How to create personas in 8 easy steps

Data-driven Personas are a powerful tool to better understand your customers. However, unfortunately Personas are often still solely based on intuition.

This article will tell you exactly why Personas are a powerful tool, how you can create them in 8 easy steps and where you can use them.

How Personas can help your organization to better understand your customers, leverage your engagement, customer satisfaction and marketing ROI.

First off: What are Personas?

Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of target groups / customer clusters which have similar attitudes, goals and behaviors towards your brand and/or product.

Personas should be based upon user research but make this data less complex and more easily understandable as they are a fictional yet realistic description of an archetypical target user - a human-like snapshot of relevant and meaningful commonalities. They should be described as if they were real people - including demographics, hobbies, attitudes, goals, behaviors etc.

What's the purpose of Personas?

The purpose of personas is to create a reliable, realistic representation of your target groups / customer clusters - and with that to help you make better decisions by adding a layer of real-world consideration.

Or as KeepItUsable puts it: “The most important goal of personas is to create understanding and empathy with the end user(s)”.

What are the benefits of Personas?

There are a lot of benefits of personas, here just a few:

• Getting a deep understanding of who your customers / users really are.
• Spreading this knowledge throughout the whole team and/or company and by that.
• Making clearer and better decisions that are focused on real customers / users, their needs and goals.
• Designing better products and services.
• Delivering better marketing campaigns.
• And with the help of all of that, leveraging your engagement, customer satisfaction & marketing ROI.

From discovering, through shaping and to playing - here’s a step-to-step guide on how you create your Personas.

1. Initialization

To initialize the persona creation process there are some parameters that should be defined in order to have a smoother process to follow:

• Strategic Scope: Determine the scope of the persona creation process by defining the Value Proposition, Differentiation, Business Area, Market & assumed Customer Categories
• Data Sources: it’s crucial to get an awareness of the data inventory within the company. Ask yourself and your co-workers: What data do we already have about our customers?

2. Customer and data discovery

On a qualitative and quantitative level start to truly discover your customers and develop a deep understanding.

Always have your goal here in mind: To get an overview of the data you gathered in the previous step, develop an understanding of the key facts and turn these into a list of factoids* you will use for the next step.

*Google defines factoids as “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.”

It’s important to understand that this is an iterative process – while you may want to begin on a more qualitative level by asking your stakeholders the first few important questions, make sure to re-iterate between qualitative and quantitative discovery a few times.

Here’s a few examples for customer and data discovery:

• Customer Discovery: workshops with employees that are closest to your customers, customer surveys
• Data Discovery: Uncover correlations within your data. As an example, by filtering your results with the gender attribute, you might discover that men generally like to search for BMWs on your website while women rather search for Audis. For this task, a tool like Powdience might help you.

Try to prepare a document covering all factoids - this will help tremendously in the next step to be more effective and efficient.

3. Process and cluster

Now that you have an overview of all your data and the relevant factoids, it is time to gather these around the predefined and assumed customer categories (remember, step 1?).

The goal of this step is a set of validated customer categories and sub-categories. The number of identified (sub-) & categories within this set defines the number of personas you will create within Powdience.

Fundamentally, in this step we recommend running a workshop where, together with the key stakeholders, you will use relevant factoids to validate and enrich these categories or provide solid information to show that the assumed categories are inappropriate – in the end of this exercise, you will start to grasp the attributes that differentiate the customer categories from one another. For more details on this point, check out our guide.

4. Persona attributes

Now that you identified a set of validated categories and sub-categories, it’s time to understand what differentiates one category from another.

The goal of this step is to define these distinctive features - the set of these features combined equals your relevant persona attributes for Powdience.

5. Prsona drafts

In this step, you start the ‘Shape’ phase of the process by defining your persona drafts.

Bring your validated (sub-)categories to life! We recommend creating one persona per (sub-)category. These might be quite a lot - but don’t hesitate; in the next step you will still be able to validate and prioritize these based on their potential reach.

6. Validation and priorization

If you created your personas on Powdience, you now see what their respective potential reach is (based on the integration of real Facebook data).

We recommend first to validate all the personas created based on their reach. If your persona does not have a considerable reach, they might not be relevant for you within your market.

Then you can prioritize the validated personas again based on reach - for which segment do you see most potential for internal communication, targeting and sales?

You might ask yourself what the suggested number of prioritized personas is. Of course, there is no general rule as it heavily depends on your business area, market and customers. A thumb rule however is to have 3 to 6 personas - with this number, you will be able to cover the most important parts of your market while still being reasonable for internal usage.

7. Finalization

You now have a clear understanding of your most relevant validated personas.

When you created your persona drafts, you were purposely selective in what information you included - you only included the relevant attributes that helped you differentiate them, validate and prioritize them based on their reach.

Storyline and pictures

Now you want to be more exhaustive. This means that you need to include all headings and information appropriate and useful to understanding your audience, creating your communication and developing your product.

To easily and truly understand the created personas, it will help the product designers and communication team a lot to have storyline elements and pictures enriching the personas.

With Powdience, you are able to add these storyline elements and pictures directly in your persona drafts.

Name and tag line

Finally, create a name and tag line. You want to highlight a key differentiator/characteristic for each persona. However, be careful not to choose something potentially offensive. As a check, consider if it would bug you to have these lines added to the end of your name.

8. Play

Now that you’ve finalized your personas, you can go ahead and PLAY! For different use cases: See 4. Where can Personas be used?

Personas can be extremely helpful, but only when created & applied correctly. Here are the Do’s and Don’ts.

• Base yourself on real data: It’s reckless and even dangerous to base a project / product / brand etc. on personas that are created out of intuition instead of real data.
• Don’t stay too abstract: When personas are too abstract and theoretical, they might be misunderstood and misused.
• Don’t create personas in a silo and impose them on people: This is often one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption and meaningful impact of personas.
• Make sure people in your organization really know what personas are and why they’re useful - especially before trying to convince them to work with them.
• Have a specific, well-defined goal in mind when creating personas. The data captured should reflect the goal for the personas and the scope of work they are meant to impact (E.g. Broad-scope marketing personas vs Targeted-scope UX personas).
• And last but not least, avoid adding extraneous details to your personas that do not have any implications for your defined goal. A name and a photo for instance aid memorability. But on the other hand, a lot of unessential details can overwhelm and make them hard to remember. Even more dangerous, you might fall into the trap of personal implications and unconscious prejudices when trying to ‘decorate’ your personas with details that are not fully data-based.

Personas help you in various contexts - we tell you where and how.

Marketing and advertising

Whether you’re creating a classical advertising campaign, you’re about to go live with a Social Media paid ad or you’re updating your content marketing strategy: Personas help you put the customer in focus when marketing your brand - how to reach them, talk to them, engage with them.

Website and usability testing

When building or running a website, its user experience is key. To ensure a great user experience, of course you’ll first need to understand your users / customers. Personas help you achieving just that. With Powdience, you have the possibility to integrate real user data, turn it into lively personas, then export and share them with your whole development team.

Product and service design

The key to successful product and service design is customer focus. As designers, we need to make sure that the customer always stays in the center of thinking and designing. Personas help with exactly that: With Powdience you turn real data into lively Personas that create empathy for your customers within the design team.

Design thinking

Within the field of Design Thinking, personas play a major role. They act as a starting point when observing and interviewing your customers. They help you when working out your customer journeys. Furthermore, they build the base to ideation and prototyping, making sure your customers always stay in the center.