How do you create customer personas for journey mapping?

What is it that you’re trying to achieve and what is the benefit of these personas. Once you answer these questions then you can work towards creating personas that align with your purpose and what it is that you’re working on.

Referencing the business strategy before launching a personnel and journey project is crucial. It guarantees that the project directly supports the company's goals, focusing on the right skills and processes. This alignment optimizes resource use and ensures the project's relevance and impact.

Ensuring a mix of qualitative & quantitative data is critical in the research phase of creating personas. We have to be so careful when conducting research that as humans we don't always know why we do what we do. So when we ask customers to think about that, it is often a post-rationalised view, as opposed to the real internal narrative that drove them. Having a mixture of data from focus groups, to unbiased questionnaires, to channel & analytics data can ensure you have robust insights from different sources to build your personas on. I am also a fan of speaking to customer service teams or looking at helpdesk support searches & sources like that. Customer services often get forgotten when they are a truly amazing insight resource.

User research is an incredibly powerful way to create in-depth demographic learnings about your customer, their psychology and motivations. I recommend deep-diving into specifics such as: - What is their age demographic behaviors (gen-z, millennial)? - What is their income range and household situation? - What is the region they live in? - Understanding their goals, challenges, fears and objectives.

Sales people are the best. But review mining, ChatGPT and social media, as well as your survey and interview process are all key. There are hundreds of ways of building personas and what I find the most depressing is the time dimension. Data also feels to be too old. I think we are moving towards a use of AI where we can both build and maintain personas over time. Just imagine if you could add the result of every segmented media campaign, of every sales meeting and of every new survey to your existing persona research. AI-enabled "living personas" fed with historical and real-time data should be your target for research already today!

How you pull the insights together will be a factor in how well you can spot and report on insights. We map our customer journeys with the following headings per phase of the marketing funnel: - Customer thoughts / feelings (the customer narrative) - Touchpoints - Pain points - Push points - Behavioural insights - Recommendations. Miro is my favourite tool for this, we will use a key to help highlight certain points and also will link off to deeper information e.g. keyword research that might live in a spreadsheet. Having a view like this, on a per persona basis, really helps you to see the customer journey - including the similarities and differences per persona. The most important next action is to ensure you act on this knowledge.

To begin, categorize data into clear groups, which might require some time to ensure accuracy. Seek input from others to validate the logic of these groups. One effective approach is to create a chart with an x and y axis, labeling the four quadrants with opposing meanings. This quadrants (or groups) become the personas.

These profiles often have alliterative names like "Budget Betty" or "Indecisive Ian" as it makes them easier to remember. It's important to build out these personas with qualitative and quantitative data to make them believable and also instructive to the end user.

Using demographic personas is really old school in 2023 - as an industry we need to get better at mapping user behaviour and getting a deeper understanding of pre, during, and post website and marketing engagement. I would use data (analytics), social media listening and database insight to recognise patterns that fit trends, needs and experiences and match with trends and needs.

Include stakeholders through the development process, incorporating influential people to ensure accurate persona creation. Their involvement not only refines personas but also aids in internal advocacy. Ensure diverse teams understand how to utilize personas effectively for their specific business needs. Develop a tailored marketing plan focused on these personas to enhance their impact.

Leveraging customer journeys for persona mapping involves analyzing touchpoints, emotions, and behaviors at each stage. Show how the journeys drive toward different points of conversion in your business process and how you may be able to influence that conversion.

This final step ensures all the personas are rightly leveraged. For it: -Prioritize key personas, and consider their goals, motivations, and pain points at each stage. -Involve cross-functional teams in the mapping process. -Focus on key touchpoints and interactions, identifying crucial moments for the journey. -Remember to consider both online and offline interactions, as well as emotional and behavioral responses.

Uma prática que tenho em minhas empresas e nas consultorias que trabalho é: 1) Liste todos os clientes que você tem, inclusive os que já foram embora; 2) Coloque as principais características de cada um que sejam relevantes para seu negócio; 3) Classifique estas características por grupos de interesse e crie estes grupos; 4) De a estes grupos notas de 1 a 5 ou de 0 a 10 Os clientes que ficarem com maior nota devem ser os clientes que você deve investir melhor no relacionamento através de CS e CX bem como seu time de aquisi??o, vendas e marketing devem trazer cliente mais semelhantes a estes.