Personas – Interview guide

The first step in creating your personas is finding the right people to talk to. So you have to go out and do interviews to find out what it is that turns your target group on.

You can e.g. start by talking to these groups:

Your customers

Your existing customers, both if you do business B2b and B2C, are a great place to start your interviews because they have already bought your product and had contact with your company. Some of them will no doubt exemplify the persona you are trying to describe.

Contact both good and bad customers. Don't make the mistake of only talking to your good customers. Feedback from negative customers shows you some other patterns that you wouldn't otherwise have the opportunity to see.

Potential clients

It is also important that you talk to people who are not yet customers and who therefore do not know anything about your company and your products. This in turn gives you a more nuanced view of your personas' challenges, desires and goals.

Recommendations

To get an even broader picture, you may need recommendations to connect with people who don't fit into your core audience. This is especially important if you are trying to enter a new market. Ask your network, colleagues and existing customers, e.g. on social media to see if they will help you find people to interview.

Conduct the interview

Your persona template addresses seven different areas and the interview questions are divided according to these:

role

1. What is your job function? Your title?
2. How is your work performance measured?
3. What does a typical working day look like?
4. What skills does your job require?
5. What knowledge and tools do you use in your job?
6. Who do you report to? Who reports to you?

Corporation

1. Which industry(s) does your company belong to?
2. How big is your company (revenue, employees)?

Goal

1. What are you responsible for?
2. When are you successful in your position?

Challenges

1. What are your biggest challenges? (Both at work and privately – depending on what is relevant)

Information channels

1. How do you find new information that is relevant to your position?
2. What magazines, blogs, websites do you read?
3. Which associations and social networks are you a part of?

Personal background

1. Describe your personal situation (e.g. age, marital status, children, etc.)
2. Describe your educational background. What level of education have you completed, which schools have you attended, what have you studied/trained for?
3. Describe your career. How did you end up where you are today?

Shopping habits

1. How do you prefer to have contact with dealers (email, telephone, in person)?
2. Do you use the Internet to research dealers or products? If so, how do you find the information?
3. Describe a recent purchase. Why did you consider the purchase, what considerations were included and how did you decide to buy that particular product or service?

Remember to ask "why?" along the way. You are trying to gain greater insight into your customers' goals, behaviors and passions, but people are not always good at reflecting on why they do what they do. You help them get deeper into their motivations by asking "why?".

In addition to interviews, you can also gain insight into your current and potential customers by analyzing your website's visitor numbers, user behavior etc. What pages do they visit most often, where do they come from both geographic and referral traffic, etc.? You can also find information in your marketing department and customer service by holding focus groups or by looking at what your customers say about you in reviews either on your own page or on sites such as TrustPilot.

Once you're done with your research, it's time to start creating your personas.

Next step; insert data into your persona template

All the information you got through interviews and research, must now be transferred to your persona template. This involves a thorough analysis of your data and identifying the patterns that emerge. Based on your research, you must decide which archetypes your research shows you have as customers.

Select 1-5 personas. Quite a few more quickly become unmanageable and difficult to remember. And that defeats the whole purpose of creating personas: to make it easier to identify and speak to your customers. Often one persona will not be enough.

Download the template here.

It helps you make your personas visible both to yourself and to your colleagues.

The personas template is divided into five main areas, all of which must be filled in to give you an adequate picture of your company's archetypal customers.

• Background information
• Motivation
• Citations and objections
• Marketing message
• Name and picture

Background information

Here you enter information about this person's background. What is the person's position, where does he/she work, does he/she have any interesting hobbies or an education that tells something about him/her?

Also decide on your person's gender, age, income and housing situation. Finally, you list here illustrative keywords or keywords as well as characteristic quirks or behaviour. This can also take the form of a motto or similar.

Motivation

Identify what goals (both primary and secondary) your persona has. It can be both work-related or private, depending on what makes sense in relation to your product/service.

It is absolutely central to identify the person's challenges, since these are the ones your product must solve. So list here the biggest and the second biggest things that stand in the way of the persona achieving its goal and clarify how your product helps.

Citations and objections

Review your interview material and select some quotes that clearly represent your persona's personality, goals, or challenges.

Here you can also collect some of the typical internals that the persona has against a purchase.

Marketing message

Tell us which word choice best resonates with this persona. Feel free to go into detail with word choice, how technical or theoretical you can/should be. Feel free to write an elevator speech targeted at your persona.

Name and picture

Finally, you choose a good name and picture that shows who your persona is. It may seem silly to put a picture on, but we both remember and understand better if we can put a face and name on it. And that's just what the whole exercise is about. So don't skip this.

Some choose to name personas with real names such as Niels, Birte and Simone, while for others it makes more sense to name them after e.g. challenge or objection: Price-Per, Detail-Dennis or Busy Tenna.

Implementation

Then all that remains is to spread your personas throughout the company. Both the communication, marketing, sales, customer service and development departments benefit from knowing your personas.

To help with the implementation of the personas, it may be a good idea to hold a workshop so that more people help to prepare them. Once the personas have been drawn up, you make some large posters where each persona's name, image and characteristics appear. Hang them up in all relevant places. All in all, it is important to continuously create awareness about personas, as they can otherwise easily be forgotten.