Gain better insight in customers with Marketing Personas

Marco Meijs, 09 January 2019

Do you want to understand your customers better and see things through their eyes, so you can connect with them more effectively? In that case, Personas might be something for you. There are different scenarios in which you can use personas. In this blog the focus will be on creating personas for marketing purposes.

What is a Marketing persona?

Before we continue, first we need to know what a marketing persona is and what it is used for. There are many ways to formulate it but, for instance, Wikipedia describes it as:

“Personas are used in marketing (and advertising) by creating a marketing persona that represents a group or segment of customers so that the company can focus its efforts. For example, online advertising agencies can monitor pictures, browsing history and the ads people surfing the internet generally select or choose to click, and based on that data they tailor their merchandise to a targeted audience or better describe a customer segments using a data driven approach.”

A Marketing persona is a concrete example of an ideal customer representing a certain target audience. This customer has a name, a profile picture and several characteristics that define him/her. It is a person that is interested in your company and/or buying your product. You define multiple personas, but it is recommended to keep it between 3 to 5.

What information is in a marketing persona?

There is a lot that can be found on the internet on what information should be part of the marketing persona. Whatever you decide, do not come up with the data yourself. You need to base it on facts. Some of the basic data you want to capture is:

A name for your persona
A photo of the persona
Job Title
Demographics (Age/Gender/Salary/….)
Goals
Challenges
Values
Etc.

Next to these basic needs you can also define a set of data that is relevant to your specific customers. There is however no set standard for this as this really depends on the type of business your customers are in.

How do you gather the factual information and create a marketing persona?

As mentioned earlier the data that is gathered should be based on facts. Besides this it is good to not collect too much data and focus on the essentials. Always try to involve as many people, from different parts of your organization, in the process. And last but not least: keep your personas up to date and relevant. For the actual gathering of the data there are different methods:

The first way to gather information is to get people in your organization together that all connect with customers. Together they can come up with different insights that give a good overview of your customer needs.

Secondly you can interview your customer. You can either do that by conduction actual interviews or invite them to fill in a survey.

As a third way you can use marketing tools like SAP Marketing Cloud that can gather information about your customer and that can combine them into a 360 degree overview. Below we will list some of the options available in SAP Marketing Cloud that may help you in getting the most reliable fact-based data you need to complete and keep your Marketing Personas up to date.

Possibilities with SAP Marketing Cloud for your fact-based Marketing personas

With SAP Marketing Cloud you get an extensive set of tools and integration possibilities to go beyond marketing data. You can:

Build complete, 360-degree customer profiles with first-party transactional and behavioral data from multiple channels – so you never miss an opportunity.
Tap into hidden trends in customer behavior with propensity models and advanced analytics that predict what they’re going to do next.
Powerful discovery and visualization tools give deeper insights into behavior and patterns, helping you to better understand your customers’ journeys.
Gain your customers’ trust and rest easy by meeting the necessary requirements for obtaining verifiable consent from your customers when collecting and using their personal data.

If you would like to know more, please leave a comment down below or contact me at: marco.meijs@acorel.nl