Simply having a good product/service isn’t enough to attract users and create a successful business. You need to reach people that are interested in your solution, have a need for it, and are willing to pay. These three factors are part of a larger image that makes up customer intent and product-market fit. To analyze how your product fits and who the specific audience is, it’s helpful to create a customer persona analysis. This article will define a customer persona analysis and talk about how to build one, why it’s important, and two different research methods used to help create this analysis.
What is a customer persona analysis?
A customer persona analysis is a diagram expressing traits and beliefs that hold true for the majority of your target market. It is a way to aggregate market research to accurately portray your ideal customer’s demographics, needs, and frustrations.
The overall goal of a customer persona analysis is to provide insight into the wants and needs of your customer. As a result, you can more accurately target their goals, and hopefully convert their business.
A customer persona analysis reveals key details about the customer’s experience, attitude, and perspective that would be difficult to uncover otherwise. Sometimes this happens through data collection, and other times it’s more likely to happen through qualitative analysis of individuals. Both strategies help reveal key pieces of data and we will discuss their similarities and differences later on.
Using qualitative and quantitative research methods helps create personalized touch-points for your customers that persuades them to choose your solution. This can be through web content, marketing campaigns, product developments, and any other change that helps meet their specific needs.
Elements of a customer persona analysis
There are many different ways to structure a customer persona analysis, but all of them usually share some common traits and information. Here are some of the cornerstones you should definitely hit when creating your diagram.
Demographic
The persona demographic should be detailed. It should include information about their age, residence, education, hobbies, gender, marital status, and more. These factors all play an important part in designating what kind of person your business is targeting.
Professional information
Professional information goes one step further . It develops an idea of who your business is targeting but now begins to focus on their role professionally. This information should include their industry, specific role, company details, leadership details, their role in the buying process, and their existing solution.
Wants & needs
This is key to determining the user’s needs for your product and what they desire in the workplace. When diagramming the user’s wants and needs, think about the issue they’re facing and the specific solution they want to see. What do they want to achieve? How do they currently reach their goals? How does existing customer sentiment link with the needs of potential users?
Frustrations
The details about what frustrates or challenges your user is some of the most compelling information in terms of making actionable changes to improve their experience. When considering this point, ask yourself: What are their pain points? What would they fix if given the choice? How could we dramatically improve their user experience?
Why is a customer persona analysis important?
Creating a customer persona analysis can help improve internal processes as well as solve issues related to customer retention and experience. For these reasons, it’s incredibly important to conduct a persona analysis regularly to understand how the landscape is changing and how you can maintain relevance to your customers. Here are some of the reasons a customer persona analysis is so important.
Creates a clear path to reach new users
Understanding what potential customers need is the first step in alleviating their frustrations and getting them on board with your product/service. By diagramming their persona, you can create a clear journey that highlights what they need in order to become a paying customer. As a result, this streamlines the outreach and onboarding process. You do everything with a clear idea of the interested party and their specific wants and needs.
Improves existing customer experience
Creating a customer persona analysis mainly focuses on new customers. However, this doesn’t mean existing users can’t see some benefits as well. Some of the proposed changes will inherently apply to your existing user base because they are likely to share many traits with your proposed customers. This means that product improvements will work two-fold to convince new users to join and improve existing ones’ customer experience.
Helps prioritize CX throughout your business
When you create a customer persona analysis, you help put your business in perspective of what the customer needs. This helps align multiple teams towards a shared goal of improving your user experience. Marketing, sales, design, and product teams can all share an understanding of the varied needs of your target market and align their efforts accordingly.
Why UX research is key to creating customer personas
Creating a customer persona analysis relies on conducting research both internally and externally. This is commonly done with two different methods: qualitative and quantitative analysis. Both strategies have their benefits, and a good customer persona analysis will take advantage of both to create a nuanced picture. Here are some of the reasons to use each research strategy.
Qualitative research
Qualitative research is the process of conducting research with a small sample size but doing in-depth, personalized interviews to establish a detailed picture of the representative individual. With this research method, you have a restricted number of people that you can target. However, you able to uncover small and informative details. Some of the main benefits of qualitative research are:
- Personalized and easy to understand persona interviews.
- Can interact with deeper material.
- Can dive into underlying assumptions and opinions.
Quantitative research
Quantitative research is more akin to data collection, where you create a simple survey or form that can be distributed to a large number of people. Additionally, you can take data from your website or product to add to the quantitative analysis. Using this research method, you can reach a very large sample size. However, you can only use basic information or multiple-choice questions. Some of the main benefits of quantitative research are:
- A large sample size provides more credibility to the findings.
- Can use data visualization to see trends and patterns in the responses.
Conclusion
When you are looking to expand into a new market or optimize your product, a customer persona analysis is one of the best tools to get started. If you liked this article make sure you check out some of our other content on moderated and unmoderated user testing.
Tim Rotolo
Ritvij Gautam