Profile your target client for better results
Persona development and customer profiling is not the same thing as market segmentation. However, persona creation relies heavily on market segmentation. In order to create personas you need to understand the market segmentation and the various customer profiles you compiled by your team. Segmentation and all that it entails is the means to generate the personas for your site.
For every segment you must come up with the profiles of the people you are aiming to sell to through your site. Once that is complete you may find that you have 4 profiles that generally represent your entire market. Each profile can than be taken and molded into a persona. Give it a name, a picture – make him real.
So within your target market, you have a lot of information about your clients including their socio-economic status, the ethnicity, family size, buying trends, and values. The market segmentation will help you narrow the groups that you wish to target through your website. You must consider questions such as which groups are more likely to purchase online? What motivations and concerns will these potential clients come with?
Now, you may decide you have plenty information to begin building your site. Why would you need to delve in deeper and form personas in order to better persuade your online visitor.
Simple: catering a site to 4 individuals with a detailed description of their loves is more successful than catering to 1 large group of people with a wide range of personalities, likes and dislikes, and opinions. Your site’s structure and content will still be very general in order to encompass the entire group. By creating personas, you are allowing your site to succeed because you can visualise who you are targeting.
Armed with that knowledge of your market segmentations, you can create with your team of marketing and creative specialists a hypothetical individual that matches the above criteria and giving them a name, a life, a background, and a face in order to maximise your conversion and site results.
The process of persona creation can take weeks of research and detailed observation before determination and creation of the final personas that you will be targeting through your site and content.
What face would your persona have?
