Building synergy between digital marketing and the development of user personas

A user persona is a way of defining your audience; it describes a group of users with similar behaviour and needs. It’s often used to make sure that the design of a digital product or service is the right one for the people who’ll eventually use it. User personas are usually based on a combination of internal and external research to make sure that they’re evidence-based.

For digital marketing I’ve found user personas particularly helpful as a tool to start narrowing down the answer to the question ‘who’s interested in our product or service’, and from there to start thinking about targeting & segmentation. At Wellcome, the primary ‘product’ I work on is our website and our user personas range from audiences who are very familiar with what we do to colder prospects who may be completely unaware of Wellcome’s existence.

I’ve really valued the expertise of user research teams both at Wellcome and in previous roles; here’s what I’ve learned from the two disciplines working together:

1 -  Choose the platform that allows you to target without bringing in your own biases. Let’s say your user persona includes (amongst other things) the occupation of a biomedical scientist. On Twitter, you could target this with a Follower Lookalike audience; on LinkedIn you could focus targeting by job title or perhaps employer. Where I’d be more careful is platforms like Facebook where you might be tempted to start bringing in your own biases of what a biomedical scientist is like. Maybe you assume they’re interested in photography or that they like The Big Bang Theory. It’s tempting to let your own biases creep in - don’t! Make sure you’re basing your targeting decisions on evidence-based user research.

2 - Work collaboratively with user researchers to make sure the personas are relevant to the work they’ll be used for. Organisationally we all have a vested interest in making sure that user personas are relevant to the different things they’ll be applied to. Particularly in the advocacy and non-profit sector, they’ll need to reflect the variety and complexity of work undertaken, e.g. marketing, public engagement, website development, fundraising etc.

For digital marketing, this means working closely with user researchers to make sure the research they’re doing will be relevant to the way I’ll use the personas for digital marketing purposes in future. What kind of information do I need to know about each user persona in order to be able to make targeting decisions and audience segments? For example, it might be helpful for me to know which news websites are relevant for a particular persona to help with targeting programmatic ads.

3 - Use digital marketing to test user personas at scale. Sometimes user personas can start out based on a small volume of high quality user testing and 1:1 discussions. Digital marketing allows us to test this evidence on a wider scale. 

For example, we can use digital marketing to drive traffic to particular website pages where the UX team might be testing particular messaging, creatives or design features, allowing us to gather insights more quickly than might be possible in a 1:1 user research set up. We can also test out specific things for specific personas (audience segments), allowing us to refine and develop the user persona over time.