You make your products for people, right? And, you offer your services to people.
But do you know what group of people in particular? Is it one group or several different groups? Are these people distinguished by location, interests, industry, niche, hobbies, specific step in their career, problems they face in their everyday life, their wishes, desires, goals, or needs?
Are they pre-school kids? Female entrepreneurs? Men with a beard? Restaurant owners? Pharmaceutical researchers? Corporate C-suite leaders? Construction builders? Start-up founders? Artists and creatives? Architects, who want to learn 3D modeling?
Now, you may think you know who they are, but do you really know who they are?
Have you conducted the research, included them in focus groups, asked them to participate in your surveys or studies, talked to them in 1-on-1 interviews, or walked out of your office and entered their workplaces and habitats to observe, ask, and learn along? You could, of course, get them on a conference call, video chat, online call, or ask them to complete the surveys online, as well.
There are plenty of research methods. As long as you don’t go out there and talk to your users, customers, or buyers, you won’t actually know your audience.
And I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to know your people before you start creating, producing, offering, or making something for them. It’s part of the research or the discovery phase for your product, business, or organization. And it is one of the most important assets of your business.
Once you have your research data collected, analyzed, and synthesized, you can get down to creating audience personas.
You can call them audience personas, buyer profiles, user avatars, audience archetypes, or anything else that you find appropriate, but their purpose will remain the same:
Personas are clearly defined profiles of your ideal customers.
Your ideal customer can be a single representative of your target audience, or it can be several representatives of several different target groups that you serve.
Having clearly defined personas helps every aspect of your business – production, design, content creation, marketing, sales, customer support, customer success, budgeting, and everything in between.
Depending on the goals you want to achieve, or the projects you create personas for, you can go with the narrow-scope or the broad-scope of persona definitions, as you’ll find explained in this article from the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g).
How to create a persona?
You can create a persona from scratch, or you can use a template. Either way, there are four basic questions to ask while making a profile of your ideal user or a customer:
What do they do?
How do they feel?
What do they think?
What do they say?
For this purpose, you need to walk in your customers’ shoes for a while, to get to know their thoughts, feelings, desires, urges, pains… Once you do, you can define the profiles. And while you do it, remember to be specific, narrow it down, and get into details.
What to include in a persona’s profile?
It will strongly depend on your business, industry, products, or services you offer.
In a nutshell, personas may include:
Name
Age
Location
Family status
Financial status
Job title
Goals
Motivations
Needs
Struggles
Desires
Values
Challenges
Hopes
Habits
Interests
I strongly advise not to make assumptions on any of these. However, you can start with an assumption, just make sure to verify it later.
For an extensive example of a persona, take a look at the Personas entry by Ph.D. and personas specialist Lena Nielsen, within the Interaction Design Foundation’s Encyclopedia of Human-Interaction Design (and please don’t be intimidated if this sounds like too much of a theory to you. It’s not, and you’ll learn about four different types of personas, too).
Learn from the Gemba
Think about the audience at large, but specifically, think of a single person, your ideal customer, or a user.
"Don't create for the world, create for a person."
– Deborah Adler
Deborah Adler is a designer and these wise words are from her TEDx talk Go to the Gemba. Gemba is a Japanese word for "the real place" or "the place where the work happens".
To know your ideal user and know the way they think and feel, how they work, what problems they encounter, what they struggle with, what they need, what they desire, what is their version of an ideal product, you need to go where they are. Talk to them, ask them relevant questions, see what they do, how they do it, and why.
Imagine a real estate agent who tries to sell houses without ever asking potential buyers what they are looking for. He wouldn’t be so successful, would he?
Personas + Content
Always, always, always have your audience in mind while producing content.
Audience personas are an excellent starting point for every content you plan to produce, create, and publish. The more you know about your audience, the better content you will create. It would be content that truly answers their questions, solves their problems, addresses their pain points, and offers informative, educational, and inspiring stories to them.
