- Proto personas, meant to quickly align the team’s existing assumptions about who their users are, but not based on (new) research.
- Qualitative personas, based on small-sample qualitative research, such as interviews, usability tests, or field studies.
Regardless of how well you believe your PPC campaign or landing page is currently performing, it can always be performing better. It hasn’t yet reached its full potential in large part because you haven’t been segmenting your potential customers. Alternatively put, different types of people visit your website. Each visitor has a unique buying cycle stage and thinks and behaves differently from the next. they all have different wants or needs. The four types of online purchasing personas are methodical, spontaneous, competitive, and humanistic. You could greatly benefit from understanding each persona’s thought and behavior when developing your online strategy.
A competitive persona is exactly how it sounds. They are looking for your competitive advantages. They don’t waste time and need to be persuaded that your company can quickly solve their problem, so they need to know why you are better than the competition and if you have any qualifications, what are they are and why they matter.
The impulsive personality wants assurance that you can provide them with what they need right away. They enjoy movement and simplicity. There’s no need to bother them with specifics and unvarnished truths. They’ll buy it right away if it seems like it will satisfy their needs. Most spontaneous visitors just have to like you to convert.
The methodical personality loves the fine print and details and despises chaos. This individual wants to know what your process is. The methodical persona wants proof that what you are saying your product or service can do is true. They ask specifically how your good or service can help them with their issue. This buyer persona is typically the most challenging to convert because they tend to make cautious, deliberate decisions.
You can more effectively target them and meet their needs if you are aware of how each persona behaves. Send us a tweet @Forthea and we’ll show you how each of these personas perceives your advertisement, landing page, or website. For each of the four personas, I’ll discuss what your advertisement and landing page should contain in my subsequent blog post.
What are Personas?
Persona types
The various personas you could employ are listed below, along with advantages and disadvantages for each:
Proto persona
The quickest persona type to start with is a proto persona, which is based on team assumptions and any existing data, if any. As you won’t need to conduct any new research, creating the personas should be quick and easy. Until you find the right number with the right attributes, proto personas are typically created with team collaboration.
Here are the pros to using proto personas:
Here are the cons to using proto personas:
Qualitative personas
Personas that are based on a limited amount of research are known as qualitative personas. Interviewing a group of people for this research typically entails asking them questions about a variety of topics that may be pertinent to the developing product. The team then compiles the data from the users’ research into fictional personas that correspond to the information gathered. The personas are then based on the behaviors and interests of actual people, which can be a complicated process but yields useful information.
The pros of using qualitative personas are:
The cons of using qualitative personas are:
Statistical personas
A significant amount of statistical data is combined with techniques used to create qualitative personas to create statistical personas. Through surveys of your potential users, the team would gather a lot of data for statistical personas. There are a few ways to do this, but one is to conduct research by interviewing a small number of people, much like you would for qualitative personas. Following that, the data gathered would be used to create a survey to be sent to users, which could be organized and analysed without the conscious or unconscious biases of your team.
Statistical personas have the following pros:
Statistical personas also have the following cons:
What are persona types?
When designing a website or application, persona types are types of people who help designers understand how users will use the technology and how to best meet their needs. Persona types are typically made-up characters that meet the criteria for the kinds of users that a company believes will use its software or website. Most businesses only select one or two personas, but those personas are frequently comprehensive, containing a wealth of demographic data and pertinent information. Personas are used in design but also in marketing.
How to choose the right persona type
The steps you can follow to select the best persona type for your project are as follows:
1. Evaluate your needs and abilities
Start by evaluating your needs and abilities. You may need objective, solely statistical data to analyze, or your company may not have anyone who can do that analysis, so you need data that your team can analyze independently. If you take a realistic assessment of your team’s capabilities and what you’ll need to complete your project successfully, you may decide to hire assistance or select a particular persona.
2. Understand your schedule
Scheduling can be a struggle when creating personas. Statistical personas are probably not something you want to make if your schedule is extremely tight and you don’t have time for really in-depth research. However, you might want to use statistical personas if you have more time and would prefer to collect more data. Your persona choice may be influenced by your schedule as much as by your needs and skills. It is best to start planning personas early in the process if you don’t want your schedule to be a major factor.
3. Select a persona type
You probably have a good idea of which persona type will fit within those once you have a good understanding of your needs, abilities, and schedule. You might select a qualitative persona if you only have a limited amount of time but require data that is reasonably accurate. Choose a proto persona if you have more time but don’t want to dive too deeply into the data. And if you have a lot of time, a data analyst on staff, and you want to eliminate biases within your team, you could choose the statistical persona.
You may need to reassess what is most important to you if you discover that there isn’t a good persona type that matches your needs, abilities, and schedule. For instance, you decide to alter your schedule so that statistical persona creation is possible because you realize you need better data and have a staff member who can conduct the analysis.
4. Re-evaluate if needed
You may want to re-evaluate if you create your personas after selecting a type and are concerned that they are not as instructive as you had hoped or do not help guide your UX design as much as you had anticipated. You might realize you want to use data to revise your personas if you started with a proto persona because you only needed the most basic information. In that case, you might try out a qualitative persona. It isn’t a bad idea to re-evaluate if you need to as long as you have time.
FAQ
What are the 4 personas?
The four types of online purchasing personas are methodical, spontaneous, competitive, and humanistic. You could greatly benefit from understanding each persona’s thought and behavior when developing your online strategy. A competitive persona is exactly how it sounds. They are looking for your competitive advantages.
What is an example of a persona?
For instance, a youngster starting a new school wants other people to think he is cool, popular, and unafraid. He enters wearing stylish clothing, walks confidently around, and waves to everyone. He is portraying the brave persona of an endearing and well-liked youngster.
What are the three personas?
The Three Personas: How Analytics, Marketing, and Product Try to Identify The Customer
