Building out your Ideal Audience / Customer Persona - how did you do it?
I know that everyone’s approach to developing customer personas is slightly different.
However, I believe there are two main categories to focus on to build out a really well-rounded target customer profile. Those are demographics and psychographics.
Demographics are statistics related to your ideal customers.
This can include factors such as:
Age
Gender
Job
Marital status
Current location
Income
Education
Employment status
The second is psychographics, which are the more intangible aspects I guess. These can reveal what type of buyers they are.
This can include factors such as:
Interests Habits
Attitudes
Emotions
Preferences
Values
Lifestyle
Both are equally important when understanding your customer I think. But as a seller / brand / store - how do you find this information?
Are there any templates or resources you use to help distill this information?
I really enjoyed a section in the following book - https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/lean-user-research/ - that says this about personas:
“If there’s no research behind a persona, I prefer a more direct name for it. I like to call it a bullshit persona. You start with a bullshit persona, you do your research, and only then do you have a persona. If you skip research, you’re just left with the bullshit.”
Once I read this statement, I decided that if I was going to create personas, they needed to be built on some genuine, primary research.
I start by making general assumptions about the persona as a starting point. There are 4 sections in the template. One has the persona name, one the demographics, one the problems (e.g. key problems you guess the persona has regarding the domain you are interested in) then the final one the solutions (a few ideas for features or products that will hopefully solve the persona’s problems listed earlier).
Then, I'll conduct some 30-45 minute interviews with people that match the BS persona (min 6, max 12).
Following the interviews, I'll add more context to the demographics, problems, and descriptions. I'll have maybe 2-4 personas, depends on the product, and I'll try to identify differences and similarities.
It does take a bit of work, but from my experience, those personas are then incredibly valuable for any marketing work moving forward.
Use an ontology, then model the personas you want to reach. https://protege.stanford.edu/publications/ontology_development/ontology101.pdf