Here are some of my examples.
For my content consultancy, my ideal clients are purpose-driven individuals and organizations, both local and international, who are collaborative, willing to nurture a long-term relationship with a professional writer, who value high-quality content, and who would appreciate my expertise.
With that in mind, there are several groups of people I'd like to work with.
Some of these are:
Freelancers who could use a professional writer by their side – graphic designers, web designers, illustrators, web developers, photographers, virtual assistants...
Entrepreneurs who are just starting and want to build a recognizable brand + become thought leaders in their field.
SaaS founders who don’t have writers in their team (not just yet!), but they want to set a clear content strategy right from the start
Indie small business owners who’ve tried different marketing techniques, but failed. They’ve tested different channels but ended without results. They have a website, but they’re not happy with the copy – they want it to be clearer, simpler, bolder, more impactful, customer-focused, buzzwords-free, and more effective. They also consider writing a new copy from scratch.
Nonprofits, charities, social enterprises who are looking to hire an independent content specialist. Their team is small, a budget even smaller, so they all need to wear multiple hats. It’s overwhelming. They need help from a copywriter, editor, content manager, and strategist, who is also affordable and aligned with their values.
Some of my personas have emerged out of these groups, while some are based on the real people I was working with, so I knew exactly what challenges they face.
I've chosen to go with simple story-like persona profiles. I don't have their photos (and if I did, I'd rather go with illustrated avatars, as I love illustrations). Plus, I don't have them in a one-page format with separated sections. But then again, this is only for me. If I had a team of collaborators, I'd probably have personas presented more visually.
Here they are.
Mark is the only content person at a nonprofit organization. He is the only one in the MarComm department, so he gets to juggle multiple tasks every day. Mark is a well-organized, super resourceful guy, with a get-the-work-done attitude. But, since the organization has broadened its scope of impact, urgent, new tasks keep piling up on his daily schedule. He loses it. His work becomes sloppy, he starts making mistakes, and he is dangerously close to a burnout. He can't handle it all by himself anymore. He needs help. He needs another pair of content hands to help him. "It feels good just to think about it", Mark whispers to himself. "But how will I convince the Board of Directors to hire another content specialist?", he continues to think. "Our budget is so tight we barely manage to work. It has to be someone affordable, and someone who could work remotely to lower the costs even more. Yes! There has to be someone out there, I just need to find that person."
Kira is a designer, illustrator, and brand strategist. She's just starting with her branding studio, offering custom illustrations, visual identity design, website design, and graphic design solutions to mission-driven entrepreneurs. Her clients sometimes want her to come up with some key messaging statements that will be aligned with their brand + occasionally they ask her to review (and even write!) website copy as well. But, every time writing enters the scene, she thinks: "How will I do this? I'm not good at writing". So she tries and tries, she struggles and struggles, but only ends up feeling like an impostor. She can make wonders with visuals, but words don't come easily to her. She knows that she could upscale her offer to include copywriting as well. That way, she could deliver the whole branding solution to her clients. So, what does she do? She reaches out to her online community of fellow creatives to ask for some recommendations and see if she could find a writer to join her for these projects. She'd love someone who can jump right in, and do the copywriting thing whenever needed. She'll explain it to her clients and say that she works in pair with this writer. So everybody wins. It could be a happy end, after all.
Anika is a program manager at a local contemporary dance theater. She also runs its in-house research center and manages the artist-in-residence program. Oh, and she acts like an editor of their online platform and a producer of the annual print magazine about the contemporary dance scene. There's a lot on her plate. She has a small team of 4 people. They all have so many ideas, but they don't exactly have them documented. Besides her, no one seems to be concerned by the fact that their online content is way out of date, their publishing workflow is a mess, plus they don't even have a blog (and they should, at least the news section). It starts to bother her. She feels like her audience expects so much more from them. So, Anika decides that they need a professional writer/editor/strategist, who is also passionate and knowledgeable about the dance field, to join their team as a freelance contractor. They need to find a person who'd create a content strategy from scratch, and take it from there. This decision inspires her to take action, so she gets down to writing a job proposal to be sent in their next newsletter. She wants to start from their community. Is there such a writer? Will they find someone who perfectly fits?
