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How do you organize/synethize data for creating personas?
I am in the process of developing personas, and the data will come from multiple sources such as reviews, interviews, and internal insight. Do you have a tool, template or best practices for organizing all these data points to make sense of it and then turn it into a persona?
1 Answer
Jeffrey Vocell
Panorama Education Head of Product Marketing • December 14
With a lot of inputs, organizing key attributes or commonalities of each persona is important. There are plenty of templates and tools available on the market (and many free) -- but I've always used a spreadsheet to consolidate and synthesize data, and then a slide for the persona. I'll breakdown some details of what's in each below.
Synthesizing persona data:
Ideally you should have multiple tabs, or columns with data including...
- Demographic data (age, generder, location, income, etc)
- Psychographic data (values, interests, attitudes, etc)
- Buying committee (who is a part of the buying decision, what role does each play, factors that influence their decision, tools they have today/have used, etc)
Persona template/slide:
There are a lot of free templates out there, but I like to include a sub-section of the above:
- Name (i.e. at HubSpot we referred to our marketing persona for a long time as "Marketing Mary" which gave common language for everyone internally to use).
- Key demographic details
- Online behavior
- Hopes & dreams
- Fears & challenges
- Brand affinity (brands your persona likes, resonates with)
- Tools your persona uses
As I like to say to my GTM teams, the persona is a map to the individual so including key relevant detail that your teams can use is critical.
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