Are Your User Personas Out of Date? And Why it Matters

At the foundation of every successful marketing campaign is a thorough understanding of the brand’s consumer base. The best marketing is human-focused, prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of the customer. To accomplish this, you must get inside the head of your users or your customers to see things from their perspective.

User personas are one of the best ways to enable your team to get a clear understanding of who your customers are. This is because it’s easier to connect with and understand a personification of a user given a name, age, gender, needs, and other characteristics than it is to simply connect with a bulleted list of generalized targets or goals.

However, when designing user personas, it’s important to continually update them to match the changing needs and desires of real-life consumers. If you only make a couple of generalized personas and never update them to match current demands and trends, you will likely struggle to produce relevant content that connects with today’s consumers.

In this article, we’ll look at how user personas can benefit your business and marketing campaigns, how to create relevant personas, and how to avoid limitations and setbacks from user personas that are taken too literally.

Why User Personas Are Important

The biggest challenge facing businesses is learning how to nail down their target customers. You might have an initial idea in your head as to who you want to target, but you can’t control consumer behaviors. So it’s necessary to do some research first to better understand what customers want and need and then adapt your strategy, products, and services to meet those demands.

Conducting consumer research and developing user personas based on your findings can benefit you in this effort. User, buyer, or customer personas are meant to mimic your ideal customer. They are fictional but represent generalized versions of who your real-life customers and users are.

Developing these personas can help various departments and teams within your company get a better grasp of your target customer base and how best to reach them and give them what they need. They benefit your customer service team, sales, marketing, product development, and your web and UX designers—all of which need to have a good understanding of your customer to provide the best service possible. And having updated and relevant user personas is just as important as developing the persona in the first place to ensure you are always working with today’s consumer in mind.

Adapting Your Marketing to Your Changing Customers

One of the key components needed to create relevant personas to use for your marketing efforts is a quality data strategy. Analytical thinking is necessary when collecting and interpreting data on consumer behaviors and insights that can be converted into useful information everyone can understand. Without a data analyst or a proper data strategy, you will find it hard to understand your customers and develop accurate user personas.

Data strategies and analytics can also help you stay on top of your consumer’s ever-changing behaviors. Continually running reports will help you recognize changes in patterns so you can reassess and make adjustments where needed. This is essential not only for keeping your personas up-to-date but for updating all of your company’s strategies and processes.

How to Create Relevant User Personas

User personas are highly beneficial when developed properly, but creating a relevant and useful persona is not as simple as giving a fictionalized customer a name, age, and a few traits. You have to understand actual consumer behaviors and then take that information and use it to develop your ideal customer personas. They should have descriptions that mimic the everyday problems, wants, and needs of your actual customers.

Creating customer personas for your teams and various departments to use requires:

Conducting Research

Again, data and consumer research are necessary to improve your business processes marketing strategies and develop accurate and useful personas. An initial brainstorming session to create a basic persona based on who you think your customers are is a place to start, but it should not end there. Once you’ve laid a foundation for your personas, they need to be given further detail and reinforced by the data you collect from research. 

Identifying and Narrowing Down Traits

It’s important to identify essential traits for your user personas based on your actual customers, but be mindful not to go overboard. Personas need to be clear, focused, to the point, and easily digestible. Each element or trait of your personas needs to be relevant and useful; in other words, it needs to serve a purpose.

Too many traits can be distracting and muddle the message. Categories you should focus on include:

• Demographics (age, name, location, income, etc.)
• Key motivations and behaviors
• One or two major needs, goals, or pain points 
• Expectations

Creating a Simple, Psychographic Narrative

Beyond these categories, you should create a straightforward narrative that utilizes the above to develop a personality and persona that you can connect and empathize with. But again, keep it short and simple. Too many descriptors and flowery language can make it difficult to clearly identify the persona in a way that is useful for your marketing strategy and other departments.

Additionally, don’t focus too much on the demographics or the statistics. The best user personas prioritize psychographics, such as a person’s motivations, pain points, behaviors, and attitudes. These elements are typically what influence customers more than their demographics. Still, demographic statists are useful to avoid personas that are too generalized, and a person’s ethnicity or age, for example, can and does play a part in their behaviors and pain points. 

Be Mindful of User Persona Limitations

When designing your user personas, keep in mind that they are fictional representations. Try as you might to have them mimic your real customers; they are still generalizations. User personas should guide your strategies and processes, not control them. When user personas are taken too literally, it can limit your capabilities.

Use your customer personas to help you and guide you, but do not allow them to narrow down your thinking. Real people are not generalizations; they have moods, desires, and needs that are always in flux. Connecting only with a person and not leaving yourself open to the unique needs and behaviors of real consumers can result in a lack of empathy and inaccuracies in your marketing and other processes.

Conclusion

User personas are essential for any brand that wants to connect more with its customers and improve its reach. However, it’s important not to take your personas too far. Use a quality data strategy to keep personas up-to-date, but don’t rely on them too heavily. Remember that your real customers are unique and don’t fit into a box. Use the personas to guide you, but always remain flexible and open to changes based on real customer needs.