{"id":6,"date":"2019-01-30T10:01:23","date_gmt":"2019-01-30T07:01:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/persona-blog.qcri.org\/?p=6"},"modified":"2021-03-18T22:04:46","modified_gmt":"2021-03-18T19:04:46","slug":"how-to-use-personas-listing-typical-persona-use-cases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/persona.qcri.org\/blog\/how-to-use-personas-listing-typical-persona-use-cases\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Use Personas? Listing Typical Persona Use Cases"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction to Persona Use Cases<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Personas are imaginary people<\/a> representing the core audience or customers of a company or organization. Personas were introduced into software development and marketing in the 1990s. Personas capture and describe key elements of customer segments so that decision makers could better understand their users or customers, not only by using numbers but also by referring to qualitative user attributes, such as key pain points and desires, needs and wants.<\/p>\n

Our persona-generation team refers to persona creation as \u201cGiving faces to data<\/a>,\u201d as personas should always be based on real data about real customer behavior<\/em>. Automatic persona generation has several advantages<\/a> over manual persona creation.<\/p>\n

The figure below shows an example of a data-driven persona whose attributes are inferred automatically from online analytics data<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"Example<\/a>
Example of a data-driven persona<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/figure>\n

While personas have been argued to have many benefits<\/a> in the academic literature, our persona team is constantly facing the same questions from the client organizations of our system for automatic persona generation<\/a> (APG). Namely, the end users of personas want to know how to use personas in practice<\/em>. While our persona teams often explains that personas are like any other analytics system<\/a>, meaning that persona use cases depend on the client organization’s information needs (i.e., what<\/em> they want to know about the customers and why<\/em>), this answer is still a bit puzzling to them.<\/p>\n

For that reason, we decided to write this blog post outlining some key use cases for personas<\/em>. These use cases are meant as examples, as the full range of persona use cases is much wider than we can discuss here. We will first explore some generic persona use cases<\/em>, and then proceed to specific persona use cases<\/em> for different organizational units and departments.<\/p>\n

Generic Use Cases of Personas<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In general, there are three main purposes that personas serve.<\/p>\n

(1) Customer Insights.<\/strong>\u00a0This deals with getting to know one’s core audience, users, or customers better. For example, the Automatic Persona Generation system<\/a> enables an organization to understand its customers’ topics of interest and preferred social media content.\u00a0Who uses personas this way?<\/em>\u00a0 Everyone in the organization dealing with customer data.<\/p>\n

(2) Creation Activities.<\/strong>\u00a0Using persona information to create better products, content, marketing communication, or other outputs.\u00a0Who uses personas this way?<\/em>\u00a0 Everyone in the organization dealing with customer data.<\/p>\n

(3) Communication.<\/strong>\u00a0Using personas for communication across departments. While it is difficult to discuss customers using a spreadsheet, it is much easier to communicate about a person<\/em>. Thus, sharing the created persona profiles across divisions increases the chance for realization of persona benefits. Personas make data communicable and, ideally, keep team members focused on the customer needs.\u00a0Who uses personas this way?<\/em>\u00a0 Everyone in the organization.<\/p>\n

Specific Use Cases of Personas<\/strong><\/h2>\n

In addition to shared use cases of personas, there are more specific persona use cases. For example, product managers can use the information in the persona profile to design a product that meets the needs or desires of core customers, and marketing can use personas to craft messages that resonate with a specifict target group. In the following, we are outlining some specific examples of persona use cases within various organizational units. More specifically, we allocate these use cases under four sections.<\/p>\n

(1) Customer Insights and Reporting Using Personas<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Customer Journey Mapping with Personas<\/em><\/h4>\n

Plot the stages and paths of the persona lifecycle, documenting each persona\u2019s unique state of mind, needs and concerns at each stage. Understand your website visitors\u2019 customer journey.<\/p>\n

Persona Discovery<\/em><\/h4>\n

Document the individuals involved in the purchase process in a way that allows decision makers to empathize with them in a consistent way.<\/p>\n

Brand Discovery with Personas<\/em><\/h4>\n

Uncover how your core customers feel about your product or service and how they rationalize their purchase decisions.<\/p>\n

Reporting and Feedback Using Personas<\/em><\/h4>\n

Report and review data and insights to drive strategic decisions, as well as provide information to the organization as a whole.<\/p>\n

(2) Tangible Creation Activities with Personas<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Planning Product Offerings:<\/em>\u00a0With the help of personas, organizations can more easily build the features that suit their customers\u2019 needs. Consider the goals, desires, and limitations of core customers to guide feature, interface, and design choices.<\/p>\n

Role Playing:<\/em>\u00a0Personas help product developers \u201cget into character\u201d and understand the circumstances of their users. They facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of core customers. Individuals have a natural tendency to relate to other humans<\/a>, and it\u2019s important to tap into this psychological effect when making design and product development choices.<\/p>\n

Content Creation<\/em>: Content creators can leverage personas for delivery of content that will be most relevant and useful to their audience. When planning for content, we might ask\u00a0\u201cWould Christy understand this?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0\u201cWould Christy be attracted by this?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 Personas help one determine what kind of content is needed to resonate with core customers, represented by personas, and in which tone or style to deliver the content. Naturally, customer analytics data can and should be used as a support for personas in order to verify the results.<\/p>\n

(3) Persona-Based Experimentation<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Channel and Offering Alignment<\/em>: Align every piece of offerings and marketing activity to a persona and purchase stage, identifying new channels and needs where opportunities exist.<\/p>\n

Prediction of Popularity<\/em>: Predict how a given persona will react to content, marketing messages, or products. This is a particular advantage of data-driven personas that enable using the underlying topical interests of the persona to model the likely match between personas and a given content unit.<\/p>\n

Experimentation and Optimization<\/em>: Carry out well-thought experiments with personas to produce statistically valid business insights and apply the results to optimize performance. For example, you could run Facebook Ads campaigns targeting segments corresponding to the core personas and analyze whether the campaigns perform better than broader or other customer segments.<\/p>\n

(4) Strategic Decision Making Using Personas<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Strategic Marketing<\/em>: When you understand where your core customers spend their time online, you are able to focus your marketing spend on these channels. For example, if the data shows that your core customers prefer YouTube over Facebook, you can increase your marketing spend in the former. Think how you might describe your product for this particular type of person. For example, would Bridget better understand your offering as a \u201csocial media service\u201d or as an \u201centerprise customer management tool\u201d? Depending on the answer, the communicative strategy would be different.<\/p>\n

Sales Strategies<\/em>: Targeted offerings can help organizations convert more potential customers to subscribers, followers and customers. You can also use personas to tailor lead generation strategies which is likely to improve your lead quality and performance. By approaching your messages from a human perspective, you can create sales and marketing communication that is tailored to your core customers and, therefore, is likely to perform better.<\/p>\n

Executives<\/em>: Key decision makers can keep personas in mind while making strategic decisions. In fact, a persona can become a \u201csilent member in the boardroom,\u201d evoked to question the customer impact of the considered decisions.<\/p>\n

More persona use cases can be found in related articles:<\/p>\n