A Website persona is a fictitious representation of a person who uses your website. This profile is often made up of different details such as a person’s age, level of income, favorite hobbies, internet usage, and so on. Take a look at this example:
“Jack Burns is thirty years old. He’s an engineer or programmer and earns enough money to put him comfortably into the upper middle class. Education is very important to him, and he spends several thousand dollars a year on books and educational seminars. He accesses the internet through his iPad or MacBook and spends most of his time online reading about current events.”
This may be a good website persona for an upscale clothes retailer or an import car manufacturer. There is no right or wrong profile, it depends on the market segment that you want to appeal to.
Why You Should Use Personas
Business owners take the time to create website personas because it helps them to optimize their website. If you have no idea who your target audience is, building a website that appeals to them will be more difficult. You’ll also find it more difficult to grow your email list and get the type of social traffic that you’d like.
While creating a business persona isn’t going to magically solve all of these problems, it will help put you on the right track. Let’s take a look at how you can make an effective website persona for your website.
Step One – Start With Demographics
While demographics are an important part of creating a persona, they’re not the whole picture. For example, if you know the average age and the gender of most of your visitors, that’s a good good place to start. Try digging deeper though. Do they have kids, are they married or divorced, what kind of car do they drive, what is their income level? This information can come from customer surveys or existing data that users have submitted to you. If you don’t have any data, you can hire a firm or you can gather it on your own.
Step Two – Think About Your Customer’s Beliefs
Demographics is the first step. Now that you have that data, you can flush it out. Do your customers take vacations, what do they do in their free time, do they attend church, what kind of brands do they prefer, and the list goes on. This may involve a bit of guesswork but the idea isn’t to be 100% accurate. You’re simply trying to get into your customer’s heads as best you can.
Step Three – Bring it Back to You
The final step is take all of this information and use it to create a thorough profile like the one above. Think of a cool name that personifies the person you’ve created. Then assemble all the details to create a living, breathing representation of one of your ideal customers. Depending on your business, you may make just one or two website personas, or you may end up making a lot more.
How to Get the Most out of a Website Persona
Now that you have several personas for your website, you’re ready to put them to work. Pick a persona and then look at your website through the persona’s eyes. Drop you own judgments and biases, and view everything from his or her point of view. This will help you to optimize your website for the customer, which will increase your sales and keep people on your site longer.
Finally, if you discover some changes that you’d like to make on your website, don’t hesitate to contact Superiocity web design. We offer a full range of web design services and we will be happy to help you tailor your website to your ideal customer.