Do you really know your customer? Part 2
How to leverage Personas to scale your product or service. Small business edition.
The last issue of the Personas series focused on how to identify the most important people for your product, your customers. Today, we will learn how to give them a life of their own, so we can refer to them when managing your product or service.
Last week we learned about the 3-step method for developing personas and applied this simple tool in Daniel’s lunchbox example. We ended up with two key customers:
Persona 1:
Who: Children in elementary school.
How: They are the end users. They eat from it. They need to be able to open and close the lunch box easily. They need to pull it out and store it back in a backpack.
What: They might not care about functional features. They do care about colors and images. Having fun and eating food they like is likely important.
Persona 2:
Who. Parents of the children in elementary school.
How. They do research and compare features before purchasing. They purchase the lunch box most likely without feedback from their children. They cook (or buy) the food that goes into the lunchbox. They clean it after every use using preferably a dishwasher. They store it somewhere in their kitchens once is washed.
What. Safety is very important, like materials being food-grade compliant. Lunchbox size to ensure it fits in their children's backpacks, they validate that the compartments are the right size for the children and the types of foods they eat. They need the lunchbox to open and close easily for small children's strength. They need the lunchbox to not spill food or liquids inside the children’s
Remember, the 3-step method for developing personas is your starting point and intends to help you identify the people that interact with your product or service. Now that we have this step complete, we proceed to give them a life of their own.
Creating your personas
A persona is a fictional representation of a typical or ideal customer based on research and data. To correctly create a persona, we will need to objectively think of different aspects of the people that embody our target customers. I warn you, this can become an extremely complex exercise, however, we will try to keep things as simple as possible.
When it comes to the information we need to create a persona, we need as a minimum, the following information*.
Demographic information: This includes details such as age, gender, income, education level, occupation, and geographic location.
Psychographic information: This includes information about personality, values, interests, and lifestyle.
Behaviors and habits: This includes information about how the persona uses your product or similar products, what problems they are trying to solve, and what motivates them to make a purchase.
Pain points and challenges: Understanding the challenges your persona faces in relation to your product can help you tailor your messaging and create solutions that address their needs.
Goals and aspirations: Knowing what your persona hopes to achieve can help you position your product as a tool that helps them achieve their goals.
Communication preferences: Knowing how your persona prefers to communicate (e.g. email, social media, phone) can help you tailor your marketing strategy to reach them where they are most receptive.
* Please notice that not all of the characteristics listed above are applicable to all personas. Also, you could find yourself adding characteristics for specific personas you need.
If we try to apply what we have learned above to Daniel’s new personas, which so far we have identified as:
Children in elementary school ages
Parents
You will quickly realize that you will probably need more than two personas. Otherwise, how would you concentrate all the children in elementary school ages into a single persona?
Elementary school in the United States goes from first to fifth grade, there are boys and girls, from ages 6 to 11, and multiple nationalities for each class. What about gender-neutral parents? What about children's weight, and height? Does it matter if they follow different religions? Does it matter if they speak multiple languages? And what about their parents? All of the above kind of applies to them, but differently, right?
This is why creating a persona can become a complex exercise even for a simple product like a lunchbox. We can simplify it all.
Defining how many personas you need
The number of personas you need to create for your product will depend on several factors, including the complexity of your product, your initial budget, the size of your target market, and the diversity of your audience.
In general, it's a good idea to create at least one persona for each major segment of your audience. For example, if you're creating a product that is designed for both younger and older users, you may want to create a persona for each age group. Similarly, if your product is used in multiple industries, you may want to create a persona for each industry. However, you should avoid creating too many personas, as this can lead to confusion and make it more difficult to develop a cohesive product strategy.
When creating personas, it's important to ensure they are distinct from one another and represent a significant portion of your target audience. It's also important to revisit and update your personas regularly to ensure they remain accurate and relevant as your product and audience evolve.
Your initial product funding strategy is important when defining your personas. When you start a new product you may not have the budget to create a product or service variation for all the personas you identify as potential targets. Similarly, you may have the budget but you are looking to test the market and grow as your product increase in sales. It is important to decide which persona(s) is(are) the initial target for your product strategy.
Adding personas as you expand your product is okay, which can potentially translate to product variations. For instance, if you start selling a more generic product targeting all children in elementary school ages, in a subsequent product expansion you could create a variation for middle schoolers, or stay in elementary school ages but differentiate by gender, interests, etc. It will all depend on what the data suggests from selling the first variation.
Overwhelmed? Don’t be. Here is where the experience counts. I will give you a tip: avoid the analysis paralysis and start. Then, look at the data and adjust.
Here is what I recommended for Daniel’s lunchbox, as a starting point:
We decided to start with a single, more generic persona to represent the children in elementary school ages and put some extra focus on their parents. There were a few reasons for this:
Daniel had the funds to launch new product variations based on different children's personas, however, we knew the weakness was coming from neglecting the parent persona.
Sales of the current product, which had 4 variations (two sizes, in two different colors) were solid on Amazon but have never reached the numbers of a few other competitors. The assumption was this was in part motivated by the lack of attention to the parent's needs and wants.
