Developing personas

Developing Personas is another tool in the web analytics toolbox that can be of great help to learn more about your site’s visitors, how they behave and more importantly which visitors convert to reach your goals and others don’t. This technique is used mostly at an advanced level, but using the basics can already significantly aide the way you plan out your website strategies.

The visitors that come to your site are all individuals, performing actions following their individual thought processes and don’t all use your site in the same way. Now, if you take particular behavioural characteristics you can find patterns with which you can group your visitors and label them as personas. Personas can be seen as characters with which you classify the different types of visitors you attract. Developing these personas comes down to knowing your target audience and sketching a profile of, for example, their demographics, profession etc.

If you’ve looked at the basic tools available in web analytics you will have a good idea where your visitors come from and, if your web marketing tactics are solid, you’ll have targeted particular audiences. Let’s say for simplicity’s sake that you attract two main groups of visitors, two personas, and that you sell IT products to businesses. Two possible personas could be a senior executive overseeing an IT department and the other a systems administrator. You both want them to convert and you use what you know of these personas to provide both of them with the information they need to improve the likelihood that they’ll perform the action: buying your nifty software tool.  Now you know that the systems admin will want all the technical details, all the nitty gritty, so you put in a detailed features page. Problem is that you know that the executive can’t be bothered about all that detail and what’s a quick overview of what your product can do to help solve his people’s problems. You now know that including a short bullet-form list of features at the top of that page will serve the executive and there’s a good chance more of them will convert.

By having developed personas you now have a better understanding of what you need to provide them with in order to improve conversions. It might look a little abstract, but once you get into it the ideas will start flowing quickly and you’ll get a better grasp of personas and how they can help you improve.

If you really get into this you could take it to another level and put your personas into scenarios, a sort of role playing exercise. I’ll stick to the basics for the time being, which is the easiest way to get some good gains.

Here’s an extract from “My Shoe Fetish & Why Personas Are Invaluable for Marketing”, written by Anne Holland of MarketingSherpa. Hers is an excellent explanation of what persona marketing is all about.