Face it. Your website isn’t for you but for your customers.
You create your website to attract prospects that you can market to and later convert them into leads and then a customer. Everything from call-to-action to the visual design is inspired by the users’ behavior.
So, don’t you think it is important to develop a customer-centric website that offers seamless navigation, enhanced user experience and boost user engagement significantly.
This is the reasons why you should craft your website's design, content, and experience with your user personas in mind. Also, talk to different stakeholders involved to gather input from all levels of the organization.
You might be wondering what is persona or what is a persona in web experience?
Simply put, a user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer, based on user research and incorporates the needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns of your target audience.
So why do we use persona?
The persona allows the company to design a better user experience for it's at all touch points, essentially, increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) and subscription - a key factor in today’s business landscape.
Also, a website that resonates with customers/audience, motivates content sharing and converts more email subscribers.
Furthermore, using a persona, you can better optimize the site for search as you have a better understanding of the keywords your audience is looking for in search engines.
How does the persona help in marketing strategy?
No matter what business you have, an emotional marketing strategy can be as effective as any other strategy.
Personas offer a purpose for all your marketing strategy be it web content or marketing collateral. Contents based on persona allows you to address the specific concerns customers struggle with before taking the desired action.
Undoubtedly, personas are extremely helpful when it comes to figuring out the interest area of our prospects. There are chances that different segments of your audience will be interested in the product for different reasons.
Also, it is pertinent to speak to them directly to increase the chance of conversion.
Let’s cut the clutter and see -
How to create a persona?
In order to create an effective user/buyer persona, consider defining your segments, demographics, articulate personas’ values & beliefs and define the value they get from your organization. In the end, give them a face and a name to make it look more realistic.
Follow the below steps to create a persona for your upcoming projects:
Defining Segments & Demographics
Begin with a list of different segments that you deal with. Email subscribers, social media fans, inactive members, donors, volunteers, activists and others.
While defining demographics, consider asking yourself a few questions on their address, gender, education, income, marital status, and kids.
Articulating Values and Beliefs
Learning about your customers’ values, opinions and beliefs give you a handle on what will be going on in their heads when they visit your website.
For this, you can ask questions about their passions and interests, dreams and goals, political thoughts and personality characteristics.
Articulate What Motivates Them
Start by asking some of the questions like their worries and goals, ways they try to create a meaningful life and behavioral traits.
Values They Get From Your Firm
Understanding your personas belief will help you to figure out exactly what they care for and why would they be your subscriber, volunteer or donate you.
Realistic Name and Face
It's always suggested to give your persona a name and a realistic face to help them become more real.
Well, by now, we have a better understanding of creating a user persona/buyer persona. And why it is important for any business. Now, it’s time to explore the best practices. Since this blog has already become detailed we will share best practices to leverage the power of a user persona in the next installment of this series.
To conclude why you should create a website-specific user persona?
To put it simply, a website designed, developed and marketed on assumption is often misguided and don’t show the results what we are expecting and ultimately it's underachieving.
We need to understand users are different and they have different goals than you. They don’t care as you do. Here persona helps every stakeholder involved make a better decision, create one shared vision and make user research come to life.
Developing persona may take dedicated time and effort, but try not to be concerned with the additional time to create as it will help your business in the long run.
That’s it! I believe this was quite a ride, but a necessary one.
Now go ahead and start working on a persona for your new, upcoming project.
In case you need any assistance with web development services, get in touch with our Drupal experts to find out how you can enhance user experience and increase engagement on your site.
We, at Valuebound - a Drupal web development company, help enterprises with Drupal migration, Drupal support, third-party integration, performance tuning, managed services and others.
