Creating a persona for your business can be easily achievable with plenty of motivation. This article follows on from How a Persona can improve your website Part 1, and covers how to easily create a persona for your business.

How you can begin to create basic personas

Persona creation can be a huge investment. Focus groups, extensive interviewing, set building and role playing. It doesn’t need to be that way if you have no budget but lots of enthusiasm.

The starting point is to talk to as many of your potential or existing customers as you can. This can be be done in person (if you have a traditional shop), in the street if you are geo centered, by phone or by taking advantage of social media marketing such as facebook and twitter. Facebook can be an outstanding medium to tap into an audience: listen to the chat or invite discussion through joining groups and asking what people want from your product or service.

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Know your customer: craft design and copy to them directly and have better usabilty, and more importantly – higher conversion.

What is a persona?…
A detailed profile of your targeted demographic.

Includes age, social position, environment, aspirations, personality traits, skills and personal details. The persona character should have a name and ideally a photograph to bring it to life. Essentially a vignette of your customer which can be used for design and copy direction to ensure you appeal directly to your user.

A persona is not a stereotype or a customer profile. A stereotype is merely a caricature and like an illustration is susceptible to the reader injecting their own interpretation. A customer profile is a generalisation of demographic ie; tweenager or mid-lifer and not descriptive enough for persona requirements.

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