Identify and connect with your audience
Whether you are a startup hoping to identify your audience, or an existing company looking to deepen a connection with your audience, you should have a clear picture of who your customers are.
Your customers may fall into a few groups or user personas. A User Persona is a character used to represent a user type. For a dog walking app, two user personas would be “A pet parent” and “A dog walker”.
When defining your user personas, use a common set of attributes to describe them so you can identify patterns later on. Important characteristics to identify your user personas would be behaviors, goals, background information, and any other relevant demographic and psychographic information.
If there are any assumptions you are making about your users, meaning questions you have as a part of organizing this information, jot those points down (they will come in handy later!). An assumption for the dog walking app could be “pet parents are comfortable allowing a dog walker to enter their home when they aren’t there”.
Another way we suggest framing your User’s journey and identifying any assumptions would be to work through their Problem Statement and Critical Path.
A Problem Statement is a tool for identifying the problem to be solved in a jobs-to-be-done format. This keeps you in the perspective of your target user and centers your product strategy on needs vs. features.
The Problem Statement prepares you nicely to define your Critical Path. The critical path is a user’s step by step guide through your solution. This helps you define the product experience.
These activities will likely bring to your attention more assumptions and/or data points to validate and research so take notes as activities are completed.
In terms of connecting with your audience, now that we know who you are looking for, you can begin to do research into where these users are. Some ideas would be to explore social media accounts, Facebook groups, and hashtags that the audience is following.
Review how your competitors are engaging and deepening their audience.
Now that you have definitions of your user personas, and some locations to engage them, you are ready to prepare interview scripts and pick research methods to uncover customer insights & take action.