Setting Goals and Creating Personas

User research is an essential part of creating a website and is often missed from marketing strategies. It’s a key part of user experience and will help you understand how your target audience act online. I’m often surprised at how little companies actually understand about their customers. They might know their names, email addresses, and what their job titles are but their behaviour and interests are often unknown.

Put it this way, if I don’t know the type of customer I want to attract and what they like reading then how will I know if this blog post is worth the time spent writing it? From day one, we’ve always wanted interesting projects, and luckily we’ve been able to get them naturally. We’ve been doing the right things, even if those things in the early days were unplanned and without a clear strategy in place. We loosely knew that by producing quality work that got good results our clients would be happy, and that more clients would come to get a similar service.

But what if we had a clear strategy, goals and objectives, and used those to help us make marketing decisions, write more suitable blog posts and design interfaces that work for our target audience? The end results would be much better no doubt.

Everyone has goals and likes incentives

People are motivated by incentives, and that’s how the economy has always worked. A potential client of ours may come to us to build a web application or a conversion optimised website but their real incentive is they want to build a successful business, work for themselves or make a lot of money. A client’s incentive is usually clear, but sometimes it’s not. It’s important to understand what their incentives are before the real project starts.

A digital marketing agency’s goals might be to win new clients, keep existing clients happy, attract the best staff etc. but the real underlying incentive is probably to be profitable and grow (read: make money and grow the empire). We need to create a strategy and process that helps us achieve our own goals and that can only be done if you understand your customers and users.

By creating personas we can start outlining our potential customers, what their goals are and what considerations we need to look at when creating our digital strategy, writing the content or even designing the website.

Identifying your customers and creating Personas

By creating personas you are spending time thinking about your customers; who they are, what they like and dislike and how you can better target them with your marketing efforts. A persona is a fictional representation of a real life customer. We’ve already established a goal is to win more clients and make more money – this happens to be one of our goals. To do this we need to attract the right sort of clients and target them.

Here’s an example of a typical persona that would be ideal for an agency like us:

Job title: Marketing Director
Company description: Business to consumer focused. 250+ staff with aspirations to grow their business and add value to their brand. They have a dated digital strategy and want to keep on top of the game.
Age: 35-54
Gender: Male or Female (3:2)
Likes: New technologies, Cycling, Wine, Movies, Good food, Sports.
Other facts: Uses mobile more than desktop, iPad or tablet use is growing, on the internet 5-7 hours per day, drives a big car and travels a fair bit.

Behaviour Patterns:
Visits the BBC website to check on the latest news and sports. Enjoys browsing the internet on their smartphone, tablet and desktop. Has a Facebook account and uses it to keep in touch with friends and family. Uses Twitter and LinkedIn to keep up to date with news and their peers. Dislikes bad service and is open to trying new suppliers. Likes learning about new trends and marketing methods.

Now we have an example Persona we can add it to the list. We’ve outlined what a potential client might look like based on our existing clients. You could go one step further and do contextual interviews with real customers and find out very specific facts about them. You could also use social networks to help you create personas and get an insight into likes and demographic data. Look at what people like on Facebook and use LinkedIn advertising to see what the age and gender ratio is for specific job titles. Google Analytics will give you an insight into what devices, browsers and operating systems people use.

This persona will be one of many, we like to split them up into two types; core and fringe. The core persona is our target audience and the set of users we spend most of our time focusing on – these would include potential clients and talented people looking for a job. The fringe personas are the users that don’t make up a significant portion of your userbase but are important to add to the mix and not miss out on opportunities – for us these may include people from the press, industry experts, and investors.

Behaviour patterns are a key part of understanding your users and designing better interfaces. If we know that our personas carry out routine tasks like login to facebook and share links then we know what interfaces and experiences they may be familiar with. This way we can make sure that whatever we design is familiar and has a better user experience. If our personas are all using tablets regularly then it’s a pretty good idea to include some touch gestures on your website and buttons instead of text links that are more friendly for a user’s fingers.

Understanding your users goals

Each persona will have their own goals and incentives, which if understood can really help a company target them better. Through experience we know that marketing directors are interested in getting results, acquiring new customers, reducing churn and so on. Their goals are to find the right people and agencies to help them achieve this goal. They often invite agencies to pitch new ideas and have budgets that they can spend on different types of marketing.

So what’s the point?

With only a short exercise we’ve outlined goals of the organisation, created personas to represent the target audience and tried to understand their individual goals. We should now have a much better understanding of what content we need to produce, what the design and interface might look like, where we need to focus our marketing efforts and more. We can also use all of the information to rate the work we’ve done, content we’ve written etc. If we’ve created a website we now must rate it against the goals and personas to make sure that their individual needs are being catered for and that the experience they have using our interface is familiar to them. Essentially we’ve created a way to test our work before we put it live in the wild.