At the time, we agreed that focusing on the parent persona was strategically necessary before putting more effort into the children's wants and needs.
The first draft looked like this:
Persona 1: Kelly.
Kelly is an 8 years old third grader at Casablanca Elementary School. Kelly has an active lifestyle, playing soccer 3 days per week and learning piano 2 days per week. The weekends are usually spent in soccer games and having fun with the family. Kelly is an active kid, and every day at brunch time, which happens to be from 11:30 AM to 12.30 PM, Kelly devours the food their parents pack for school. At 8 years old, brunch is more a time to have fun with friends than eating, so Kelly tries to eat as fast as possible and she hopes the food is delicious and easy to eat. Kelly hates when mom asks to be more attentive to how the lunchbox is put back inside her backpack, as sometimes the desire to play with friends is higher than being careful to close the lid of the lunchbox or if the utensils were forgotten (again), which sometimes requires her mom or dad to clean the backpack or buy new utensils.
Persona 2: Deborah.
Deborah is a 35 years old professional woman and Kelly’s mother. She is married to Joseph, a 36 years old sales representative working for a software company. Deborah is a proud business owner and runs a dentist practice. While a very busy mom, one of Deborah’s priorities is to ensure Kelly has all the resources she needs to grow healthy and happy. This is why Deborah and Jose decided to invest their time in packing lunch for Kelly every day with healthy food, as they don’t believe the food offered at the school cafeteria covers Kelly’s nutritional needs. Deborah makes food every morning for Kelly during breakfast, which can be a chaotic time. She tries to make something different every day so Kelly never gets bored with food. Deborah’s priority is to ensure Kelly eats it. Safety is a top priority for Deborah, so she ensures to research the products she buys for Kelly’s lunch and doesn’t mind if they are more expensive than other less qualitative options. Every night after work Deborah fetches Kelly’s lunchbox from the school backpack and cleans it. She relies on the dishwater for Kelly’s lunchbox and utensils as it saves her valuable time.
Consider all the information you can use now to build a product and marketing strategy for your initial product or service. For this description, Daniel modeled Deborah using his sister and niece. He has the knowledge and resources from a very close family member to start building a persona that closely matches Deborah and Kelly as a starting point.
So, after creating Deborah and becoming familiar with her wants and needs, what did Daniel learn and what changes did he make to the product?
The product itself didn’t change, initially. The changes were focused on three major areas:
Packaging. A completely new redesign with a focus on Deborah, and not Kelly. Clearly visible and identifiable information about product safety when it comes to materials used and how a special lunchbox lid closure feature prevents spills.
Amazon listing. A complete rewording. Adding specific details on product safety, like plastic materials used and the meaning of it in order to force buyers to understand the differences between Daniel’s product and competitors selling lower quality. A video was also added focused on Deborah’s experience packing and cleaning the lunchbox.
Ad campaign. Because the target is Deborah, a persona he knows well now, Daniel succeeded in narrowing the target customer for Facebook and Instagram ads, making it more effective.
As a result of these changes, Daniel’s Lunchbox is now an Amazon top seller. Additionally, I am collaborating with Daniel to understand what changes his business need to start selling products through large distribution chains like Costco, Target, and Walmart.
How well should you know your target personas?
Very well. Writing a persona requires a certain level of expertise and knowledge about them, and it can’t just be made up.
Tip: The less you know about the industry and market of a product or service you want to sell, the more effort is required to study your potential customers.
By no means I am discouraging you to find a great niche or an unmet need in the market and launch a great product or service for it, but please do the work to clearly identify who your customers will be. Some additional useful tips:
Jargon. People use very specific jargon in their own sectors and/or interests. It is very easy to understand if a seller of a specific product is an expert or not, of the market and industry you are selling to. The more specific the niche the more you should use its jargon. An example from the fishing world:
Hookset: When the angler pulls the line to set the hook in the fish's mouth.
Lunker: A big fish, usually referring to bass or other game fish.
Tackle: The fishing equipment used, including rods, reels, lines, and lures.
Fly fishing: A technique that involves using an artificial fly to catch fish.
Jigging: A technique where the angler jerks the lure up and down to attract fish.
Chumming: The practice of throwing bait or food into the water to attract fish.
Catch and release: The practice of catching a fish and then releasing it back into the water.
Backlash: When the fishing line gets tangled on the reel.
Rod action: Refers to the amount of bend or flexibility in a fishing rod.
If you sell a product related to fishing, ensure you us jargon in your listings and marketing content.
Motivations: Understand the motivations that drive your users to use your product, and the benefits they hope to achieve. When creating personas there could be a good deal of guessing initially, however, keep evolving your personas as you learn more about them.
Goals: Identify your users' goals and the outcomes they hope to achieve by using your product. Deborah will buy Daniel’s lunchbox not because a hamburger will taste better when packed in it. It will buy it because the lunchbox maintains the hamburger intact inside an 8yo backpack, or because she can throw it confidently in the dishwasher every night.
Never stop evolving your personas. We all change and adapt to new realities, technologies, geographies, etc. Life changes for everybody, so keep evolving your personas throughout the lifetime of your product to (maybe) sell it forever!
What other insights do you have? I am interested in learning from you also!
See you in the next issue!