User persona template: how to create one and use it

Why should you try a user persona template?

A user persona template can help you get to know your audience better, so you know how to market them.
Effective marketing targets specific groups of users, not the mass market. This means companies need to really know their target audience and in order to do this, you need to do market research and create user personas that can help you guide your strategy.

How can user personas benefit your marketing? Let’s jump in it.

Why user personas are important

Most businesses offer products or services that can fill the needs of only a specific group of people and then try their best to reach them with their marketing strategy.
Let’s say you are the owner of a company selling leashes for dogs: with your marketing activities, you will try to target people who have a dog. Aiming to reach the entire market would represent a waste of time and money, as many people would be uninterested in your product.

User personas are a representation of your ideal user and they can help you create marketing strategies that match your prospect customers’ needs. User personas are profiles of customers and they can help you understand several things about them, like:

• Age
• Gender
• Values
• Habits
• Needs

Once you have a draft of your user persona, you will gain a better understanding of your prospects and this will help you to better address with your products or marketing actions, your target users’ needs.

How to create a user persona

Your user personas’ goals

The first thing you should do when building a user persona is focusing on your endpoint, what is your goal for users visiting your website, your store or being exposed to your marketing campaign? Do you want them to buy your product? Or maybe to subscribe to your newsletter?
What kind of product/service are you offering them?

Here are some examples of users’ goal to help you find yours:

• Purchase of your product
• Signup and creation of an account
• Clicking on an advertisement and watching a promotional video
• Return to your website and become a frequent user

Make some research on your target audience

You probably already know a lot about the users you are targeting.  In any case, it is good practice to make some research on your existing userbase and gather detailed information about them.

There are different types of researches you can conduct:

• Run a survey: it is pretty easy to set up a survey on your online website or app. By asking some sociodemographic questions you’ll already know a lot about your user personas. For this purpose, we recommend using UserReport free online survey, as you can directly build user personas from the results you collect in your account.
• Conduct interviews and/or focus groups with your userbase. You can gain precious insights by engaging with your users in a direct conversation.
• Use Google Analytics to get an overview of your users’ online behaviour and characteristics. Aso, by looking at the performance of your own website pages, you can find out more about the content your users are interested in.

What to include in your user persona template

When it comes to designing your user persona, there are no right or wrong, but we can suggest some best practices on what to include. Remember that a user persona is a description of a person, hence it needs to be quite detailed.

Start from your users’ sociodemographics traits:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Income
• Location
• Employment
• Marital status

Also, include their psychographics:

• Lifestyle
• Interests and values
• Spending habits
• Attitudes

Include the needs and pains of your users, they are vital information for you.

Focus on your user personas’ goals e.g. finding the right information very quickly, find personalised information when navigating the interface.

Keep also in mind that:

• The description of your user persona should be simple, to the point, not too long.
• It’s a good idea to add a picture and graphic elements to each persona, it will help you better define them.
• Once you have created a template, stick to it and use it for all your personas.

We have created a user persona template you can use as a starting point when creating your own, please try it out and feel free to share your comments and feedback with us!

Free user template

How to use user personas

Since user personas are representing your users’ segments and what they expect from you, they can drive your decisions when you are about to change something in your interface design or when you are evaluating whether or not to modify a product’s feature.

Remember though, that personas are not something static, instead they are constantly evolving. This is why you should use a tool that keeps track of all your personas and register their changes through time. What does this mean? This means that user personas can become part of your interface and offerings’development.

Finally, you should try to share your user personas with as many people as possible. Create user personas templates, collaborate with your colleagues to create personas and hang them even on the office walls. Remember, your goal is to create a shared understanding of who your end users are and how to better serve them.

UserReport to create user personas

With UserReport free widget you can create and run surveys on your website or app, then, once results are collected, you can easily create customer personas and get detailed profiles on your users, based on real data. 

UserReport is free, so try it out and start creating your own personas!

Sign up for free