TEMPLATE

One Page Persona Template

A persona, (also commonly referred to as an 'audience persona', 'user persona', 'customer persona', or 'buyer persona') is a fictional character created to represent a user or customer type who might use a website, product, or brand in a similar way. A persona builds a picture, or ‘personification’, of a typical customer to reflect the overall audience. They help you to understand your customers (and prospective customers) better, and make it easier for you to tailor product development, marketing campaigns, and content to the specific needs, behaviours, and concerns of different types of customers. The One Page Persona Template below gives you a framework for crafting a persona by outlining the considerations and information needed to create an insightful, comprehensive, and actionable picture of your character. 

Personas affect and inform the way you think about and interact with your audience, helping you create a more meaningful bond between them and your brand. The goal of a persona isn’t to represent all audience members, or address all needs, but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important audience groups. You could have as few as one or two personas, or as many as ten or twenty depending on how many different audience groups you’ve identified and decided to target. They key is that each persona should be distinct and reflect a unique market opportunity.

A good persona isn’t just a list of details or traits that you’re trying to appeal to. It’s a picture you’re painting of your customer: of who they are, what they think, how they act, and what motivates them. The One Page Persona Template breaks this construct into three overarching sections:

1. Their needs

The foundation of your persona is to understand your identified customer group’s needs. This starts with looking at their goals and aspirations, followed by the challenges and frustrations that they face. These then extend into the specific initiatives and tasks that they’re trying to complete.

What are their goals and aspirations?

  • What do they want to achieve?
  • What are their personal and/or organizational goals?

What challenges or frustrations do they face?

  • What obstacles are stopping them from reaching their goals?
  • What are their pain points?
  • What problems do they have with existing products/solutions?

What initiatives or tasks are they trying to complete?

  • What do they want to get done?
  • Which projects and programs are important?
  • What does success look like?

2. Their buying journey

The second pillar of the persona template is to outline their buying behaviours and consider how you can inject into, and influence them. This focuses in on their buying process: what steps they take, what their triggers are, and how they make decisions. Consequently, you need to determine what you can do for them, i.e. how are you going to add value for the customer.

What is their buying process?

  • What purchase process do they follow?
  • How do they decide what to buy?
  • What's their approval process?
  • What are their buying triggers and motivations?
  • How do others participate in or govern the buying process (i.e. parents, corporate procurement teams, etc.)?
  • Do they have any time-specific or seasonal buying patterns?
  • Does formal budget planning affect timings?

What can we do? Why should they buy from us?

  • What can we do to help them achieve their goals or complete their tasks?
  • How can we help them overcome their challenges or frustrations?

What objections may they have?

  • What would prevent them from making a purchase?
  • What risks affect buying choices?
  • How do they balance consequences and payoffs?

3. Their influencers

Finally, we look at the parties and factors which are influencing them through their buying process. These are the different stakeholders – individuals or groups – who they’re listening or talking to; and then the forms, channels, and sources of content and information that they consume in making their purchasing decisions.

Who are their stakeholders or influencers?

  • Which individuals are leading the conversation in their world?
  • Who are their key stakeholders?
  • Who are their influencers?

What content do they consume?

  • What information do they rely on? At each stage in their buying process?
  • What content do they seek and when?
  • What type of content affects their purchase decisions?

Which channels do they use?

  • Where do they go to find information about the products or services that they buy?
  • Which channels do they use? Which do they prefer?
  • Where are they socially?

The One Page Persona template

The persona template distils everything onto a single page making it easier to articulate and share your persona with others. Being only one page also forces you to be really specific about what you include in your persona's make-up; it makes you really consider the essence of the persona and make decisions about what to include and, crucially, what not to.

Personas are intended to help you visualise and thereby relate to a human being as your customer, rather than aiming for an abstract idea. As such, we need to add humanising elements to our persona design. These include giving the persona a name, ideally something memorable and representative such as “Enterprise Ellen”; also, we add an image so we can really picture who this person is. Another really powerful aspect is to provide quotes, buzzwords or phrases that they’d say – not only does this help make them real, but it also gives a great starting point for keyword research.

Download your PPT (Microsoft PowerPoint) or PDF persona template by simply clicking on one of the buttons below. You'll receive a blank template for you to use, together with a prompt sheet with the questions for each section as a reference when crafting your persona.

Persona Template
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The One Page Persona Template is intended to help you rationalise your insights and thinking into your identified target customer groups. It does so in such a way that makes it easy to communicate and share the resulting personas with your teams, partners and wider stakeholders to create clarity and focus on who you're targeting, and thereby gain buy-in as you move forward.

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