How do you organize/synethize data for creating personas?

Question

Jeffrey Vocell · Accepted Answer

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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