I have personas, now what?
Here are some of the ways I used their needs, hopes, and pains in my writings:
Their language is within my key messaging statements
Their voice is a foundation of my voice
Their stories are incorporated into my website copy
Some of their pains I’ve pointed out within a landing page for a special offer
Some others in a different landing page for a different offer
Some of their thoughts and dreams I include in Instagram posts
All in all, personas are ever-present in everything that I write business-wise
Some of their questions could also be starting points for blog posts. If I was to start a blog on my website, I might be writing some of these:
How to deal with a content overload when you are a team-of-one
Why including a writer in your design projects might be a good idea
Blogging for nonprofits: How to make it sustainable (and manageable!)
How to write clear, yet highly captivating website copy for your business
How to repurpose your content (and make your life easier)
I hope you get the idea and see the importance of having ideal clients clearly defined before making any content-related changes. You also write for your people, right?
Take it to the next level
Hilary Marsh from Content Company talks about taking personas to the next level, in her Confab 2020 talk How to make a content strategy stick (Confab virtual conference ended on May 20, but there are no publicly available recordings of talks, so I can’t share the link with you right now. But, hey, if you are among this year’s Confab participants, jump straight into the on-demand library and take a look).
Some of her examples include:
Printing out real-size cardboard personas and putting them in front of your office, so every time one of your colleagues comes in to ask about new content, you get to ask them “Is this going to align with Susan’s needs?” or “Is this going to solve some of John’s pain points?” (yes, she actually did this)
Printing out posters to represent each persona and put them on your office lobby walls
Making card-size prints with personas’ needs, pains, and gains to make it easier to use them during workshops
I love these ideas. That way, you’ll bring your audience spokespersons, a.k.a. personas, into life and make them more visible, their needs more tangible, and their problems more easily understandable to everyone in your company.
Reads & Templates
For a step-by-step example of creating customer personas, go through this WRKSHP’s Medium post and download their free Persona Canvas.
If you are a designer (and even if you are not) you can supercharge your work through a deep understanding of your target audience by using Personas from the FlowMapp tools.
If you are developing a software and you’ve been wondering about the early adopters who might want to try it out in its Beta phase, turn to the research about user adoption patterns. In this article from Interaction Design Foundation, read about the various categories of adoption that users usually fall into, and learn how to optimize your product for success.
While at the Interaction Design Foundation website, read also the insightful and helpful article on creating personas from user research results, and which six elements to include.
To learn more about proto-personas, that are based on the assumptions of the stakeholders, and further checked against actual data, read this article by Andrew Jacobs, published in the UX Collective publication on Medium.
This Personas Canvas from the Design a Better Business can help you create your personas with their names, objectives, goals, needs, outlines, and more.
Check the booklet Creative Communication for Artivists and find examples and templates for personas inside. This booklet has been created by Nomadways, specifically for artists, activists, and creatives, but everyone can find invaluable information inside, along with some helpful workshop instructions.
Creating user personas can be a very helpful tool, but remember that “user personas are not an excuse for not doing user research”, as explained on the Inside Design blog from InVision. With that said, learn about 5 essentials for your personas, get some templates, and check out some great examples.
For interactive, editable, and adjustable persona templates check out the layouts from Extensio. Use them to collaborate with your team, share them via a link, or export as a PDF.
Download free Customer Avatar Worksheet from DigitalMarketer and see how they’ve developed Agency Eric as one of their avatars.
Please note: a shorter version of this piece was sent via email (along with some silly mistakes I saw afterward 🤦♀️). I’ve added some more resources and insights since then, to make it more of a complete piece 😊
Thanks for reading!
Stay tuned,
Nadja