Proto Personas
Proto Personas
TL;DR
One of the problems in the Marketing Team which I helped to solve was a lack of clear strategic direction. To remedy that, my team leader commissioned me to create a set of marketing personas which we could use to inform our decisions.
The main challenges were limited time and no budget for primary research. I circumvented those by combining customer data with desk research and cross functional workshops to finally identify four different customer groups.
My role: full ownership
The problem
My pivot into a more research focused role at Elastic Email coincided with a growing awareness of the limitations facing the marketing team.
Slow growth
The most painfully obvious sign of trouble was that our marketing efforts were not driving as many conversions as we hoped. New signups, despite still outnumbering churning clients, were appearing really slowly. This was not a crisis but we were definitely in a slump.
Ads ineffectiveness
One of the obvious solutions to jumpstart growth was to increase the ads budget. However the effects left much to be desired as both our ads and landing pages didn't perform well enough to make a real change.
Lack of direction
Many attempts were made to turn the tide of the slow growth, but they were somewhat chaotic and the effects were below expectations. It became apparent that we didn't know our clients (and potential clients) as well as we thought, and so our marketing was falling short of their needs.
At that point marketing team leader decided that we need to get to know our clients better and I was tasked with creating a set of personas that would inform our marketing activities.
Challenges
The process of creating the personas presented several challenges from the very beginning.
Time
I was expected to deliver actionable results as quickly as possible. There was no time to really conduct any primary research before producing the deliverables.
Budget
No budget was assigned to the task. Therefore recruiting participants was entirely out of the question. I had to rely on what we already had.
No clear direction
At first, no description of target groups was given to me. I had to rely on our client data to come up with patterns which could form personas.
The process
The process which led me to the final result was long and took some unexpected turns, however it involved three distinctive elements.
Finding patterns in customer data
Without a clear direction on my first attempt, I had to rely entirely on customer data to provide patterns from which, hopefully, the personas would emerge. I combined several types of data:
Many pivot tables later, several groups emerged:
Desk research: checking assumptions against external evidence
At a later stage my superior provided me with several target groups for our business. Namely:
I ran a desk research study to find out as much about those groups as possible from the commonly available sources. As I learned more about them it seemed more and more apparent that these groups mapped very well onto my research into customer data.
Challenging the personas with the wider team
After the research was done, it was time to create the personas. I commissioned a cross-department team which included people from marketing, product, support and frontend teams.
Outcome
In the end we arrived at four persona documents. I kept calling them proto-personas due to the lack of primary research, and the final result being at least partially based on assumptions. Still, what we had was enough to give the marketing team a much needed direction. Meanwhile my work on validating (or invalidating) the personas was only just beginning.
