Using Personas to Define Your Audience

To help you evaluate your web site from your target customer’s perspective, you can create a fictional web persona based on all the customer data you accumulated.

A persona is like a role, and it includes how a person acts, talks, thinks, believes, and so on. The customer web persona you create is a profile that represents your target audience based on calculated averages of your customers’ buying processes, goals, and demographics.

Companies use personas as user “archetypes.” These archetypes are a compilation of general personality traits, behaviors, wants, and needs attributed to a type of target customer, which can be applied to a larger category of customer types. This helps guide their decisions concerning product launches, new features, customer interaction, and site design. It’s easier to evaluate your web site from a particular Jane Doe’s or John Doe’s perspective than just imagining a vague customer group. By understanding the goals and patterns of your audience, your company can create archetypes to help create services to satisfy a specific, highly targeted group.