How can you create a persona for your site? Let’s look at a real life example. Best Buy  scanned their market, reviewed customer profiles and buying habits, and came up with the perfect target client. One that doesn’t know much about electronics, is easily swayed by a salesman, and is in a rush to get it and get out of the store: the “soccer” mommy.  After researching their sales stats etc., the soccer mom was the perfect target customer.

Their training efforts, store set-up, and customer service are all geared towards helping her, “Jill.”  She’s the perfect customer; her family comes first, dreads electronic stores, and needs a lot of help. Employees at Best Buy are TRAINED to go after “Jills”.  They scan the incoming traffic to the store and locate the Jills, guiding them to buy whatever it is they need and more some, and finally walking them to the checkout to ensure that they make the purchase and don’t get lost along the way.  Best Buy has experienced a significant increase in sales after taking such an approach.

So how can you determine what personas you should be targeted with your copy and online effort? Let’s review the process, which has been delved into a bit in previous blogs:

You need to determine who your target market is; who are your “Jills?” You may have more than one golden, perfect customer to create a persona for, but don’t exceed 7 as we discussed in previous persona blogs.  So, let’s say after this in-depth look at your market, you determine the most ideal customers.  You look at their profiles and begin to group them depending on which profiles are in common with their personality, demographics, buying strategies, purchases, temperaments, and lifestyle.  You end up with 3 main groups.

Among your 3 main groups you need to distinguish the most complex and difficult to please of these personalities. Ultimately, each persona will represent the groups you have categorized amongst the customer profiles you have. This means that you need to pay close attention to each of the profiles, examining their lives in detail, and determining what overall features would satisfy everyone in that group. Your persona for that group will have ALL of those characteristics that you come up with.

Let’s examine this further. So you have the following customer profiles which make up for ¼ of your company’s revenue by ordering items online at your company:

Jill Fillo: 38, mother of 2, divorced, high school dropout, lower middle class, works as a secretary at a law firm, receives child support monthly, and lives in a small ranch in a suburb of Houston, TX. Purchases your items on a monthly basis and creates crafty baskets to sell at her local church.

Sally Zinger: 29, mother of 1, single mom (never married), lower middle class, Associates Degree, works in a Doctors office as an assistant, lives in a 2 bedroom apartment in Baltimore, MD. Purchase your items consistently to create gifts and crafts the patients purchase or are sent as gifts to other doctors and pharmaceutical execs. from the doctors office.

Clarissa Motts: 34, mother of 2, married to an engineer, is a stay-at-home mom, finished one year of college, upper middle class, lives in Louiville, KY.  Purchases your items online to auction for charities at different day events she attends with her friends and family.

These are a few samples of one of the groups you created, for example.  There are commonalities with their economic status, purchasing motives and patterns, ages, family lifestyles, and income. Your job would be to create a persona that would satisfy each and everyone of your customers in this category, which is why you need to know the details of your customers.

The site is not very optimized at this point. In order to maximize conversions many issues from your 3 personas need to be considered.

Persona Creation for your Site

You must also consider the temperaments of your potential clients. This will help construct copy that will easily sway them in the purchase process. Of course, under each of these general groups your personas have much more complex personalities.  Of the complex personalities, you need to create 3 (representing the 3 groups) and come up with their names, lives, personalities, objections and fears they may have towards your site, and an incentive to actually purchase your products or services.  So basically, rather than creating the site and copy blindly, you focus it on these 3 hypothetical individuals (like you’re talking and targeting them). This way you can ensure that you targeted the 3 main, most complex personas you will ever have; and if you satisfy them, you satisfy all your other customers.

So many clients don’t understand how we are going to base the entire site creation on three, four, five and up to 7 hypothetical individuals; each with a unique set of personality traits, objections to your products/services, reservations and interests. But think of it this way; if you were created a video game for example, would you create it blindly and expect any 13 year old to pick it up and like it? Never! Video game creators tell you that they test and re-test the games on their target market in order to ensure they are able to “addict” them.

When you’re creating your website, your target goal is to convert visitors by persuading them, encouraging them, solving their “problem,” and answering their questions.  How are you to know what they are to be thinking? Only after understanding your market thoroughly will you be able to do so.  The power of personas is so great that all of your company’s advertising and efforts will be targeted towards them.

So, although they use this approach offline, it can be implemented with personas online as well. You need to target specific individuals that need your product but are looking for some answers etc. Once you create your own Jill, you can make sure that her objections and fears are addressed, her site usability is mapped and easily applied, and her conversion will happen.

With that, we have concluded the personas series. We hope the series have answered any questions you may have.