If not… you should!
When you do business development you tend to create a lot of strategies based on your target group(s). When you strategize around the web you should make the core of your marketing strategy the product. I always make them the perspective of the strategy because it’s a fun way of working, basically, it starts out really close to make-believe, but then you keep getting adding more characteristics to the personas, and most of the time they end up being pretty accurate if you use your logical sense and combine it with a couple of case studies. I see personas as a narrow generalization and a semi-market-segmentation that is really important for the virality of your message. Also, It will also make you be closer to the users if you tailor and align the message with the specific group of people you’re want to love your message or product or whatever…
So, in Toothless Tiger after an analysis (and after reading the book “the user is always right“, we found out that we needed to target people with the same driving force as ourselves, it makes a lot of sense to me because I can literally take my own drive and opinions and use them for developing the internal strategies for Toothless Tiger, which is awesome.
So – start using personas when you strategize, it will make you’re working more creative and practical. I love to be able to say “if I was a part of this and this target group I would do like this and this and I would feel this and this way about that and that”…