From "buyer personas" to "student personas", defining them for educational activities

For both pedagogical and classroom management issues, it's important to know and understand your students. A parallel can be drawn with a company's need to understand its customers. Marketing has developed the concept of "buyer personas", and in this text we propose to transpose it to education to define "student personas"

Needs leading to the creation of personas

What you need is a framework that provides a concrete overview of your audience, informing you of the profile of your current "customer" including their preferences, where to find them, what they want to achieve and the problems they face. Buyer personas provide this framework.

Effectively, a strategy that targets everyone ultimately targets no one. A company needs to get to know the typology of its customers in order to turn them into advocates for its brand. If your buyer personas are just vague adjectives and pretty pictures, they're only good for decoration. A buyer persona is not simply a description of your buyer. Data from your target customers is also used to reduce your marketing efforts so you can focus on a smaller group of people who will in turn want to become your customers.

What is a Buyer persona?

The Buyer personas are modeled archetypal representations based on the research of:

• who the buyers are,
• what they are trying to achieve,
• what goals drive their behavior,
• how they think,
• how they buy,
• why they make purchasing decisions.

The buyer persona tells you what potential customers think and do as they weigh up their options for solving a problem your company solves. Much more than a one-dimensional profile of the people you need to influence or a map of their background, actionable buyer personas reveal insight into your buyers' decisions, attitudes and concerns. They determine the specific criteria that drive potential customers to choose you over your competitor, or to opt for the status quo.

What can a student persona be?

The same model and the same questions seem perfectly transposable to a classroom: who are your students, what are they trying to achieve, what goals drive their behavior, how do they think, how do they study, why do they engage in an activity? The student persona can highlight exploitable student personalities according to their motivational processes and choices.

Reasons to use buyer personas to guide marketing

Identifying these buyers can be the key to improving marketing ROI as you can tailor your content, advertising and website to focus on converting these specific people. The buyer personas help to better understand your customers (and potential customers) and make it easier to tailor your content, messaging, products and services to the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of different customer groups.

Reasons to use student personas for educational purposes

There are relatively few typical profiles in the classroom. It is therefore possible to establish them so that each student can find his or her way around. Thanks to this, you can adapt:

• the content of your lessons,
• your teaching methods,
• your communication,
• ...

to focus on skills acquisition leading ultimately to learner certification.

Student personas

Every student has his or her own personality and differences. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to create personas that will be useful in your classroom. Keep in mind that in marketing, the purpose of using personas is to better understand your customers (and potential customers) and make it easier to adapt your content, messages, products and services to the specific needs, behaviors and concerns of different customer groups.

Gaining a better understanding of students, in order to adapt course content and the form of teaching to their needs and behaviors, seems to be relevant. The students in a classroom are probably a more homogeneous set than a company's customers. Identify the people in your audience who share the same challenges and goals, and group them into their own category. These different categories will represent different personalities.

• Your students' goals and motivations;
• Your students' backgrounds;
• Their educational background;
• The socio-demographic profile;
• Their personality traits: recently, a teacher reported to me that she had used Twitter in class via a livetweet. What came out of this experience was that students who usually don't respond much showed up, they were girls, much more active via Twitter. Sometimes some are inhibited by shyness or fear of public speaking.

At the center of attention: the student

It's sometimes tricky to take up marketing concepts given that the teaching objective is fundamentally different. However, when marketing is customer-centric like our teaching is student-centric, it can make perfect sense.

Sources

https://www.mycommunitymanager.fr/brand-advocate/

https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research