Once you’ve created your product vision, you’ll need to determine who you’re creating this product for.
For this, you’ll have to define your target market and then go a step further to define your customer persona(s). So what is the difference between the two?
Defining your target market will give you the segment of people you’re targeting, according to their age, location, education, industry, interests, gender and similar demographic information. Of course, you don’t have to note down all these details, only those that will be relevant for your product.
Although narrowing down your audience may sound counterintuitive at first, it’s actually a crucial step you can’t miss. The fact of the matter is that you can’t sell to everyone, and if your marketing scope is too wide, you’ll only be wasting your resources.
Marketing to everyone is like shooting darts in the dark - you will run out of darts probably before you even hit the dartboard once.
The second part is creating your customer persona.
A customer persona is the representation of your ideal customer - based on market analysis and data collected from your existing customers. Aside from demographics, a customer persona should give you information about your ideal customers such as their typical buying behavior, their lifestyle, their needs, their problems and challenges, goals and motivations.
Once you define your customer persona (or personas), it will help you further develop your strategy when it comes to the product itself but also marketing and sales. You’ll be able to know where to find your ideal customers, how to speak their language, create the features they need, deliver the content they’re interested in and even predict their common objections.
Of course, all the stakeholders should be able to see this information as it will influence so many decisions, which is why it belongs in your product management board. You can easily set it up in Infinity by using the Columns view, creating different columns for different personas. You’ll be able to add a description for each persona along with all the information you’ve collected, plus you can add images and gifs to help you visualize these people better.
Here’s how the customer persona template looks in Infinity.
You can easily create your customer persona(s) using this template like this:
Once you’ve defined your customer personas, this will be a strong foundation that will determine all your decisions. But, you should be ready to learn about your audience as you go and even adapt your target market and your customer personas if you see the need for it in the future.