How a Brand Can Benefit from User Persona Development

Gathering, analyzing and converting data to develop user personas for a brand or company is a critical step in creating business strategies. From web design to cross channel marketing initiatives, creating and utilizing user personas impacts audience strategies and conversion outcomes. Just as defining your target market, investing in further research to identify user personas is necessary when strategizing and crafting consumer strategies. When in the development process for web-design, identifying user personas can assist in creating user journeys, pathways and content. When developing meaningful content, it is both art and science, combining the chemistry of persona demographics, analytics and the brand narrative.

Building a Foundation: Persona Development

Marketing stakeholders will emphasize how important identifying user personas are when looking to connect with an audience that will benefit the business. It is more complex than analyzing data sheets and general target market infographics. Examining user lifestyle, needs, preferences and patterns are all elements that work together to create the ideal user personas. Think of a user as a character, who has many interests: demographics, motivations and behavior of this person are insightful when creating consumer user personas. When developing content to be conducted for research it should be more than just analytics but rather useful, meaningful and consistent tone across all platforms.

How to Identify Personas: Common Misconceptions

Personas are created through research and data. It is important that a persona is not just an assumption but aligns statistical research gathered about the identified audience segments. In the design process, having knowledge about an individual and how they interact with other brands in the marketplace creates more relatable and user experience driven touchpoints. It may be tempting to want to take a “one size fits all approach” to creating marketing materials, but this could impact conversion rates. To truly connect and engage the persona properly, there must be a strategy in place in order to produce authentic results and overall increase the bottom line.

“A semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” –Hubspot

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is impactful when strategizing and designing a website. It is very important to identify keywords and content when creating a website to have a successful SEO strategy. When marketing a brand, carefully selecting the language and descriptors is impactful when used to connect the brand to the consumer. If a consumer is searching for an item with specific keywords and a brand hasn’t identified this consumer as a persona, this can result in a missing opportunity to connect with a consumer.

User personas impact more than marketing strategy and web design, but also company profits and how they produce products that consumers relate and connect to. Investing in user personas is important for brands to properly serve customers in their respected market to continue making impactful engagements and reoccurring conversions.

Erin

Erin is the Executive Director of Design at ArtVersion. As the main anchor of the ArtVersion team, Erin oversees all of the firm’s internal and client communications. She designed and engineered major strategic shifts for our clients, including Hilton, TransUnion, Caterpillar, and Volvo. To drive user engagement and help evolve their brand experiences by expanding a base of digital offerings and creating new global capabilities utilizing data science, research, and design.

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