What are personas?

Talk: Personas—Your Secret Weapon to Great Marketing featuring Christina Kao, Co-founder of Techniq. Hosted by South Park Commons.

Let's begin by learning more about what personas are.

Personas Overview

Personas are archetypal or fictional representations of real users of your product or service. Even if you haven't launched yet (and therefore, don't have real users), you no doubt have target users in mind. Defining these early - as in, before you spend any real marketing dollars - will help you make better-informed product, marketing and sales decisions down the road. 

Personas are an extremely valuable tool for better understanding the experiences, feelings, behaviors, pain points, and goals of your users. As you go through this exercise, you’ll think through who these users are and assign them with real-world attributes, like their name, age, company, and job title. You'll do this based on other people who fit these user types and you’ll imagine answer questions such as, ‘What are their key goals in their role at their company?’, or ‘Why are they using your product?’ and ‘What pain points do they have that your product helps solve?’. 

Here is an example of a completed persona profile:

 Why create personas?

All too often, products are launched without ever taking the time to actually define the target customer. We've worked with dozens of founders who insist they "know" who their target audience is, but it's only after we've guided them through this persona process that they see how much information, understanding, and empathy has yet to be fleshed out. 

We like to think of personas as a secret weapon to crafting great brand and product positioning and messaging. Having clearly defined personas is key to helping you keep your customers’ needs firmly in mind so you can better tailor your positioning and messaging. Creating personas for your product helps you gain empathy towards your users, understand who they are, and see things from their point of view—all of which is necessary for creating a successful go-to-market launch or product launch.

Down the road, when you're hiring your team, personas will help provide a shared language for everyone in your company to make better-informed product, marketing, sales, and design decisions. Personas are also incredibly useful for getting everyone on the same page when it comes to understanding who you are building your product for. 

Why you need both buyer and user personas

For SaaS companies, buyer and user personas are equally important. Buyers sign the checks, while users get your product in the door. 

It’s important to understand what the buying process looks like within your target organizations and who is involved at each step. For example, if you’re targeting VP or C-level buyers for an enterprise product, these executives will look to their team of directors and managers to confirm if your product will help them achieve their business goals. Or, if you’re targeting users for a self-service product, these people will need to sell your product up the chain of command to get budget sign off. 

Having clearly defined personas for both your target users and buyers will help you tailor your messaging to their needs, behaviors, and goals, which will—in turn—help you better market and sell your product. To cover the full spectrum of your target audience, we recommend creating three buyer personas and three user personas.