Powerful attributes for your Persona
We use personas to provide insights on how to develop and how to market to our potential customers.
For B2B products, we may not care as much about traditional demographics—such as family status, kids, and pets. But even business buyers are people. They have attitudes associated with age and family situation.
Consider the administrative persona for educational software. She is a divorced mom with two young kids in day care. Does she want to work late to make some extra money?
So the questions to consider in creating your personas are these: What information is relevant to your marketing and development decisions? Do you need demographic attributes or situational ones? Or both?
Consider this list of attributes from my friend Jennifer Doctor.
- Describe the persona’s situation, physically and emotionally.
- Typical Day. What do they do all day? What are they responsible for? How do they interact with co-workers and customers?
- Problems & Frustrations. What challenges disrupt the persona day to day? How do they manage these?
- Why do they do what they do? How do they feel a sense of purpose and/or satisfaction?
- Who do they listen to? For purchasing? For advice? When they need help?
- What are they trying to accomplish? Why? How?
- How do they feel about their job? Your company and product? The industry?
Read more from Jennifer on personas in Flat Stanley Doesn’t Live Here: A real and practical guide to building personas at http://www.harborlightpartners.com/resources
Fundamentally, we need to know how to find and market to our buyers and how to develop to our users. What do you need to know to succeed?
About Steve Johnson
Steve Johnson is a product management process coach, author, speaker, and advisor. His approach is based on the belief that minimal process and simple templates result in a nimble product marketing and management team. Before founding Under10, Steve was a Pragmatic Marketing instructor for over 15 years and personally trained thousands of product managers and hundreds of company senior executive teams. Learn more at www.under10playbook.com
In his spare time, Steve enjoys making music, and has an album available on iTunes. Check out Steve’s music at notExactlySteve.com