How to Adapt Your Personas for Different Channels

Adapting personas for different channels is paramount when it comes to hitting the right target audience. Without the knowledge of how to be flexible with lots of different marketing methods, you could end up either targeting the wrong audience or not targeting any particular type of audience at all. You need to make sure that you’re getting to the right, relevant people, and much of that comes with knowing how to adapt personas for a wealth of channels, but how can you do that? Let’s take a closer look:

1. Identify your customer base

This is an essential part of the process, if not the most important part of adapting personas for different channels. Segment your customer base into groups that have things in common, such as demographics, psychographics, purchase patterns or pain points. 

There are many ways in which you can do this, such as: market research, surveys, interviews, analytics and even customer feedback. However, there are some things that will dictate it for you, such as your business model, market size and value proposition. 

2. Choose your channels wisely

Before you can adapt or create any sort of persona, you need to identify the channels you want to focus on. Channels are used to describe the way in which you communicate, interact and deliver value to your target audience. Channels can come in the form of websites, apps, social media platforms, emails, phone calls or physical shops or stores. 

When it comes to choosing the right channel, you need ones that are going to be the most relevant, effective and convenient for you, your employees and your business as a whole. However, even the channels need to be chosen based on your customers’ preferences, expectations and behaviours. 

3. Define some scenarios

Before creating personas for your different channels, you need to think up some hypothetical scenarios that you want to explore for each channel. These relate to the situations in which your customers will use your products or undertake your services. This can include: browsing, buying, using or troubleshooting. 

Then look at the scenarios you’ve created and list them in order of priority, from the most important, common or challenging scenarios to the least likely. Base your choice on the customers’ goals, needs and pain points – don’t just focus on the positives or benefits. You need to look at negatives and disadvantages as well for it to be worthwhile.

4. Actually create your personas

You need to be creating personas for each channel that’s in your scope. There are multiple tools, templates and formats available that’ll help you to do this. However, there are some things that you need to place more of an emphasis on, such as a name, a photo and some background information. 

Each persona needs to have an imaginary story behind it in order to tailor it to each of the channels you’re looking to target. In addition to the aforementioned elements, you also need to include information regarding what your persona wants to achieve or solve when related to the service or product you’re trying to push, along with their motivation. 

Just as you need to focus on what makes your personas tick, you also need to look at their dislikes and what prevents them from achieving their goal when it comes to your products and/or services you’re selling. You should also pay attention to how your personas behave and what they expect from the thing you’re selling them. It’s a simple enough task that provides you with valuable information.

5. Refine your personas

The last step in the process is to refine the personas you’ve created. The best way to do this is to test them on real customers, and not just around the table with colleagues circulating different imaginary scenarios. If you have stakeholders, then test them out on your stakeholders as well for good measure. 

 You should then encourage some feedback and constructive criticism, using that to refine the personas you’ve created. Are some of them too overboard or are they not quite hitting the mark? The only way you’ll know for sure is to test them out. There are several methods for testing and refining personas created, including:

• Specific feedback sessions
• Usability testing
• Focus groups
• A/B tests

The sole purpose of the testing is to determine how accurate, relevant and/or useful they are to those who matter most – your customers. This is why testing your personas before running with them permanently is so imperative in the world of business. But don’t just stop there. You need to be updating and changing your personas regularly, based on new data received, different insights and/or any changes that might occur in the market.

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