Speaker 1: It's time to stop thinking of your audience as customers and to start thinking of them as users. How? With user personas. Hello world and welcome to another video on the Visme channel that's meant to help you and your business grow. Like a plant needs water, you need Visme. And today we're spiking our water with some necessary information on user personas. By creating a user persona, a business will shift their focus to providing solutions to their audience's pain points. It's like you're talking with someone rather than talking at them. All of your marketing should promote how you provide your audience with a unique experience. Creating a user persona will help with that. In this video, I'll explain further why you want to create one, what to include in yours, and the best practices for creating it. Shall we? Let's start with the basics. What is a user persona? You may have previously heard it called a buyer persona or a customer persona. And it's a fictional character or really a representation of a character that portrays your target audience. The goals of this characterization represent the objectives of a larger group. So this persona, which usually consists of one to two pages, is made up of a customer's needs, goals, behaviors, pain points, behavioral patterns, skills, and demographics. One early simple example is this user persona here. Revcode targets beginning, intermediate, and novice programmers. They acknowledge that they're not targeting experienced programmers by pointing out what their target audience's issues are, and they even use an infographic to show who finds their platform the most useful. This persona focuses less on demographics and more on pain points. If you're new to user personas, and you just saw our first example, and you're thinking, what good is that going to do for me? Well, let me answer that question for you. You see, a user persona fully clarifies your audience's needs. It answers the question, who are we marketing to on paper in more than just text form? And while you know how your product or service helps people, are you sure that your marketing is geared towards that group? A user persona will help you achieve that in three ways. The first is it'll help you build empathy for the user. It'll help you understand what's important to them by putting yourself in their shoes. It'll help you see your audience as real people and not just as numbers or some end goal. The second reason is it'll help you provide a marketing direction. You're no longer asking if you'd like a marketing idea, you're asking if your user persona will like it. The persona will help you market your solution the best way possible, appealing to their wants and needs. And the third reason is it'll create consistency across teams. Your marketers, designers, builders, decision makers, they'll all be on the same page in understanding the direction you're going and why. In order to bring your customers to life through a user persona, there's certain things that you must include. The first is basic information. Start simple. Age, gender, location, and give them a name. Sally, Johnny, Carl, Rachel, whatever fits. Then dig a little bit deeper. What does your ideal customer do for work? Are they married? Do they have children? These are some questions that you'll want to answer before again digging deeper. Give them an archetype, which is a very typical example of a common thing. A couple common examples are the hero or the motherly figure. Just by saying those words, you may get an idea in your head of who I'm talking about. You can then give them a short bio. Mention what social platforms they may use the most and how they're most often influenced. Here's another example. That's a template you can edit through Visme's website right now. On top of several items I just mentioned, this template also allows you to add a picture to your persona, which brings me to the next element you should add. Pictures. By adding a picture to your persona, you immediately make them seem more human. You suddenly have empathy and you care for your user persona. But don't add the picture of your best friend just because you need a picture. Consider their look, age and apparel. If you're marketing sweatpants, you don't want a picture of somebody in a suit or dress. You want somebody like Hayden, a college student who's also in need of finding a rental property. The third element to include are personality traits. A picture may say a thousand words, but you also don't want to judge a book by its cover. So describe their personality. Are they funny, serious, professional, introverted? You tell us. This user persona features what he's looking for, his personality traits and even how he would react in most situations. And while this last persona mentioned the user wants, you could expand on that if you want it. Create a user persona that focuses on what your audience is seeking and their goals and motivations. This may help you answer questions on how to not only help them, but help you connect with them. And last but not least, you'll want to include pain points. I know I've mentioned it already, and that's because it's one of the most important factors influencing your content and campaigns. What's frustrating them? Answer this question. By knowing their issues, you'll be better suited to help them. All right, you now understand the importance of a user persona and what to include in one. Now it's time to put your knowledge to use and build it. For this phase of our video, we have five steps. You're already on the right track for step one. You're doing the research into building a user persona, but now you need to do some field research into your target audience. This may consist of actually interviewing individuals you believe fit your target audience. Find those that have purchased your product before or have expressed interest in it and sit down with them to learn more about their behaviors, interests, and other traits that we've already discussed. And don't only talk with those who have liked your product. You need to understand those who didn't like it as well if you truly want to market that product properly. It may not be fun, but it's necessary. And if you don't have that kind of time, you need to look at customer support logs or web analytics, which actually leads us into step two. That analytical data is already at your fingertips. When someone signs up to use your product, you'll be able to find out their age, gender, behavioral patterns, and more. And if you're not finding out that information upon signup, ask users to take a short survey. You may need to incentivize them to do so, but it'll be useful for you to better understand your users. Once you've gathered all your data, it's time to analyze it. By looking into patterns, you can place users into groups. Look into how often they're using your product, how long they've been using it, how loyal they are to your product. By answering these questions, you can organize users into groups, making it easier to create that user persona. So now you should have a few differentiated groups of individuals clearly organized. But don't panic. You shouldn't be looking to create just a single user persona. We actually recommend creating anywhere from three to five. You don't want to have more or your focus area will be too broad and any fewer won't reach a large enough audience. This example throws two personas into a single graphic to immediately compare side by side. Rideshare apps appeal to several different groups and two of them are visible in this easy to edit template on Visme's website. The fifth and final step is to build your graphic. Gather all of your data and information received thus far and follow me. Start with a header, a fictional name, photo, job title, or even a quote about what that user may be looking for. Something like, let's me post, schedule, and manage my social media with ease of use without additional steps for a social media management app. Next, you'll want to add demographics. What's their background? Gender, ethnicity, education level, family status. Even consider their professional background. Are they a director earning over $100,000 a year or fresh out of college? Then ask what's their environment like? Do they work from home or in an office? How many hours a week? Are they working with others or independently? Hopefully you're still keeping up. The last part you'll want to add in this section is any psychographics. What does that user like or dislike? What annoys them? What encourages them? This can be put into a short sentence in the persona. Next, you'll want to add end goals. Simply answer the question of what users want to accomplish by using your product. What are their motivations? For a social media manager, she wants a seamless product experience that doesn't require unnecessary hoops to jump through. You can add a scenario section as well. This will briefly explain what a day in the life of that user looks like. It'll explain what their tasks are and reiterate why they're looking for your product. And lastly, if your brain hasn't given up on me yet, there's some additional information that you can add that I've mentioned earlier in this video. Like social channels that the user uses most or maybe their favorite brands, TV shows, applications, whatever fits in the realm of your product. At the end of the day, you want to build the best representation of your target audience. There may be elements that we didn't discuss in this video that you can add, and we'd encourage you to do so. But we also tried to cover all the bases here, and we hope you found it useful. When it comes to actually creating your user persona and the software required to do so, visme.com is your answer. It's intuitive, practical, and was built with users like you in mind. And all the examples you've seen in this video come directly from our website. You can start editing the templates you've seen today in the next five minutes. Starting with a blank canvas is scary and challenging, so don't let that fear stop you when you can build a user persona with Visme. Thank you all so much for watching. If you've learned anything today, click that like button down below. And if you want to learn even more, click the subscribe button as well. With Visme, I'm Mike Ploeger helping you make information beautiful.