User Segments or Personas: Identifying Your Audience

You’ll have seen plenty of those articles, posts, or products that promise they are the key to unlocking your business success — as if it were that easy. It is simple: you need to understand what problem you’re able to solve, for what group of people, and then you need them to engage with your solution to the level that makes you profitable or successful… but it’s not easy!

In my article Research 102: Using Data for Decision-Making, I gave a real-to-life case study demonstrating how data can help you identify problems and potential opportunities from those problems. In this article, I’ll give an overview of a few helpful frameworks to help you with that middle piece — who are my users? For me, this is the filling in the middle of your metaphorical product sandwich. It helps you bridge the gap between:

1. Who is experiencing or most impacted by the product I’ve identified?

2. Who is positioned (mentally, emotionally, demographically, financially) to adopt a solution, if I propose the right one?

If you’re part of a charitable or public organisation, you can sometimes be led by the first question most heavily. You may not be burdened by the very real question, ‘Can my best-served user actually afford to invest (and continue to invest) in my solution in order to keep me in business?’. Charities or public organisations backed by other funding sources have their own unique challenges. As the Candid Collab is a community of solopreneurs, I’ll leave that for now and focus on you for demonstrating this framework.

These tools are not your only way of understanding your user, but they are helpful, structured places to start.

First, you must identify your user (the one experiencing the problem AND the one who might buy in for your solution to fix it).

Then, you must understand what commonalities and differences are core to how users might respond to this problem or your solution.

Finally, you want to reach them. Whoever they are, wherever they are on their journey, how do you speak to this user in a way that shows them you meet their unique needs? A caution: This is where brand becomes very important. It should be impacted by the frameworks I will share, but it is its own distinct discipline. If you build your brand for everyone, you’ll reach no one. I’ll leave that topic to the experts, though cough cough go check out the marketing articles on the Candid blog (I’ll remind you of that later —stay with me for now!).

Choose Your Adventure

Time for a little ‘Choose Your Adventure’ set up.

Some products (and their features) are built for a niche group of people, like members already within a community. If you already have users, you probably have some categories or typical ‘types’ of behaviours you see. If this is your situation, start with the section on User Personas before reading about Segmentation to think about scale.

Some products are built as a foundation to solve a problem or desire to build a business, you may not know or have buy-in from users yet. If this is your situation, start with the section on User Segmentation before progressing onto Personas as this will help you narrow your focus before you get weghed down by fictional groupings.

User Segmentation

You will never reach all the users that exist. Even massive monopolies like Google or Amazon have pockets of people that evade their reach.

To use a metaphor, imagine all users ever to exist like dishes spread across a table just before a large holiday meal. You have some savoury dishes, some sweet, some crowd-pleasers, and some that are made for tradition’ssake or that one relative who would never let you live it down (for my grandpa, this dish was always my mom’s cheesecake). Maybe one day, you’d like to conquer an entire range of people (dessert lovers), but right now, to make your product or service successful, you’re going to focus on the users that are (metaphorically) pie.

Handy for my metaphor, a pie chart is often the way of visualising user segmentation. Out of all the potential users that may be interested in your problem/product/solution, user segmentation is about considering all the ways you might ‘slice that pie’. This is an intentional exercise where you try to understand the major demographic factors that will ‘split’ your potential audience and take the time to understand how their demographic differences impact their motivations or decision-making.

For those starting without a distinct user base, you can do some benchmarking research and let quantitative stats guide you if you aren’t sure about the weighting of different demographic research. It’s less about who your specific users are right now and more about looking at who they could be. I encourage you to stay away from the ‘easy’ superficial demographics unless they are integral to your actual problem. For example, age. SO MANY people gravitate towards segmenting users by age, particularly in tech solutions. But age isn’t binary to behaviour! I know 50-year-olds that are AI leaders and advocates, and 30-year-olds that are techno-phobes and avoid online forms. Here, motivation or adoption rate of tech is a better way of segmenting users, because it’s about their positioning towards a problem rather than a stereotypical grouping. Sure, we may see statistically that there are more people in younger age brackets within that group, but slicing the pie into 20-30-year-olds isn’t actually as helpful for action!

