Buyer personas and audience segmentation: why does excellent user and customer profiling help grow your business?
In an environment where customer-centricity is becoming increasingly prominent, marketers and strategists are faced with a shift in perspective, deploying strategies that can no longer disregard a thorough understanding of their target audience.
Selective, informed, less and less “loyal,” and increasingly difficult to please: faced with the modern consumer, a brand’s ability to create relevant customer experiences at every physical and digital touchpoint plays, without a doubt, a crucial role in its success.
Research conducted by Pwc in 2018 among a sample of 15,000 consumers from 12 different countries shows that about one-third of customers say they are ready to “abandon” a brand after having a bad shopping experience.
In addition, more than 65 percent of the sample surveyed among U.S. consumers say they greatly value the possibility of personalized customer experiences and say these play a decisive role in their purchase decision, much more than advertising.
Welcome to the era of customer centricity, a new paradigm, many strategies of marketing personalization to deploy.
Buyer Personas: what are they and why are they indispensable in a successful strategy?
Any good marketing strategy cannot go without a thorough understanding of one’s target audience, i.e., one’s “buyer personas.”
“A Buyer Persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer based on data, interviews, and some educated guesses. It’s essentially a definition of your ideal buyer presented in a way that sounds like it’s talking about a specific person.”
With these words HubSpot defines the concept of buyer personas: technically it is a fictitious representation of the target audience, practically we can define a buyer persona as the archetype of one’s ideal customer constructed from the different information gathered.
Therefore, it becomes important for marketers and strategists to create models of typical customers, taking into account the demographics, behavior, interests, goals or difficulties of the potential user.
Such data can be collected through interviews with real customers, surveys, market studies, data analysis platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook Audiences as well as from discussion with all business functions involved in the process.
At the stage of defining one’s buyer personas, it is important to go beyond the collection and analysis of socio-demographic data and to be able to bring out values, anxieties, frustrations, life habits, buying habits-that is, all the information of a psychographic nature that we need to know our typical customer in depth: only in this way can we know their needs, anticipate their desires and create content and offers more in line with their expectations.
customer data platform
Profiling to know…with full respect for privacy
From excellent user and customer profiling and prospect knowledge comes the best marketing strategies to grow your business: demographic information, browsing behavior, past and present, source channels, buying habits and more.
A strategy of profiling, to be advanced, must result from a very thorough data collection process that contemplates both the analysis and collection of data during the user’s browsing and purchasing journey through, for example, the cookie system, and through the collection of data released more directly by the user by filling out forms.
In both cases, of course, always with full respect for and protection of the user’s privacy and in a manner that complies with the new GDPR data protection directive.
Here are some examples of data types that may be useful for the purpose of user profiling and segmentation:
demographic data (First name, Last name, Gender, Address,Phone, email, etc.).
data on purchasing behavior (Number of products purchased, date of last purchase, etc…)
behavioral data (What the user has visited in the past, such as product, categories, Brand, etc…)
real time data (what the user who is browsing the site now is doing)
Customer Data Platform: the future of marketing goes from here
buyer personas: who they are and what they are for
Data collection, but not only that: the other key aspect of putting in place an effective marketing personalization also comes through audience profiling and segmentation.
It is perhaps at this stage that the use of a Customer Data Platform(CDP) can really make a difference. Without wishing to delve too deeply into the technical aspects, it can be defined as a platform that allows data to be collected from multiple sources and normalized at the single customer view level , thus enabling a 360-degree view of the individual user.
All of this then translates into the ability to be able to profile different users based on the data collected and then to cluster them based on common data, creating segments that can be updated in real time.
Accurate and dynamic segmentation is, therefore, the key to a winning marketing strategy as it allows you to interact and communicate with the user by showing content that is consistent and in line with their expectations at the most appropriate time.
From buyer personas to marketing personalization activities: when method makes a difference
By defining buyer personas, it greatly facilitates the personalization of the customer journey. However, it remains crucial to have the rightmethod for strategy development.
Blendee goes to marketers and strategists by revealing the right steps for a winning method based on customized “experiences” for various segments.
It starts with the Identification of the Buyer Persona and its characteristics, continues with the choice of Filters and Segments, then creates Campaigns and Experiences, and finally chooses the individual Actions to be implemented on the different channels.
The result? To give each customer and potential customer personalized and valuable customer experience, pave the way toward their loyalty.
