We’re about to supercharge your work. 

No, not just because we’re a digital marketing agency, but because we introduce the importance of personas to you today. 

Though we’ve discussed what personas are in this post, the value of making personas in your creative process can’t be undermined. 

In essence, personas are documents describing fictional people, based on the research of real users. A common tool in UX (user experience) design, personas are the result of your ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes – understand their struggles, needs, aspirations, and social environments. 

But if they’re not deliverables, why do personas matter? 

Because they help your design and sales teams create connections between user research and information architecture, or iteration tools. Personas are an alignment tool to help design + non-design people internalise user/market research. They make you ask: 

• Who are we designing for? Does it meet their needs? 
• Would Kwame (a persona) be able to fill this form? 
• Are we communicating our services’ pricing and packages well to Raziya?
• Would Onyeka be effectively convinced by this marketing campaign?

Image Source: Sample Personas

For Marketers. 

Personas help you understand the person behind the search, behind the SEO and content marketing. You can use them to: 

• Create social media advertisements that resonate 
• Get insight into your target marketing segment 
• Develop clearer content marketing based on how your audience spends their time 
• Achieve consistency in marketing communications 

For Designers. 

Better visualisation of the target audience = better user journeys. Personas help you: 

• Get a great idea of user expectations and how they’ll use the website 
• Focus on the primary needs and expectations of the most important personas 
• Understand the major user group on the website and social media pages 

Image Source: Persona Sample: Katie the Super Fan

So here’s why you should use them. 

• Team Consistency

Personas take a lot of data and make it compelling and interesting to read. This makes it easier to remember and consider when your team is cohesively working towards a solution or design.

• Giving “Face” To The Persona

The user’s story (like Katie here) becomes more than just a figure your team needs to design for and market to. It creates empathy and understanding when you know Obinze (a persona) has only recently acquired a smartphone after a struggle to join university due to whatever circumstances. It prevents developers and designers from applying their own biases and models to product design – which might not even align with what users need. 

• Stakeholders Can Discuss Redesign 

It can be hard to redesign when you might have a lot of stakeholders who have different ideas about what should be developed first. Personas can help them walk through the pain and pleasure points of each target group and help clarify actual user priorities. 

• Build Empathy

Want to make something good that people will love to use? 

Empathy can help. And personas. 

You gain valuable perspectives similar to users, and step out of what is familiar to you as a designer and recognise others’ needs and expectations. And, of course, identify with who you’re designing for. The more you see the persona as real, the more you’ll take them into consideration and want to make something amazing for them. 

Image Source: Empathy: First Stage of Design Thinking

When we discussed design thinking,  the first stage of empathising was most important, because it encouraged you to connect with your audience – which personas can help you do. 

• Direction For Design Decisions 

We now know that a deeper understanding of user behaviour can help designers make products based on what is necessary from the users’ point of view. In addition to this, personas can help settle arguments: 

Instead of: I think our call-to-action button on the website for the email subscription should be bigger.  

Saying: Since our primary persona, Evelyn, is always on the go, she needs to tap bigger targets on the website to give her email without too much effort. 

Despite this, designers should try and remember that personas aren’t the only tool for prioritisation, the goals and needs of the business should also be kept in consideration to maintain a business-user balance. 

It’s important to keep in mind that while using demographic data, your team can fall back on subconscious beliefs. We tend to put our biases over personas’ characteristics such as their ethnicity, technological knowledge, gender, etc. Demographics can cause assumptions and subconscious stereotypes by team members, and to constantly remember to self-reflect and put the personas’ characteristics through screening by multiple people to avoid biases. 

We know how to separate fact from fiction. Tribe of Brands can help you stay on top of trends to effectively navigate the complex waters of the internet. Our marketing agency can help you with further ideas of how to design world-class websites, seamless user journeys, and digital marketing campaigns.