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Don’t build marketing personas just because it’s “the way it’s always been done.” Build them with purpose…and enhance them with game-changing technology. Here’s why…
Marketing personas are a great way to categorize customers and prospects. Businesses have used these fictional buyers to direct sales and marketing efforts for decades. But, you have to understand the mission before executing a strategy, right? So, let’s talk about why marketing personas are more relevant than ever before. Then, we’ll show you how you can make them even better!
What Is a Marketing Persona?
First, we should be clear about what we mean by “marketing persona.” They are profiles used to represent customer groups with shared characteristics. You may have heard them called buyer personas, customer personas, audience personas, or target personas, but they are all exactly the same thing.
While they are definitely worthwhile, building marketing personas can be a lot of work. They typically include demographics, interests, roles, age groups, goals, pain points, and more. So, it takes a good deal of research to make sure they are created accurately.
Traditional Data Collection:
- Purchase History
- Interviews
- Surveys
- Focus Groups
- Website Traffic Analytics
- Customer Feedback
- Support Requests
- Lead Generation Forms
- Psychological Assessments
More sophisticated marketing personas include behavioral traits to give you a better understanding of how people think and make decisions. Psychological assessments can be used for this purpose, but you may not have them for everyone. Our newly developed Digital Scan, however, can instantly add a layer of behavioral data to what is already collected by your firm.
AI-Driven Data Collection:
- Digital Behavior Scan
The Right Reasons to Use Marketing Personas
Now, let’s get into the reasons for creating marketing personas in the first place. In today’s incredibly competitive marketplace, nothing is more important than understanding the people you are trying to reach. People want more than a product or service that gets the job done. They want something purpose-built for them. Client-centered businesses are the future, and they start with effective marketing personas that are built with people’s nuanced differences in mind.
Why use marketing personas?
- To Personalize Messaging
Did you know that how you communicate is just as important as what you communicate? Personalized messaging is more engaging and can lead to a much shorter sales cycle. Marketing personas help you determine what communication channels, content, tone, and format will most likely appeal to your audience.
- To Optimize Marketing Efforts
The better you understand your target audience, the more guesswork gets taken out of the marketing cycle. You’ll be able to offer solutions that resonate with client and prospect needs, their lifestyles, and their motivations.
- To Create Purpose-Built Products and Services
Visualizing the goals and challenges people have can play a vital role in directing product and service development. You’ll have a better idea of what is most valuable to your customers, allowing you to prioritize and allocate resources accordingly.
- To Improve the Customer or Client Experience (CX)
Anticipating your buyer’s needs can help you tailor products and services to improve their experience and provide better ongoing support. This “insider knowledge” will facilitate the design of more intuitive products. And, you’ll be able to provide an experience with your brand that is more satisfying and likely to lead to long-term loyalty.
The Problem With Personas
Marketing personas can provide essential clues that help foster a deeper level of engagement with clients and prospects. Even so, they can be problematic if not built on concrete and up-to-date data. Be aware of the pitfalls that can make your efforts backfire.
Ineffective Practices:
- Building Too Broad or Over-Simplified Personas
- Projecting of Biases, Stereotypes, and Assumptions
- Not Keeping Personas Current
- Bloating Them With Useless Data
- Overlooking Personality and Behavior
“Personas are only as effective as the research that goes into them, but the research must be objective and not based on assumptions.”
- Forrester
A Digital Shortcut to Building Better Marketing Personas
Giving your clients or customers a tailored experience is no longer a special added touch; it’s a baseline expectation. So, it’s worth the time and energy to make sure your marketing personas contain the right kind of information. If you want to add some punch to your personas, consider an instant infusion of behavioral insights!
We recently developed a way to easily combine behavioral insights with the data most companies already have on their clients and prospects. Our AI-assisted Digital Scan technology can add a new dimension to your marketing personas in real time and without endless surveys. The results have a psychometric reliability of 75% to 80% using a person’s digital footprint alone!
Communication as a First Thought…Not an Afterthought
Even when a marketing persona indicates someone is a perfect match for your products and services, you’ll still need the right approach if you want to win their business. With this in mind, we created four marketing personas that are aligned with natural behavioral styles to aid in one firm’s hyper-personalization efforts. In the graphic below, you can see some communication tips provided by the system. These are just a few examples of the 4,000+ insights that a Digital Scan can effortlessly provide for every one of your contacts. So, you can know how to connect before you ever meet!
Communication Messaging Based on Natural Style
Related: How Behavioral Data Drives Revenue-Generating Insights