Personas and customer journeys - helping you communicate effectively
Personas are fictional characters that represent your target audiences. The persona describes the needs, goals, attitudes and behavioral patterns of the target audience. This makes it easier to imagine the person visiting your website or using your services. You will gain an understanding of their expectations, needs and preferences, so you can make better decisions about your communication. And once you've identified their respective customer journeys, it becomes even easier to offer the right content to the right persona.
How many personas are needed?
A persona represents the overall picture of a segment of your target audience, not your entire target audience. Therefore, after collection, you need to review and group the information. A related question is - how many are needed? The general recommendation is to create three to five personas that represent your target audience. That's enough to cover the majority of your customers, while being delineated enough to distinguish them from each other.
Different ways to create personas
The structure of your personas may differ depending on how they will be used. If you are creating personas to streamline your communication, you may need to study different attributes and characteristics than if you are using personas for your new website. However, the aim is always the same - to provide a clearer picture of your target audiences, what they need and how you can support them in achieving their goals. Read more in our blog post on creating personas. Here are some examples of parameters that are useful to know, whatever your use case:
- Demographic factors such as age, relationship status, job title and income.
- Personal factors such as characteristics, interests, lifestyle, values, ambitions and motivations.
- Background factors such as responsibilities, professional experience, education, channels and digital maturity.
Identifying goals and challenges
What is important to the person, linked to role, career and/or industry? Defining goals is important because it gives you an insight into how your customers' goals and your goals can be met. Another perspective could be to list the accessibility needs of the person visiting your website. Then describe what drives and motivates your persona and what makes them frustrated? This will give you an idea of what you should do more of to make their job easier and what you should try to avoid as it is not having the right effect.
Digital customer journeys
Each persona has its own digital customer journey. Normally, it consists of five stages where you can use different activities to generate leads and convert prospects into new customers. Here are some examples of what you can do in each stage:
- Attract: Use different marketing channels and strategies such as social media posts, blog posts, SEO and PPC campaigns to make sure potential customers find you and interact with your content.
- Capture: Get to know your prospects by getting them to provide their e-mail address and other information via forms such as newsletters and interesting information.
- Nurture: Now that you know who your visitors are, you can start sending email campaigns and leverage automated feeds to nurture them with additional information.
- Convert: It's time for your sales team to use the information you've gathered and make a tailored approach focusing on the actual needs of the potential customer.
- Expand: Keep up the momentum and make sure your new customer gets what they need so they are ready to accept more services and offers from you.
An important part of communication
At Navigator, we often work with personas and customer journeys in our clients' digital communications. We have an elaborate process for creating realistic characters that represent the target groups and then identifying their customer journeys to make them a natural part of the communication.
Long experience with personas and customer journeys
At Navigator, we have extensive experience of working with personas and customer journeys for companies in B2B, B2C and Healthcare. If you want to see examples of what we have done for different customers, you should browse through our cases. You can find more inspiration and knowledge on our blog. Feel free to use the filter function to search your way through.
Please download our guide
Feel free to download our e-book "Your compass for the digital customer journey".
