The concept of user personas was originally developed for user interface design, but it’s a powerful tool for marketers, too. David Lloyd, who is the lead strategist and senior data analyst from Brilliant Noise in London. joins us to discuss his post this past summer about The dream of data-driven personas.

Personas, particularly ones that are deeply rooted in data, can help shape marketing campaigns. We talk about the differences between user experience and marketing personas and what are the typical data types that would be used to shape useful ones. His blog post talks about common mistakes that marketers make in creating personas and describes what a typical persona looks like, down to assigning them a name to make them more real. 

He also addresses why you don’t want to go too wide or too specific in creating your personas: the ideal number of personas a marketer should work with is about three. Also, the cloud has made it far easier to create and collect a great deal of online data that can be useful in creating personas. Lloyd tells how marketers can make personas more actionable as part of their marketing plans.