User Personas: Getting to Know Your Brand Audience

A person wearing a black hat and glasses sits on their desk on their laptop.

Understanding Audiences and Creating Personas

You might hear someone talk about user personas or what type of persona should be used for a target audience. You may not think branding is a part of UX design, but it is essential to create something enticing to the users and form new perspectives for the branding company. But what does this entail?

User personas are a form of marketing and a way of looking at an individual instead of a broad audience. Personas focus on individuals that make up the larger audience while allowing for clarity and analysis. For example, a brand could be marketing towards a younger generation, let’s say Generation Z, but they don’t know where to go from there. User preferences are always changing and shifting, so it’s key to align audiences appropriately with brands and digital design products. The user persona is a fictional character backed by realistic data that fits your target audience and allows brands to get into the headspace of new perspectives. Strategists can create descriptions of their personalities and their backstories. These personas give new ideas for targeting a multitude of people. By doing this, brands can find current motivations or pain points for potential target audiences that will inform the structure of a UI/UX design.

Why Should Brands Create User Personas?

User personas are a way to be creative and create a human-centric strategy. A user persona makes designers, developers, and brands think like a consumer by creating details that produce a bigger picture of the “why” and “how” to reach a target audience or possibly audiences you hadn’t thought of before. User personas can streamline a brand when starting or trying to find a new audience with a brand refresh. Creating these archetypical users can help understand shared behaviors over a wide range of demographics. Looking into the shared behaviors behind user personas helps with human-centric design. This design gives life, can provide empathy by understanding audiences, and can help lay out a website that works for different clients. 

A Blueprint for Designers

Personas can help establish how the users may interact with a brand, and they will benefit internal teams. Designers can look through another person’s perspective and better understand ways to appeal to the end user visually. This is especially true if the user is someone different than themselves. It can help the product team decide how to plan, develop, launch, and manage the product or service by looking at the user personas. Finding the behavioral pattern behind the consumers hones in on ways to market to them effectively and ensures people feel as if they align with a brand’s message.

Personas Highlight Marketing Pain Points

For example, a kid’s toy company’s business traction is slowing but recently created the coolest new toy- a buildable chess set. After a few months on the shelf, their sales were much lower than anticipated and saw a decline in sales for the whole company. The marketing team tried to figure out why and decided to create user personas. After creating them, they realized they were targeting too young of a demographic and should have marketed to parents and older kids. They saw a motivation for parents to buy a buildable chess set as an activity to do together and to teach their children the art of chess.

This example highlights how useful personas can be for the internal teams to widen their views and understand user trends. The user persona is an essential part of marketing, but it is also a productive tool to connect to a wide range of clients. It can be used for creativity or to begin the progress of making effective web page designs that are user-centered. User personas are a reliable and realistic way to find the target audience.