Felipe is 25 years old and lives in an apartment in Belgrano, Buenos Aires, Argentina, with his mother and his younger sister. He graduated as a Graphic Designer a few months ago and has been working for two years in a design study in Palermo. He is thinking about moving in with a friend. He wakes up at 8 a.m. and goes to work every day on his bike.
Barring exceptions, Felipe plays soccer with his friends every Thursday. He trains at a gym near his house, two or three times a week. He doesn’t watch television, but does watch “Netflix series”. The last one he saw was “Stranger Things”.
Felipe is a Boca Juniors fan. The app he uses the most on his phone is Instagram “for posting stories” and Whatsapp “to chat with friends”. He saves money to travel around the world on vacation. Last summer he travelled to Australia and New Zealand with three friends.
Plenty of “Felipes”, one “Felipe” Felipe doesn’t really exist… he is the result of interviews and surveys that a business in the culinary field in Buenos Aires developed to find out the profile of it’s ideal client.
This methodology used to generate a fictitious representation of a user or client of a product or service is known as Customer Persona.
For some years now, the use of Customer Persona in businesses has been generalized both to better understand their clients and potential clients and to customize the content according to the specific needs of the “Felipes” for each brand.
Defining the Customer Persona
Now, how do you define a Customer Persona? To get to know Felipe, we first need to gather information about many of our current and potential clients, mainly through surveys and interviews.
In this dynamic, the entire group of Felipes is consulted, both about their personal information and the description of a typical day in their lives, as well as their purchase behaviors and what they value in a brand, including what type of communication they prefer.
Best experiences
Companies can therefore take this information and use it to provide a much more relevant and less unidimensional experience.
Online forms are a very valuable resource to gather information about users and get to know Felipe, in other words, our Customer Persona. Below, are three tips for using your online surveys as a powerful tool to define your ideal client profile.
Request user data
One of the easiest ways to profile our Customer Persona is to start the online survey by asking the respondent for personal information. The configuration panel of platforms to create online surveys usually has tools to request demographic data (age, city, sex, etc.,) and even ask the respondent to link their social media account data through Facebook Connect.
In this way, social media is another important tool to establish a Customer Persona, given that most of the platforms already have integrated analysis that can provide key data sets.
We recommend that you accompany the initial text where you request the respondent of the online form for personal information, with a message that kindly explains or “softens” that requirement, such as “Tell us something about yourself”.
Use images
Images are also a very powerful tool for creating a Customer Persona. Increasingly, users identify themselves more and give more detailed information in online surveys when the choices are accompanied by explanatory images.
For example, if you plan to ask the respondents “What activities do you spend your savings on?”, the choices could be travel, entertainment, clothing, technology, etc. However, if those options are accompanied by an image of a beach, a concert or a smartphone, the respondant will be able to choose their aspirational response better.
Online survey platforms have features to either upload your own images to customize the question or use them from image banks and generate a more enriching question.
Analyze the results of open-ended questions
The questions in which the user can further elaborate beyond the pre-set choices serve to get to know the user better. This is why, when we are thinking about finding our Customer Persona through an online form, allowing users to freely add information is a good resource to be able to later analyze common patterns in the responses.
Nevertheless, processing the information of these open-ended questions is not easy. It requires a lot of analytical capacity. Therefore, a very interesting resource provided by platforms to create surveys are word clouds, which visually represent the most repeated terms in all of the responses. There, the words mentioned most frequently in the responses are the ones that will have the largest size in the cloud, which will allow you to easily appreciate the predominant topics.
Online forms are a very valuable resource to gather information about users and get to know our Customer Persona
We recommend that the platform you choose to create your online survey has the option to automatically create word clouds.
With SurveyKiwi you will be able to create high-impact online surveys and analyze large volumes of data through unlimited access to responses in your Gold Plan. This tool will allow you to achieve the goal of knowing your ideal client better and to profile your Customer Persona. Visit our website to learn more about us and create your first survey.