Are you creating something from scratch on your own or are you part of an existing organization? Some things will be easier and some harder depending on your strategic playground. A startup entrepreneur deals with different constraints than a project leader for a new venture within an existing organization. Depending on your starting point you will execute them in a different way to leverage different strengths and overcome different obstacles.

On the field, as a startup you are going to face 3 major constrains:

1. Produce proof that your ideas can work on a limited budget

2. Manage involvement of investors (if you scale your ideas)

3. Risk running out of money before finding the right value proposition and business model.

One can link them to have some deep knowledge about the stakeholders and shareholders, that’s why using Personas can be handy. In this business insight, we are going to give you useful information concerning:

1. What are personas?

2. How can personas improve your marketing?

3. How do I create personas?

Let’s start with a simple test

Imagine in a remote village a star hotel named “Anta Hotel”. The customers are tourists and people traveling for business trips. To appeal to these travelers, Anta Hotel manager decide to create a special offer to appeal those 2 specific customers. But since his budget is limited, he can’t afford to launch those offers without your advises. You as a partner should help Anta Hotel management team to have a better understanding of the customers wants and needs.

Personas : what is it?

It may seem hard to market to a customer base or target audience that’s made up of different types of people. But, using personas can help. According to the interactive Design Foundation, personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Each persona helps you define a group’s attitudes and lifestyles, and see how your product or service is or can be a part of their lives.

Personas can help your marketing avoid ineffective generalizations. Instead, you can find out how to reach your audience on a more personal level, and deliver the right messages, offers, and products at the right time. To create effective personas, you obviously need to get to know your target audience. Your research should start broad and then get into the nitty gritty details.

How to create a persona

First, define your target audience’s general makeup. For example, Anta Hotel could describe its target as “rich tourist,” “people who love to live in the wild,” or “human resource managers. Take that broad target audience and really get to know them. Interview them, run surveys, and even hold focus groups if you have the time and resources.

This is where you go into detail. Learn about their favorite activities, their professional and personal ambitions, what makes them anxious, their personalities, their attitudes toward life, and what items they couldn’t live without (like internet, for example). Also, ask them what their typical days look like – when they get up in the morning, how they get to work or school, what kinds of meals they eat, what time they get home, what they do during their free time, etc. Then, find out how connected they are with your product and/or service. How do they feel about what you have to offer? And how do they like to be marketed to?

Once you have all this information, look for patterns and insights that will help you develop detailed personas. Group people together who had similar responses during your interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Then create a fictional profile that can represent each group, AKA a persona.

Making use of the Personas

For example, Anta Hotel might use these personas: the HR who like to host meeting in exotic places, the Robinson family and the exotic tourist. Using answers to your interview questions, develop each persona. Think about the type of profile your persona would create on a social media website. Also, map out your persona’s typical day, ambitions, anxieties, etc. To make your personas more believable, relatable, and “real,” assign each a photo and a representative (but fictional) first name. Also find a quote that sums up what each persona stands for.

Turn the personas’ info into sales insights

Visualize the path your personas might take as they discover, buy, and use your product or service. This is called journey mapping. Your journey maps should identify all the moments or touch-points when and where your personas would interact with your brand. Let’s explore this by using Anta Hotel persona of Louis, the exotic tourist. Here are touch-points on Louis’ journey map:

1. Louis is looking for a place to spend the holidays

2. Finds Anta Hotel online

3. Check the rooms pictures and the rates

4. Take a look about the transportation accommodation

5. Books the room

6. Spend the holidays in Anta Hotel

At each of these touch-points, Anta Hotel should map out how their business and marketing might interact and communicate with Louis. That includes Anta’s Hotel search ads, their landing page, pictures, how easy it is for Louis use transport accommodation from and to the Hotel.

Create value around the personas

Back in the days

Back in the days, the personas was built arount psychodemographic profiles. It means profiles group consumers into categories that have the same socioeconomic characteristics. For example :

• JANE: 20-30 years old, Upper middle class, Earns fcfa 500K/month Married, 2 children

• Travel Behavior:  Prefersgoign to the hotel, Likes good services, does not like waiting in line, books hotel online, travel once a month

With the jobs-to-be-done approach, you uncover the motivations of different customer segments.  Yet, depending on the context, some jobs will become more important or matter less than others. In fact, the context in which a person finds himself or herself often changes the nature of the jobs that the person aims to accomplish.  For example, the clientele of a Hotel is likely to use very different criteria to evaluate their experience. Likewise, a mobile phone user will have different job requirements when using the phone in a car, in a meeting, or at home. Hence, the features of your value proposition will be different depending on which context(s) you are focusing.

How is it done now

It focuses on the jobs, pains, and gains that drive customers. By sketching out a persona, you aim to uncover what really drives people, rather than just  describing their socioeconomic characteristics. You investigate what they’re trying to achieve, their underlying motives, their objectives, and what’s holding them back. Doing so will broaden your horizon and likely uncover new or better opportunities to satisfy customers.

Credit Sources:

• the Interaction Design Foundation.

• Osterwalder, Alexander. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want