Overview
Segmenting your audience and turning it into personas is a process that involves dividing a target audience into smaller groups based on specific characteristics such as demographics, preferences, and behavior. By creating these personas, marketers can gain a better understanding of their customers’ wants and needs. Which, in turn, helps create more effective marketing campaigns.
What are Personas?
Personas are data-based representations of your target audience. They are based on data analysis and research of your existing customers’ characteristics, preferences, and/or behavior, and -preferably- they should not be based on generic aspects, but those that match your current customer list.
Why should companies create Personas?
Segmenting customers using personas allows marketers understand optimize their audience targeting by classifying it in such a way that they will portray a clear picture of the prospects based on who they are and what they want/need, and -hopefully- how they make their decisions regarding your product/service(s). This, in return, will help marketers plan more effective marketing campaigns, around specific touchpoints, leading to better messaging and engagement.
When should a company create Personas?
Ideally, before starting any new marketing campaigns; user personas represent the customer/end-user of your product or service. MOPs, working with sales, customer success, and the data team, should be able to create them based on several characteristics, like demographics and behaviors/tendencies using your existing customer list as the basis.
How should a company create Personas?
There are several ways to create personas, including analyzing sales data, conducting surveys, and gathering information from websites or social media channels. Combining these methods can provide a more comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and preferences.
Sales data can provide information on the different types of products or services that your customers are purchasing, their frequency, how much they spend, etc. With surveys, you could gather demographics, interests, and behaviors; these surveys can be conducted online, by phone or in person, with the questions being as specific as you’d need them. And, finally, via website/social media, you can also incorporate additional data points like location, language, preferences and, even, opinions.
Who should create Personas at a company?
As mentioned before, the marketing operations (MOPs) team, working in collaboration with the data team and alongside sales and customer success, should be able to create these personas. MOPs will bring the campaign efforts perspective with sales and customer success chiming in on the customer side and the data team will focus on connecting all the data sources needed to capture your users/customers, before segmenting them into the personas that make sense to your company.
Conclusion
Creating personas is an essential process that enables companies to better understand their target audience and create more effective marketing campaigns. By profiling and targeting specific groups, companies can more effectively manage their leads and plan their marketing campaigns around specific touchpoints.
Overall, audience segmentation is an essential component of successful marketing, and companies that prioritize it are more likely to achieve their marketing goals and connect with their target audience.
