Marketing Personas
Composite sketches or representation of a retailer’s most important customer segment - is what we refer to as marketing personas. These sketches have their roots deep in customer’s demographics, behavior and motivations. Retailers are required to be apt at data collection, data aggregation, data grouping and analytics of that data, as all these work as building blocks for creating a buyer persona.
Retailers selling work-wear are likely to have marketing personas somewhat like this:
The “Peter” persona really comes in handy, but is useful for only making certain marketing decisions. Personas help hugely in understanding a group of customers and prospects, ultimately enabling businesses to deliver:
*Relevant marketing messages
*Segment email lists
*Decide what can & should be written in a blog post, etc.
Marketing personas were, are and will always be an important marketing tool.
Are personas an end to customer understanding?
Personalizing the personas
Marketing personas help marketers comprehend or think about the requirements of groups of shoppers. This approach is anyway better then guesswork about what buyers – customers or shoppers want or are looking for. Guesswork, yes you read it right, was unfortunately what most of the retailers used to do. But with personas, marketers are not required to stay dependent on narratives or opinions. Instead, personas with use of real data – help retailers draw insights about groups of people, which prove helpful for overall marketing and customer experience.
In above example, the persona of Peter may adequately describe what individuals in that group usually have in common including occupation, location, marital status etc., but missed out big time on granular details. Personas are known for making stereotypes of customer groups, isn’t it? It makes you, as marketers believe that just because others in the Peter persona have a few things in common, there is everything that they have in common. But unfortunately it leads to a disaster, as is not necessarily true.
It is time for retailers to move ahead of marketing personas to personalization of personas – like they moved from guess work to personas. They are now required to think beyond simple lists of shoppers as groups, and move on to market to individual customers in unique ways. This trend is catching up real fast, as it has very few names but with lot of attributes to it. Known and practiced with different names such as extreme personalization, individualization, me-commerce, personalization and many more; it has a unique and single goal – to treat shoppers like individuals.
Individual profiles to treat shoppers as individuals
Evolution of personas to profiles can be initiated by collecting data that is much more comprehensive, granular, real time, and information from disparate sales channels and interactions, placed of in a single database – ready to be analyzed and used to draw conclusions. These insights are not about a group – but about individual shoppers.
To attain this, retailers or businesses will have to increase the engagement with customers significantly. This way they can ask for personal information in exchange of the promise to deliver enhanced customer service and experience. The information that marketers here collect are similar to attributes used to describe a persona, however, the information here is not generalized to describe a group and instead, marketers store it for a single customer. Individual profile attributes include:
*Customer name, email address, and physical address
*Demographic information including gender, age, relationship
*Social media identity including Facebook profile & alike
*Behavioral data including interactions and transactions
*Sentiment inferences from social media reviews and posts
*Membership in groups or organizations
*Public record data
Data collection for customer profiling
There are two questions that we have made efforts to answer here:
Why is it important to collect customer information?
Why collecting customer data is important for retailers?
Technology, tools and applications have helped marketers to collect and understand customer information, but it always had and always will need integration, and that element of human touch. Google Cloud Platform and players like Amazon Web Services, have the tools to conveniently develop comprehensive, individualized customer profiles – which ultimately help them to market directly to specific shoppers across a wide plethora of retail channels.
There are comprehensive software solutions as well that empower retail companies with customer individualization. However, these solutions are still emerging & hence costly; making them affordable for larger companies only. This is where the human element walks into picture. Market intelligence experts synchronize information from primary research studies, internal & secondary data, industry experts, social media intelligence and various other sources for 360 clients profiling.
Customer profiling takeaways
*Consumers are more connected than ever and this has made them more demanding. Regardless of channels, these customers expect seamless experience of brands
*Combining first party data with third party data gives you sufficient insights of who your customers are and what their peculiar preferences
*Customer profiling is all about creating customer segments to target each customer group with granular and relevant marketing
*Appropriate customer profiling helps you customize your messaging to each individual segments to enhance customer experience
*Understand your data, through an assortment of activities right from data collection, to data entry, and data processing, categorization and validation, to profiling your customers – to get smarter than competition when it comes to how you message, engage and interact with your customers, even cross-channel.
Client profiles for individualized marketing
Data findings are for all and not merely to be used for marketing teams. Use customer profiles to define everything your business does to make sure you are headed to become a customer centric organization. Customer profiling and segmentation solutions gives your company that competitive edge by segmenting customers or B2B and B2C companies across parameters like demographics including age, gender, income, etc. A step further and we also deliver psychographics such as personality type, preferences, etc. and behavioral reading such as similar likes and dislikes, sports, hobbies, etc.