Whenever I speak to my clients about their digital marketing goals, there are several common themes. Customers today demand a relevant experience throughout their journey, so conversations often focus on the need to serve personalised content or how to action large data sets across multiple channels.

It makes perfect sense that this should form part of any Christmas marketing strategy, however, before we get to a stage where it’s even achievable we need to tackle a simple question, “who are my customers and how do they behave?”

One method of answering that is to build digital marketing personas using the available information you have on your customers. A persona is similar to a fictional skeleton that you gradually flesh out, until you have a set of archetypes that can act as a proxy for your audience. These personas can then be used as an easily identifiable model across your business to more easily guide your strategy.

To further illustrate this, I will take the example of a multi-channel retailer.

The first hypothesis (Persona A) is that there is a young demographic amongst its customer-base between the ages of 18 - 22 that display the following behavioural traits:

a) Frequently buys online
b) Uses social media recommendations to inform their purchase and shares user generated content to inform their purchase
c) Almost exclusively Interacts with your communications via mobile device
d) Brand loyalty can be short-lived
e) Always shops in the sale

The second hypothesis (Persona B) is a group of medium income earners between the ages of 30 – 40 conforming to an entirely different set of purchasing behaviours:

a) Will use an online store to browse products but almost always visits in-store as part of the buying process, often via click and collect
b) Researches customer reviews and blogs from industry experts before purchasing
c) Heavily influenced by traditional offline marketing as well as digital marketing
d) Loyal to particular brands, based on criteria such as customer service and product quality
e) Regularly pay full price for the right product

What if marketers could tailor the customer experience according to these buying personas across multiple touch points? Research shows that today’s consumers not only expect brands to serve relevant and engaging content, but that they actually personalise the overall experience. Understanding in detail the context of a customer’s various interactions with your business is the first step to providing that deeper level of personalisation.

With the number of considerations at play, however, it can be difficult for marketers to build a clear path to achieving such a clear understanding of their customers. To help get started, therefore, please see the following high level steps:

1. Understanding and using the available data is important

It is essential that any customer strategy begins with an understanding of your data. Before carrying out statistical analysis, give careful consideration to your brand’s overall goals and the data touch points that you have available to you. The majority of marketers are already using behavioural and transactional data sets in their digital marketing but it is important to look beyond this for an all-encompassing view. According to Gartner there are five research modalities that can offer significant value:

  • Demographic – Population data such as geography and income.
  • Psychographic – Insight gathered by understanding opinions and attitudes
  • Ethnographic – Insight gained through observation of your customers
  • Transactional – Data acquired through your customer’s purchase history
  • Behavioural – Data captured through how people interact with your company via various digital channels

Within these key areas there is almost certainly a wealth of useful, actionable insight that you might not yet be utilising and that can bring greater insight into your customers.

2. Create digital marketing segments based on your data analysis

Before you can build your personas it is important that you action your data hypotheses within your digital marketing strategy by creating segments of customers. These segments should be based on key attributes that have been discovered as part of your customer analysis. It is important that any outcome data is captured and fed back into your central data tool for further analysis and to measure performance of each segment over time.

3. Create a testing program

The best way to verify the hypotheses that informed your segmentation strategy is to build a testing program. Choose a number of variables that will have the most meaningful impact on the personalisation of your offering and feed these back into the segments to make them more coherent. Examples could include favoured channel, tone of communication, product affinity and frequency of communication.

4. Create & apply your personas

The implementation of a sound analysis and segmentation strategy will provide the foundation to start building out your personas. The steps detailed above should provide you with the confidence to make objective rather than subjective statements about your customers and a feedback loop will allow you to continually verify your prognoses.

5. Evolve the Personas over time

Any personas that you create should be fluid and evolve over time as your understanding of their behaviour grows. Many loyal brand advocates are happy to provide further information, particularly if they are aware that it will be used to directly improve their customer experience. Customer service surveys, the capturing of stated preferences and product feedback following purchase can all be used to help further build your persona models. As your business continues to grow and adapt according to strategy and market conditions it is also essential that your personas are continually re-evaluated.

 

By Alex Jenkinson, marketing expert at SmartFocus. 

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