Get out all of your company’s printed materials – your business cards, letterhead, brochures, fliers, ads, newsletters, etc., as well as a printout of your website’s home page – and spread them out on your desk. Take a good look at what you see and ask yourself: Is it visually obvious that all of these items are from the same company?

If not, why not?

A big part of branding is recognition. Having a “look” that you use across all of your marketing materials makes it easy for your customers and potential customers to recognize that a message is from your company. So what are the elements of this “look”?

The Four Important Elements of Your Brand’s Visual Image

1. Your logo symbolizes your company. Make sure it is easily recognizable and works well in a wide range of advertising media. Overly creative logos can sometimes harm you rather than help you — make sure you pick something that can be remembered for it’s elegance and simplicity, not forgotten because it’s too complex.
2. Your color scheme should be uniform throughout all of your materials, and appropriate for your goals. Some color combinations are relaxing and soothing, others suggest excitement and enthusiasm, while others project a very “corporate” image.
3. Your overall “look” (including colors, fonts, pictures, layout, etc.) needs to visually reinforce the feeling that you want your product or service to convey. For example, a company marketing “mom’s apple pie” to senior citizens will have a much different look than one selling the latest electronic gadgets to teenage boys.
4. Your printed materials need to reflect important elements of the “look and feel” of your website (or vice versa). There’s nothing worse than having printed materials that don’t look like the website — your prospective clients will usually refer to printed materials first on their desk.

Remember, it often takes multiple exposures to an advertising/marketing message before a consumer will decide to make a purchase or inquiry. If your materials are a mismatched hodge-podge of colors, designs and messages, it will be very difficult for you to build a recognizable presence in the market place.

My first internet job was as a creative director for a company that did websites for political candidates. To say the least, we were pretty far ahead of the curve in 1995 (the candidates would ask us what the World Wide Web was, obviously not getting the memo that Al Gore had invented it). We did some notable sites — the first site I ever built professionally was for the Oliver North Radio Show, some nonprofit work, and a site for Jim Cunneen — but we didn’t know what we were doing, so it ended. But it was fun.

So, in my heart I’ve always had a special place political sites.

And let me tell you, Barack Obama’s web initiatives reflected exactly what they did in the campaign: they stayed on message, they stayed at a high level, and it was classic effective direct marketing. Advertising executives should take note, because when we look about at campaigning on the internet, the year it really arrived was 2008. 

They really knocked it out of the park, and they can attribute a lot of their success to web fundraising.

Following that, impost disects their Obama web initiatives in a very detailed post. Read on…

I’ve included a template persona — download it here.

If I’m working at a client that has an idea for a site or application, but they can’t identify the target audience i.e. users of the site, I sit the client down and ask them, “so who are these people that you want to make money off of?” They usually don’t know, so in an effort to define that audience, I do just that — define the target audience — with personas.

How important are they?

Your target audience affects almost every decision you may make for a website or application.

This includes technology selection, look and feel, interface design patterns to use, the tone of voice the content may take. Personas are used by the business owners to define their target audience, can be used for understanding the application and gets everyone up to speed, from designers, information architects and developers to business users.

The personas may even effect if you do the project at all or not: if your web application can’t meet the needs of the personas, is it really worth spending money on at all?

Personas are used to enforce the spirit and direction of the application, and more often than not are the foundation of a website or an application design.

What’s A Persona?

Personas describe fictional characters who your target audience is.

They describe five typical actors that cover 80 percent of the site audience based on any demographics that can be ascertained from what the site is, or what the competition already has. Sometimes that can be hard, if you are starting service that no one’s ever seen before, or trying to define a new market segment.

For some projects, the personas are easy to define.

Take the Apple iPhone versus Google’s Android G1: Who are using these phones? Does open source or cost of applications affect their buying decisions? Do they need or not need keys on their phone? So they like slick versus ease of use? All off these details would be used to describe the users that may or may not fit the personas required for your project.

Why You Should Do Personas For Every Project?

The biggest issue I’ve seen with many of the consulting projects I’ve worked on and on internal projects is that we had not a single document describing the target audience for the website or application, because the client hasn’t done any market research. Usually, the client or the company wanted a website, and we built it regardless if it fit the target audience.

In absence of studies and other detailed information about their target audience, personas are the first attempt to define their target audience and further define any decisions made about features and functionality. In a few cases, not only did the personas further define the project that we were working on, defining the target audience radicially changed the perception of what the application or website should be, and thus the feature set changed drastically. Clients forget their audience shouldn’t be everyone, because an application designed for everyone fits precisely no-one (or, just how many 90 pound children like wearing an XXL t-shirt?).

Or, imagine telling your client this approach wasn’t going to work, at all. That’s a fun conversation to have.

Personas not only define how the target audience should be approached in human computer interactions, but the complete brand experience. How you speak to a person with limited computer knowledge versus an expert is very important, even in email and customer service communications.

The personas can be written by the client, or the web designer, or the programmer. Usually they are constructed by the information architect or business analyst; most imporatnt, they should be done by a key figure that needs to have an intimate knowledge of who they are designing for and can communicate it to other team nembers.

