How To Use Personas For Better Brand And Website Design
Website design isn’t just about making a website look pretty or having funky hover effects (although that is arguably a large part of it!) Much more happens beneath the surface before we even begin designing…
Before each project, we always create a sitemap and wireframes, but there’s even a step before we get there: the persona stage.
What Are Personas?
Personas are fictional characters created based upon research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
They consist of the demographics, media consumption, fears, emotions and dreams and everything in between of an imagined individual who represents your target customer.
It’s a process which allows you to take a step back, and view from the outside looking in. Not only stand in your customers shoes, but have a good idea of the exact pair they’d choose.
This blog focuses on the relevance and benefits of personas on business and branding, but we also have a how-to blog, featuring step-by-step guide on how to build your own personas and some tips from our first hand experience including how to collate research (even on a low/no budget).
Why Bother With Personas?
Personas help you to understand who you’re talking to.
You might not talk to your parents the same way you’d talk to your friends. Websites are faceless - you don’t know who’s on the other side of the screen - so if you don’t understand who your customers are, you are casting your net anonymously wide.
Ultimately, your website and marketing communications are about your brand being best understood. Personas help you to understand who your audience is, and as a result help you to shape your comms and brand strategy in a way that makes sense to them. This in turn eliminates by waste by ensuring they are highly targeted.
When applied to advertising or keyword targeting for your business, eliminating waste by knowing who you’re talking to (or more so - knowing who you shouldn’t be talking to!) can save a lot of money by focussing your ad spend: all it takes is a little understanding of brand personas.
Having clear personas help you to get the right message across on the right media to the right person. Pretty much the intention of any advertising, branding or PR strategy. What’s not to love?!
“Personas are focused on customers. Customers are the bedrock of business.”
Personas are perhaps the most fundamental element of any business/brand strategy, because it identifies the missing link between product/services and sales - i.e your customer - who’s right hand takes the product and left passes the money.
The truth is, if your customers aren’t at the forefront of your business, then you're doing something wrong.
Customers are the reason why you run your business: they are the fuel thats allow you to keep it running.
Brand personas ensure your business always has customers in sight as you walk down the path and to your goal destination. It makes sure you’re following them. Keeping up with what’s happening. Never looking too far away - focusing too much on getting to the top of the mountain - that you miss the pothole in front of you, trip up, and lose track of your customer.
It’s important to understand how your customers navigate the world, which will make them easier to follow - as even if they move out of sight for a while, you know them well enough to anticipate the route they’d take.
...But an even better way to keep customers in your sight instead of following them - is walking alongside and befriending them.
Allow those in your sight to become familiar faces - not strangers. You could tell me both what they physically look like, but also their fears, emotions and what they watched on TV last night. (It’s hard to even know family members that well!)
Ultimately, you need to understand someone first before connecting with them, and exactly the same with branding.
And connecting with people and giving them something of value is what makes business so rewarding. Personas are a way to understand more accurately the type of person whose life you’re influencing with your business. It makes work enjoyable and purposeful.
Strategies And Best Practices For Personas.
Be Specific
Successful personas are granular. It involves approaching your audience with a fine comb and going all the way from the core to the edges.
Personas identify an individual rather than a group. This allows for niche targeting which is important as it’s unrealistic to aim for everyone to become a customer.
Despite describing a single fictional character, this personality reflects a typical key audience group. There could be 10,000 ‘millennial Sarahs who freelance and use cafes as their offices’ despite identifying one personality.
Communicating to an individual makes the conversation feel more personal and directed, so the audience is more likely to listen up.
Go Deeper Than Demographics
In a digital world, it’s quite possible that you can operate your business without ever actually interacting physically with a customer. It’s a far cry from how business used to be - where instead of your e-commerce store, you may have owned a bricks-and-mortar local shop where you’d quite literally interact face-to-face with customers daily. You genuinely get to know them and be in the same space. You build relationships.
With digitalisation comes depersonalisation. We understand and segment real people based on non-real, digital data.
Of course, data will never quite represent them. Their social media likes is only a faint outline of their shape.
But the truth is, there is a real person behind that screen! That person will buy your t-shirt and wear it on their real skin and their real friends will comment on how it looks.
Digitalisation has allowed for distance. On the plus side, you can more easily have customers on the other side of the globe - but equally with distance customer connection can also feel at an arm's length, and de-personal. Personas help to re-humanise your business. Understanding your customers as personalities - not only as end users with a bank account could also reignite a rewarding spark. Remind you of the value you give to people. Remind you of why you started your business in the first place.
It’s important to take a 360 degree view of a person. They’re human, not only a happy-clappy-consumer. To view customers as this is to undermine them. By ignoring other aspects of their personality - you’re focusing only on what they do for you as a consumer (pay you money for your products and services) rather than what you do for them. The problem you solve. Prosperous business is a reciprocal cycle!
Now You Know How to Use Personas For Better Brand and Website Design
To sum up, personas are a crucial foundation for any brand strategy.
If the website is the face of a fully-grown business, a persona is the fetus.
It’s a fundamental stage which should come before all else - a stage of growth for understanding who you are and how you will interact with the world.
After all, nothing can be fully grown without having been a fetus first! Re-humanise your customer targeting by understanding and befriending your customer’s personalities.
