Throughout our insights, we have repeatedly touched on the topic of buyer personas and marketing automation, understanding well how these models play a key role in creating our marketing strategy.
If sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time is the essence of an effective strategy of personalization of the customer experience, it is evident how knowing your typical user/customer thoroughly is the key todeploying the most effective and rewarding activities and choosing the best performing channels according to your target users/customers.
Buyer personas: what data to use and how?
Demographic characteristics, interests and preferences, goals and difficulties of the potential customer, and much more: if we wanted to create the profile of our buyer personas from scratch, there are really a lot of data and information we would need to use.
Very often, however, we are used to stop at master data alone to create, for example, the targets of our campaigns (think, for example, of the ads we create on Facebook), forgetting, instead, that what makes the difference are the qualitative data that do not emerge at a first analysis: values, anxieties, fears, frustrations, buying habits, in other words, all that information that allows us to get to know our typical customers in depth.
That’s when market surveys, data analysis platforms such as Google Analytics, Facebook Audiences, are only part of the tools we can make use of: the most interesting data often come from direct comparison with real customers, from surveys and focus groups, as well as from discussions with all business functions involved in the sales process, from sales to customer care. Here are some examples of key data to collect:
- First and last name;
- photo;
- demographic information;
- Psychographic aspects (ex: character..);
- objectives;
- needs and frustrations;
- preferences and interests;
- Experience and familiarity with technology;
- purchasing habits;
- desires regarding the ideal product/service.
The information gathered is thus used to create detailed profiles of real people: when we process buyer personas we should really be thinking about potential customers in the flesh.
All of this, as we have said, is preparatory to strategy design, but the sketch of our buyer personas does not end there. How can we enrich it?
Buyer personas and marketing automation: evolved and dynamic profiling
While the qualitative data we collect at an early stage are crucial for understanding activities to be deployed and channels to be used to reach the typical customer, they cannot be considered exhaustive.
Many other pieces of information can in fact be collected even while campaigns are in progress: think, for example, of browsing behavior, rather than qualitative data collected through specific lead generation and lead nurturing activities, or data involving the purchase process such as products viewed, added to cart, removed, and purchased in addition to all the quantitative data involving the customer journey.
All this information is critical not only to enrich the profiles of buyer personas, but also to better refine the strategy, optimizing workflows and activities based on users’ own behavior.
As can be easily guessed, in such a context, the use of technology solutions such as the Customer Data Platform, can really make a difference, offering the opportunity to collect data from multiple sources and normalize it at the single customer view level. All of this translates into the ability to profile and segment one’s audience in an advanced and dynamic way, first, and to personalize and enhance the customer experience, then.
Buyer personas and microdata: people first, customers second
Addressing the topic related to buyer personas and marketing automation and discovering how marketing automation activities play an important role in the evolved and dynamic profiling of our typical customers, we cannot fail to touch on the topic related to micro-data as well.
Massimo Giacchino, author of “Design Thinking,” defines micro-data “as traces and signals that people leave online.” These are, therefore, information and data that users release, interacting with the brand or simply satisfying a curiosity or a need thanks to an online search. Thus, they fall within this type of data, information contained in multiple channels and contexts and freely available. Here are some examples:
- social profiles and posts of followers/fans of our competitors;
- posts in Facebook and Linkedin groups;
- hashtag;
- product review;
- related searches suggested by Google.
This is data and information that, if properly analyzed, tells us a lot about our buyer personas: who they are, what needs they have, why they might choose our product/service, where they can buy it and how they can use it.
Knowing one’s audience thoroughly is the first step in devising successful marketing strategies. Data and information gathered at a preliminary stage, including input from microdata, are critical to defining our buyer personas and understanding the best strategy to deploy.
But it is always necessary not to stop at appearances, to delve deeper and profile further. Here, then, is where the contribution of marketing automation can be a winner at this juncture, providing us with additional insights into the analysis and clustering of our audience.