Who Should The Personas Describe?

Once we have five typical users selected, describe them in semi-fictional detail:

• General Information
  • Age
  • Ethnic Background
  • Occupation
  • Education
  • Home Life
  • Lifestyle
  • Activities
• Web Usage
  • Web Competency
  • Frustrations with the Web
  • What kind of information is hard to find
  • Frequent sources of information
  • How notified about the website
• Why, How, Barriers
• Typical Use Cases

It seems like overkill, but typically we’re able to fit this into one page. The amount of information to include should be enough to be intimately familiar with the personas as friends, but not too much to overly define them (like, do they drink Coke vs. Pepsi?). For fun, attach pictures: your co-workers and clients will identify with them as a target audience easier with a visual representation.

I like injecting a bit of humor here, because people inherently have a sense of humor (one project I worked on, we named the personas Jim Coder and Johnny Bedroom, and after a few weeks, the personas became the goal of who we we’re targeting so much so the developers used them in conversations). The approach defused a very stressful situation, and made the project more fun.

If you can get it on one page for each persona, you post it on the wall — everywhere.

Even the smallest websites benefit from at least sketching out who the typical users are: one project I worked on was a shopping cart for niche aftermarket automotive parts. The products covered six years of a specific make and model manufactured by an American automotive manufacturer, and the site was targeted as such.

We’re talking of a potential audience of no more than 100,000 people, but very targeted.

The result?

The site had a mailing list 6,000 members deep, and the owners sold the company for a huge profit.

Where Can You Find Information For The Personas?

Exactly one of our clients I’ve worked with had the information we needed to start on detailed personas; the client provided us with reams and reams of reports based on focus groups that they did on their audience, and their target audience was a few hundred thousand people. Additionally, there were resources online that even further define who they were targeting. Not all the way to psychographics, but close enough to affect project approach and design.

The result: detailed personas we could use to match up just about any user, including walking into any bar or restaurant in the locality the website was for and identifying if patrons were not only the target audience, but which persona they fit in.

For most projects, this is not the case, so the best way to go about this is sitting down the stakeholders and asking them: so, who’s going to use this application? After defining a target, use anything you can find (web reports, similar applications, researching the marketplace) to further define the personas.

If you are really lucky (by meaning the client has money to pay for this), you get to do contextual interviews i.e. watching in the target audience in their native audience. This can be everything from watching them for just an hour to diaries full of their daily activities. Most imporantly, it’s key that you figure out what they are doing and not what they are saying by watching their tasks.

I usually research websites that are close to the feature set but don’t completely match what they are developing. For internal projects, we model them after some of the stakeholders we meet in face-to-face meetings, changing the names and ages of the personas to protect the innocent.

What Happens If Personas Aren’t Defined?

Good question: what happens if you don’t know what the target audience is, and the application built doesn’t meet their needs?

There are studies about the failure of software projects and not all of them are because of failing to meet the target audience, but if ten percent of them are, how much money are we talking about? Millions? Billions?

I’ve been involved with a lot of software projects, and there’s nothing more frustrating that a project that goes off the rails and doesn’t meet the needs of the user. Money’s wasted, time’s gone, and we’re non the better for it, other than another frustrating experience. We do learn from our failures, but we should have more successes.

But here’s a better metric to go by: A Standish Group survey found that the number one reason that IS projects succeed is because of user involvement (Standish Group). stolen from Classic Mistakes Enumerated. That’s an old study, but think about that: if the target audience gets involved, projects succeed.

Number one reason.

End of story.

So just how important is that target audience again?

Other Resources

• I’ve included a template persona to start from. Download it here.
• Our tax dollars have gone to a really good resource over at Usability.gov.
• George Olsen has a good article over at Boxes and Arrows about personas.

No matter what, your site is the first thing your users see, and in effect your brand; a true brand will build loyal customers

I buy way too much photo equipment. Way too much. I got some high end lenses, the prosumer Canon 5D body. It’s fun stuff.

For lighting equipment, I want to buy good quality stuff, but I don’t want to break the bank, so Alienbees come highly recommended. They are a company based in Kentucky, and their customers rave about them.

Most importantly, they know who they are, which is more than I can say about most of the customers I know.

Their website isn’t the most attractive site on the planet; however, it’s really easy to use, and reflects the personal nature they use when dealing with their fanatical customer base. No elaborate graphics, no flash, but there’s a simple shopping cart that’s straightforward.

The site has this clunky, midwest feel to it, but that’s okay, that’s who they are, and they even include links to other vendors for products they don’t have. It’s a true resource for the camera buff.

They are religious about customer relationship management. Keep it simple stupid is their motto.

How religious about their superior customer service?

I had one of their flash packs die on me. I used their website, called their customer service, and was connected directly to their tech person. He explained the issue in English, that it was a bad transistor that’s been showing up in some of their recent products, and that they are making their best efforts of keeping their customers happy.

He said, ship it, we’ll have it out back to you the next day.

I did, they did. I received a phone call, an email notice that it was on it’s way.

How often do you see that?