Case Study For Segmentation

If we consider solopreneurs, for example, what are the ways we might segment this user pie?

You could consider people looking for a side hustle to be a distinct demographic from mission-led business builders. Divide the pie this way and try to understand: What are the key differences between these observable characteristics, and why does it matter for the problems they might experience? If role definition is your segment, this may also lead you to compare and contrast content creators to product builders. Keep in mind that these lines aren’t always clear in real life, but segmentation is about considering where those divisions exist.

Do this exercise several times, considering different ways to split the pie and what two, three or four different ‘segments’ might appear. You might split your pie by:

• Environment

• Resource access

• Motivation

• Regulatory concerns (I come from an education background so adhering to regulatory or accreditation standards often impacts the products you can create)

• Experience level

• Habits.

If you started with segmentation, you now have a good idea of your types of users, proceed onto personas to help bring these numeric potential users to life…

User Personas

To use the same metaphor of a table, set for a large holiday meal and filled with dishes, the user persona is about bundling up a set of characteristics into a fictional ‘person’; putting a ‘face’ to your numbers. When creating personas, you should not be focused on separating by demographic or characteristic, but unifying several core pieces into one ‘person’ driven by how they will (or might) approach and view solutions.

For example, are you the person who loads your plate high, getting a little bit of everything on one plate until you are stuffed? Are you the person who plans to go back to the buffet for multiple rounds, pacing yourself? Are you the person that eats your favourites first or saves them until last? Are you the person who eats dessert first because life is short and it’s the holidays, you’ll fill the leftover space (if there is any) with savoury treats? Ok, this is probably where my metaphor ends.

Case Study For Personas

We’ll come back to our real-world solopreneur. A persona that might unify several demographics or motivations into one unifying approach to any solutions we may present might be the ‘Asynch-apreneur’.

We use this persona to get a full picture of how a primary focus will impact the solutions they gravitate towards or how they see a solution. Maybe this persona is a side hustle consultant. They need something that works in the little gaps of time they have, nights, or even weekends, when they know synchronous communication might not be efficient for their clients. Maybe they just want to use their solopreneur lifestyle to travel or adapt to other personal rhythms (insomnia, energy levels, struggles with interpersonal communication?).

We build a picture of them. Sometimes people select character-looking photos to represent their personas. I think this can lead to unintended bias (the Chat GPT ‘what do I look like’ middle-aged white guy trend anyone?). Instead, I like to pick representative images and names for personas that help you focus in on their behaviour.

Here’s how you might outline your persona:

• What does this persona value?

• What are some reasons they choose this positioning?

• Why solutions will they see as most valuable?

• Are there design implications their positioning might impact?

• What jobs are they going to need to accomplish?

Empathy Mapping

I find empathy maps are a great tool to help develop personas. Empathy maps can take many different forms but these are essentially a template for structuring your thinking. Check out Miro for some great open-source empathy map templates. A simple empathy mapping templated is usually created with a 2x2 matrix with each quadrant used to place yourself in the position of a specific user or user type:

• What does this person think?

• What does this person feel?

• What does this person say? (Great if you have user feedback or support tickets that you’re trying to formulate into more structured thinking.)

• What does this person do (what actions do they take)?

You may have started with creating personas, but you can also revisit these personas and your empathy maps whenever you are trying to assess a new problem or define your next product/solution/feature.

If you started your adventure today with a persona, these are great places for empathy mapping but they don’t always have clear ways of scaling or measuring your impact to your business as a whole. Now, you can circle back to segmentation, which will help you understand how dividing your users or targeting users of a certain type might be most beneficial. For example, if you’re looking to scale quickly, what segment of people are early adopters? By focusing on a solution for a specific persona or segment, will this help you scale more quickly, even if it’s not a rounded solution just yet.

Give these frameworks a try and let us know what interesting insights you come up with that help you think about who your users are.

Oh… and as promised, here’s your reminder to check out other marketing advice to figure out how your brand reaches these users on the Candid blogs!