The success of SaaS products relies on your product and your audience.
A powerful product is critical for business growth, but only if you understand how to build, market, and sell products to the right people.
To find the right people, you need to uncover your user personas.
Learn how you can express the value of your product by targeting the right users with comprehensive user personas.
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a semi-fictional representation of your existing product users. Businesses often have multiple user personas to represent the different people who may use their products and services. Each persona should explain the typical goals, motivations, and characteristics of the user segment.
These representations are based on data gathered through user research. Interviews, surveys, and data analysis are some ways you can collect this information.
Your marketing, sales, and product teams can then use those user personas to perfect their offerings. Having well-defined user personas ensures your ideal users are at the center of your decisions and actions.
Take Semrush, for example: Semrush is a subscription-based digital marketing SaaS tool that allows marketers to conduct research and uncover marketing insights. Because it offers mostly search engine optimization (SEO) tools, the company expects many Semrush users will work in the SEO industry.
Semrush creates high-quality blog articles, webinars, eBooks, and courses with SEO industry experts. Tailoring their content to SEO managers allows them to position their tool as a valuable SEO resource. And that audience-led marketing has proven to be successful in attracting the right users: As of 2021, Semrush has 471,000 active users and over seven million all-time registered users.
Why defining your user personas is crucial
Looking at your audience as a whole makes it impossible to attract and engage the right individuals to your product. How can you effectively connect with one user if you’re trying to target 3,981,494 people at once?
The simple answer is: you can’t.
But you can target one person.
To engage your ideal users effectively, you have to put your audience under a microscope to zoom in on different segments.
User personas allow you to segment your audience into various subgroups with similar goals, characteristics, and behaviors. This magnified viewlets you hone your focus to an individual level.
Understanding your users is advantageous to product-led growth. Product marketers can tap into user personas to generate higher product demand. They can build marketing strategies that position the product as the ideal solution for your users’ needs and challenges.
Addressing the needs of one person—rather than one million people—will strengthen your audience connections too. User personas help sales and marketing teams craft unique messaging that resonates with your target audience. They can adapt their messaging based on the persona, allowing them to more effectively resonate with each type of user.
This refined messaging combined with a user-led product marketing strategy will improve your lead quality. Because you no longer target anyone and everyone, your audience can self-qualify based on your content. These marketing qualified leads (MQLs) can then be passed to sales, where they have a higher chance of converting.
User persona vs. buyer persona: What’s the difference?
Before we go further, I need to stress one thing: Users and buyers are not the same. Sometimes there’s crossover between the two (such as the head of procurement buying procurement software to use themselves) but, in many cases, they’re different people (such as a manager purchasing SEO software for their team).
Think of buyers as the parents who buy the cereal, whereas users are the children who consume it.
In a more professional context, buyers could be the finance, senior leadership, or procurement team purchasing the software, and users are the team members who’ll use the tool.
You’ll interact with each type of persona at some stage of the customer journey, so an effective sales and marketing strategy takes both buyers and users into consideration.
Users can be seen throughout the journey, particularly at the early awareness and consideration stages, while buyers typically come in at the decision-making and conversion stages.
Different type of product users for user personas
We encounter many different users over the course of our business journey, just as we meet a variety of people throughout our lives.
Some of the users you’ll encounter in business are:
- End users – The primary user of your product or service
- Supervisors – Users who oversee product/service end users and who also benefit from the solutions provided
- Procurement – Buyers who are responsible for sourcing solutions and finalizing purchases
- Finance – Buyers who are responsible for setting and distributing budget
- IT and development – Technical users of products and software who may also be responsible for identifying the value and quality of the product prior to purchase
- Senior or executive leadership – Users who want to understand the return on investment and how the product or service supports company goals
How to uncover your user personas vs. buyer personas
As shown in the list above, end users and buyers are often different people, with different motivations and responsibilities driving them. Knowing how to distinguish between buyers and users will help you develop airtight sales and marketing strategies for your business.
To uncover your user personas, ask yourself, “Who is my user?” The answer unearths the individual who intends to use your product.
In contrast, to find your buyer personas, the question becomes, “Who is my buyer?” Its answer identifies the individual responsible for purchasing your product.
We can’t proceed without giving ideal customer profiles (ICP) an honorary mention: To find your ICP, you need to ask, “Who is my customer [at an organizational level]?” This helps you determine where to target your efforts (e.g., SMEs vs. large corporations) before you begin marketing to the individuals who’ll buy (your buyer personas) and use (your user personas) your product.
Tip: Small to mid-sized businesses typically have the same user and buyer. Growing and enterprise businesses will likely have separate users and buyers.
For now, let’s focus on how to define user personas, as well as sharing some tips for distinguishing users from buyers.
1) Conduct user research
The first step in discovering your user personas is similar to buyer research, except the people we collect data from are different.
Finding the right audience to conduct your research with is step one to successful and effective user research.
User research provides deep insights into the people who use your products and services. It helps you understand where to find your users, what they love about your product, and what you could do better.
Data from user research can also reveal which users are most likely to convert or upgrade, who sticks around the longest, and which product features appeal most to different types of users.
