Jul 20, 20212 min read

Who's Your User Persona?

Graphic of a person and a question mark over their face

In marketing, a user persona (also called customer persona) is a semi-fictional person that is the ideal customer for a product or service. A user persona includes basic biographical data (age, education, location), as well as their social and psychological preferences (politics, artistic interests, religion, etc).

Therefore, a user persona helps a marketing team best reach their desired audience (or customers) and tailor marketing content specifically for these ideal personas. Example: If the product is pain killer medicine and the user persona is anyone with back problems aged 40 and over, pain killer ads on Tik Tok are going to yield low results. A user persona helps avoid misguided marketing campaigns.

Image of a user persona, a semi-fictional person for marketing purposes — From Konrad.com

So who's your ideal customer? This might be tough to answer at first. In a perfect world, everyone is your ideal customer, right?! Dream on.

In the real world, artwork needs an audience but we can't serve everyone's needs. The goal is to figure out who wants our buy our artwork the most. If we don't, this potential audience will go elsewhere and you'll lose out on someone buying your book or painting.

There are many ways to drafting a user persona:

Data analaytics: social media platforms have metric analysis capabilities that will disclose broad demographics of your main users. This data can be folded into your user persona
Survey: Send out a survey to a select number of people (10+) and ask why they're interested in your art. Is it beacuse you use striking colors in your paintings? Is it because you write about LGBTQ+ empowerment? Is it because your artwork is affordable? You won't know until you reach out and ask others.
Intituition: This is risky but you know who you want to serve so trust your gut (I say risky because sometimes we think we know who are customer is but the data might say otherwise, so keep an open mind).

Create a User Persona

There are tons of free user persona templates online. My favorite is Xtensio. There are a few limitations for the free version but you can get what you need from this template.

Now that you have a user persona, you can think of better ways to reach your real or ideal customer!