How to use a persona? 13 persona use cases listed

In this post, we list some of the many ways to use a persona. This list considers mostly business cases for personas.

1. Brand Discovery: Uncover how your core customers feel about your product or service and how they rationalize the purchase decision.
2. Channel and Offering Alignment: Align every piece of offerings and marketing activity to a persona and purchase stage, identifying new channels and needs where opportunities exist.
3. Communication: Personas are also great for communication among team members and across departments. Personas are GREAT for meetings! They keep folks focused on the BIG picture.
4. Content Creators: Content creators can leverage personas for the delivery of content that will be most relevant and useful to their audience. When planning for content, we might ask “Would Bridget understand this?” or “Would Bridget be attracted by this?”
5. Executives: can keep personas in mind while making strategic decisions. In fact, a persona can become a “silent member in the boardroom”.
6. Experimentation and Optimization: Carry out well-thought experiments to produce statistically significant business insights and apply the results to optimize performance.
7. Journey Mapping: Plot the stages and paths of the persona lifecycle, documenting each persona’s unique state of mind, needs, and concerns at each stage
8. Marketing: When you understand where your core customers spend their time online, you are able to focus your marketing spend on these channels.
9. Persona Discovery: Document the individuals involved in the purchase process in a way that allows decision makers to empathize with them in a consistent way.
10. Product Managers: can use the information to design a product that meets the needs or desires of core customers, and marketing can use personas to craft messages that resonate.
11. Product Offerings: Personas can be extremely helpful in product development. With the help of personas, you can more easily build the features that suit your customers’ needs. Forrester Research reports a 20% productivity improvement with teams that use personas.
12. Reporting and Feedback: Report and review data and insights to drive strategic decisions, as well as provide information to the organization as a whole.
13. Sales: Targeted offerings can help you convert more potential customers to subscribers, followers, and customers. You can also use persona description to tailor lead generation which is likely to improve your lead quality and satisfaction.

More articles on persona use cases

• How are Personas Used in Real Organizations?
• How to Use Personas? Listing Typical Persona Use Cases
• How can I use a persona for advertising?
• How can I use a persona for online analytics?
• How can I use a persona for marketing?
• How can I use a persona for UX design?

Jansen, B. J., Salminen, J., and Jung, S.G. (2020) Data-Driven Personas for Enhanced User Understanding: Combining Empathy with Rationality for Better Insights to Analytics. Data and Information Management. 4(1), 1-17.  https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/dim/4/1/article-p1.xml