Using Personas to personalise your marketing

I’ve previously made the case for customer experience being the key competitive differentiator within today’s leading businesses. So how do you deliver that in a meaningful, personalised way? One option from the connected marketeer’s toolbox that’s seeing an increasing amount of success is customer personas.

What are personas?

“63% of ‘High performer’ Sales, Marketing and Support teams are more successful at creating personalised omni-channel experience for customers, compared to just 2% of the ‘Under performers’.”

-       ‘State of Marketing 2016’ Report, Salesforce

Aligning Sales, Marketing and Customer Support departments is increasingly seen as a critical staging point on the journey to deliver outstanding customer experience. This alignment cannot happen unless you are able to describe your customers consistently.

In this never-ending quest to better understand and describe the customer, sales and marketing departments have over the years relied on a variety of strategies and definitions. In terms of using research and information to divide customers into ‘segments’, marketers have used geographic, demographic and sociological filters.

Customer personas take a different angle, looking at real-world behaviour and experience (rather than job titles or demographics) to understand user needs.  Customer personas are fictional, generalised representations of ideal customers, based on real data and bespoke market research. Personas help everyone in a company - marketing, sales, services – understand and relate to customers in real-life, emotively human terms.

User stories (fictionalised examples taken from the persona’s perspective) bring personas to life. They are a great way to enable the teams to imagine how and why a customer would engage with the brand, what their goal for an engagement will be and what a satisfying, successful outcome looks like (e.g. make a purchase, renew a contract, refer a friend, register for an event).

Given that I’d imagine most of you have some idea of what personas are I won’t say more by way of introduction, but if you do want to read more I’d recommend Salesforce’s Getting Started with Personas training module which contains the following elegant quote:

“…a persona represents a group of users clustered based on shared behaviour, motivations, goals, pain points, or other characteristics. Personas help you keep your key user groups at the front of your mind when making decisions about your product. Effective personas are created based on research to ensure that they reflect the real people who use your product.”

Creating a unified customer experience across your marketing landscape means your business will be able to create deeper and longer-term relationships with its customers. Through improving the performance and ROI of your marketing campaigns, personas are at the heart of this.

Segmentation isn’t good enough

Traditionally, businesses looked at their customers based on their own internal segmentations such as commercial value, the commercial size, their role within the organisation, or verticals sectors that they operated within. Whilst it’s easy to segment existing customers that way, it’s not possible to understand (and so target) the people within the organisations who make the buying decisions. It’s even harder to know how to grow your funnel with new customer prospects using such generic categorisations.

Job roles are often used as shorthand when talking about sales behaviours: for example, Sales Development Reps build pipeline, Account Executives close deals. However, job roles are not consistently correlated with behaviour across a typical user base. For example, users with the title “Business Development Rep” and “Account Executive”, may recur in different personas, indicating that job title is not always a clear indicator of sales behaviour. So – to repeat a point I made at the top of the blog - we encourage people to look to behaviour, rather than job role or title, to best understand a user’s needs.

Personas reveal similar motivations, pain points and challenges as well as their role and influence within the organisation. It’s essential for all teams to be involved in the creation and maintenance of personas, ensuring there is agreement on their motivations, their areas of interest relevant to your business and what type of content they normally consume.

With the advent of digital marketing and the ability to personalise your marketing messages and activities, it is now essential to group the people you are trying to influence (and ultimately sell to) into unique personas. Your email marketing and Paid Media activities can be improved with greater alignment to personas – let’s look at a couple of examples.

Using personas to personalise communications

Email Marketing

The advent of marketing automation and closer integration with CRM data means marketers are now able to create much more powerful, timely and relevant emails. Brands that don’t use personas to create personalised email communications and offers will only end up destroying the value and lifespan of their email database.  Customers expect to receive relevant communications based on either their current interaction with the brand or something that adds value to their role or personal situation (education, special offers).

Paid Media

Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are ideal channels for creating highly targeted and personalised adverts for your target audience. By using personas and your own sales and marketing data to define your audiences, you can improve the power of the advertising tools on social platforms to target niche audience groups. This will enable you to create personalised promotions, offers and content, ensuring your ad spend is targeting and converting the right customers.

The Persona imperative

Research-generated, data-driven personas are an efficient method for drawing meaningful, actionable conclusions about our users, at scale. Ensuring departments collaborate to create personas is the first step, but this needs to be reinforced by sessions to help teams adopt the research and think of their own creative ways to use the personas.

Combining personalised marketing with the retargeting features on platforms such as Google and Facebook means you are then able to create new audience groups of unknown customers that could also be interested in your content and promotions. This is where things really get exciting - but Marketing departments will need integrated and robust platforms to ensure they can achieve this.

If you’d like to know more I highly recommend this article from Kathy Baxter which makes the compelling case that personas are essential if your organisation wants to improve the customer’s experience across all of its touchpoints, with a refreshed focus on engagement:

“Any organisation that is serious about becoming a customer-centric brand will need to invest time and resources into creating and maintaining personas. Without them you will find it harder to acquire new customers, improve your sales numbers and retain customers. The modern digitally empowered customer now expects a seamless and personalised experience across any touchpoint. It’s time for all organisations to create a single-view of the customer.”

Do you agree that personas are inherently more useful than demographic data filters? Is the future of digital marketing strategy ‘persona flavoured’?  Would love to hear your thoughts and experiences.