Do You Really Understand Your Audience?

As a marketing professional who stays current on trends, you’ve already heard about user persona. But do you really understand the advantages of effectively utilizing this method to better understand your target audience? Your brand has an audience of real people. And your success or failure with customer engagement hinges on your ability to see through shallow target descriptions and connect with those people who are really interested in your brand.

What is User Persona?

Very briefly, let’s talk about what it is. A User Persona (Aka: buyer persona, user avatar) is a fictitious person that you “create” based on a data from a real person.

How Does It Help Identify Target Audience?

While “Big data” is, for lack of a better word, “big” and hard to analyze, you can pull out specific facts, characteristics that we know about our traffic and customers. In addition to various traits (education, personality, background, skills, etc.) each persona is given an objective. We, as real people, all have objectives, reasons for doing what we are doing, so this is very important. 

Rather than spending a lot of time and money on focus groups, using these personas helps you see things through their eyes and consider what causes various responses: interaction, click-through, conversion, promotion, etc. Because you know they are “real people”,  you can evaluate how well you help them meet their objectives through your UX (User Experience).

How Does It Increase Customer Engagement with Real People?

By developing these user personas and “running” them through scenarios in which they interact with your brand, you can improve the user experience for the real people who visit your site.

You would consider things like how the User (customer):

1. Is guided into your site.
2. Decides to stay a moment (or not)
3. Navigates through your site.
4. Encounters slow load or other roadblocks on your landing pages.
5. Reads/Views your information
6. Makes decisions (clicks a button, buys, sends info, requests info, shares, leaves, etc.)

TMI (too much information) is not just a social media problem. The User Persona helps you create a balance between providing enough information for a B2B or B2C customer to make a decision without overwhelming them by continuing to tout your brand and service after they’re already “sold.” But don’t stop with the landing pages. Every touch point is an opportunity to convert or send the target fleeing.

Your Brand Needs User Personas

You need user personas to better understand who your target audience is, how they are received by your brand, how they perceive your brand and why they do what they do. By developing user personas you can improve customer engagement and convert engagement into brand loyalty and promotion.

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