Are you new to delving into data to harness its value? Your organization likely has the type of data the marketing team needs to develop robust personas.
Who Data = Demographic data that describes your customers such as Stats Canada census information – age, income, geography, gender, education, etc.
What Data = Behaviour data such as transaction data or buying patterns, payment history, preferred products/services/events, etc. Consider also not just internal data, but external data that can highlight consumer trends, habits, hobbies, etc. appropriate to your business. Consider trend Sites like Google Trends, Google Search Console, trendspottr, trendhunter; Consulting sites like deloitte.com, pwc.com, mckinsey.com or industry-specific organization sites like ic.gc.ca, imagine Canada (NFP), Retail Council of Canada, Canadian Craft Federation, Canadian Federation of Independent Businesses (CFIB), etc.
How Data = Illustrates how your customers interact with your brand. This can include email open rates, website clicks or Google Analytics insights, chat or call transcripts, event attendance, sales teams insights, etc. As teams juggle and integrate communication channels it can be hard to keep track of all the customer touchpoints.. Google Analytics focuses on using touchpoint attribution models, which means teams can assign values to each potential touchpoint. For example, from learning how customers prefer to interact teams can assign a weighted value to each touchpoint to help track and analyze future data.
- Social Network – 20% weight / importance
- Paid Advertising – 10%
- eMail / eNewsletter – 40%
- Website – 30%
- = 100% Expected Result or Actual Sale / Registration / Donation / Action
Why Data = Helps teams understand attitudes towards your brand or why customers prefer your brand. This can include market research data such as customer surveys or polls, social media feedback, blog comments, etc.
Adapting a persona to the stages in a customers journey
As you begin to develop a persona to describe your customers, consider also the various stages in a “buyers” or “donors” journey. Too many organizations speak to new customers in the same way as returning or loyal customers instead of tailoring content for each part of a customers journey.
Awareness = Speaking to customers who have little or no brand awareness. They may be using search engines, discovering your blog or social media platforms, finding out more via WOM (word of mouth), etc.
Interest / Consideration = Developing a relationship with customers who are now aware of your products/services/programs. They may now have signed up for emails, done a product tour, watched a video, read reviews or testimonials, signed up for a free trial/webinar, etc. – actions that demonstrate an interest.
Active / Returning = DO NOT stop once a customer has decided to purchase a product, participate in an event, make a donation etc. as this is just the first step in delighting customers so they keep coming back! Ensure your plans consider post-purchase needs like instructional video’s, satisfaction surveys, social media engagement, customer service supports, etc. that turn customers into brand influencers/ambassadors.
Start small by discussing what data you can most easily access and build from there. Survey Monkey, Stats Canada and other free tools now make it easy, even if you are starting from scratch to pull together some key data to begin developing a critical understanding of your best customers.
Interested in learning more – Check out a list of some interesting courses for learning more about data and decision making.
http://www.brandrewire.ca/data-courses-to-consider