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Business Benefits
Outline similar characteristics among customers for easy targeting in an ad-heavy market.
Look for common groupings of customers based on factors that influence their purchasing behavior, like the budget they have available to spend monthly.
Do not group by demographics unless that has a strong impact on how people buy, and what information you communicate with them. Favor groupings based on behavior.
To find data on available customer budget, look at previous quantitative research or business analytics.
Ask your stakeholders “What are the measurable business goals?” they want to achieve.
Talk to those who have regular contact with your audience and ask if the groupings make sense to them.
Adjust your groupings based on the feedback you receive so they help to achieve the business goals.
Create assumptions and hypothesis that will impact the business goals, if proven right, before deciding on the type of data to extract in interviews or surveys.
Use the data you gather from quantitative research to learn about each group’s relationship with your brand. Follow it up with qualitative research if you need more information.
Use:
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score to find potential bottlenecks.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) to identify detractors and fans and further explore their issues and reasons for buying.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) to figure out how easy it is for customers to interact with your brand. Ask them questions during a live testing session, particularly when they are asked to perform a certain task and they seem confused. You can ask Why did you press that? What were you trying to find?
Identify key characteristics for each group through surveys and interviews. Avoid questions about future actions of a client.
It’s not a good idea to ask questions about future actions of a client. They tend to be overly positive and use their imagination, yet you need clear actionable data.
Always formulate questions about their past behaviors which have patterns, this will help you understand what they will do next and what data is relevant for the business to grow.
For example, “I would like more free gifts to make me buy more” is not urgent and possibly this persona isn’t a regular buyer.
The characteristics you focus on will depend on how you want to use your personas, but typical information includes:
- Goals they are trying to achieve.
- Pain points they want to overcome.
- Tasks they wish to complete.
- Questions they have.
- Things that influence their buying decision.
- Emotions relating to their buying process.
- Objections to buying.
- Relevant broader context.
Collect enough data from the above, so you can answer these 3 questions: what they know, what they might do and what their conscious objective is?
- What they know - Ask for thing like their comfort level with technology. This will influence the steps in the Customer Journey for example, everyone may not use the search
- What they might do - You can conclude this based on the actions from Interviews and Usability tests.
- Conscious objectives - You can ask for questions like why are they in the store to begin with, what they try to achieve?
Collect samples of research participants’ answers to develop a sense of the language that each group tends to use. Use this in content creation or emails to make the content “familiar” and resonate more.
Summarize each grouping into a persona. They need to be clearly different from one another in behavior and the preferences that determine how much and how often they will spend in your store.
Base details to include:
- Behavior
- Preferences
- How much they buy
- How often the buy
You can use information you gathered to turn them into fictional personas and bring them to life with details like:
- Name.
- Age.
- Job title.
- Income level.
- Family life.
Make use of your personas at every opportunity and as criteria against the goal of potential projects or initiatives.
For example, does it fulfill a personas goal or help them overcome a pain point?
You can also remind stakeholders and team members of these personas to keep them in focus.
- Bring them to every project meeting.
- Include them in artwork and graphics around the office
- Include them in any project documentation.
Last edited by @hesh_fekry 2023-11-14T15:45:45Z