​of the persona Can be seen.

Point 4: Regularly Review The Set Persona

Once you make a persona, it’s not over. As the environment surrounding the market changes, the needs and values ​​of users change day by day. You may also get noticed from the perspective of another user, which was not visible from the perspective of one user. Regularly verify that the persona you set reflects the actual user image, keeping an eye on changes in the environment, trends, and user needs.

Set a Persona And Make Your Online Shop a Success

The primary purpose of setting a persona is to be from the user’s perspective. The idea of ​​persona setting has become widely known among people involved in product planning and marketing, but there are some cases where personas are created without understanding the actual situation of the user.

If you run your own ecommerce site, the online shop is a treasure trove of user information. Instead of leaving the accumulated customer data as it is, please try to set a persona as an opportunity to think about what the user’s needs are and what products and services should be provided to meet those needs.

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