You can conduct user research by analyzing data collected through web analytics, user behavior, and CRM tools. Metrics like customer lifetime value (LTV), time on tasks, system usability scale (SUS), and net promoter score (NPS) are just some of the ways you can measure user experience. Other valuable analytics are user behavior recordings, demographic data, and product usage.
User research can also take the form of user surveys and interviews. Speak with your users and actively listen to their opinions, feedback, and insights. Offering users a chance to talk through their experiences presents a unique opportunity to understand their needs, motivations, and challenges in depth.
2) Ask relevant questions
The questions you ask during user research will differ from those used in buyer research.
Buyer research is focused on learning how to encourage more purchases while user research tends to prioritize finding what’s most useful for people. As such, you need to alter the questions you ask depending on who you speak to.
If unsuitable questions direct your research, you run the risk of creating products that people don’t want. In turn, your messaging will be misaligned with your audience, and your sales will struggle to pick up.
Asking the following questions during user research interviews can help you discover users’ needs, motivations, and challenges:
Demographic questions
- Tell me about your role and responsibilities at work.
- What does your typical work week look like?
- What are the apps and tools you use the most?
- Outside of work, what are your interests, hobbies, and activities?
Problem-, solution-, and task-focused questions
- What is your biggest pain point related to [problem/product/task]?
- What is your relationship like with [topic related to your product]?
- Tell me about the last time you tried to [problem/task related to your product]
- What are your main priorities at work?
- What is the hardest part about [problem/task/job]?
Product-focused questions
- Tell me about any other tools you’ve used for [problem/task related to your product].
- What did you like or dislike about other tools you’ve tried?
- What would you like to see from a product for [problem/solution/task]?
- What would stop you from buying or using this product?
- Is there anything missing from this product that you’d like to see?
- Tell me about your biggest frustration when using this product.
These questions focus on understanding the user — their role, challenges, and opinions on the product. If you were speaking with buyers, your questions would focus on topics surrounding their budget, barriers to purchasing, and willingness to purchase.
Try to keep questions open-ended when conducting user research surveys and interviews. Giving people space to expand on their answers could lead you to valuable insights that you wouldn’t be able to glean with close-ended questions.
3) Segment their uses, needs, and challenges
Different users have different uses, needs, and challenges.
End users, for example, likely want a product that’ll let them quickly and easily complete a task. Meanwhile, IT teams may be looking for a product that seamlessly integrates with other products and is secure and easy to maintain. For their part, executive teams will be on the hunt for products that boost their bottom line and offer them a competitive advantage in their niche.
Splitting users into subcategories based on user type will help you identify their uses, needs, and challenges. In turn, you can craft strong marketing strategies and messages for each of your user personas.
Learn how to grab the attention of various users, offer a solution to their problems, and position your product as something they need. Approaching product marketing from a user perspective will work wonders for your business.
4) Create user persona templates
Once you’ve interpreted your user data and have a strong impression of their uses, needs, and challenges, you can create well-defined user persona templates.
User persona templates allow all of your teams to better serve your users: Marketing teams can adapt their marketing strategies; sales teams can improve sales messages; product development teams can optimize product features; engineering teams can prioritize their tasks — everyone in your organization can benefit from user persona templates.
They’re a visual representation of your various users. They should be displayed in an easy-to-read format that gives people a snapshot of your users and their needs.
In your user persona template, include space for the following sections:
- Type of user
- User role and responsibilities
- Needs and motivations
- Challenges and pain points
- Other tools and products they use
- Where they’re most active
This template should summarize all your user research findings into one clear, well-organized document.
The information included on your user persona template will differ slightly from what would appear on a buyer persona template.
While some categories may remain the same, the answers will change, as their role, needs, and challenges may be more finance or purchase oriented. For example, buyer personas should also include a section on barriers to purchase.
5) Adapt your marketing and sales strategies to the user
Armed with foolproof user persona templates, your marketing and sales teams will be equipped to create user-focused strategies.
Marketing teams can prioritize the marketing channels their users are most likely to use. This could include introducing new content types for different users.
For example, supervisors may benefit from reading case studies or learning about a tool on a podcast, while end users might appreciate user guides and solution-focused blog posts.
Marketing messaging should also adapt to the user. When speaking with executive teams, it may be more formal and results-focused. For end users, however, the messaging might concentrate on providing solutions to common user problems and tasks.
Similarly, user persona templates will help sales teams personalize their messaging; they’ll understand the needs and challenges of each user and can tailor the conversation accordingly, which will forge strong customer connections. This deeper knowledge also helps the team provide relevant content during the sales process to guide the user toward purchasing.
The messaging provided to users may vary from that used for buyers. Marketing and sales conversations with buyers tend to focus on the value of the product from a financial perspective, whether that’s sharing the cost savings of using your product, the price points available, or how the product could support their business or financial growth.
On the other hand, user-targeted messaging might highlight how a product will help the user save time, do their job better, and grow their portfolios.
Wrapping up — Defining your user personas
Defining your user personas can increase product uptake by meeting the needs of your users more accurately.
Understanding your various users allows you to adapt your marketing and sales messaging accordingly. Through personalized messaging, you’ll be able to build strong user relationships and position your product as the ideal solution.
Remember, your buyers won’t necessarily be your users, so you need to create a cross-functional strategy that satisfies both depending on your funnel stage.
Follow the steps covered in this article to define your user personas and drive product growth.