Personas Become Key to Successful Marketing
“Personalization and the customer journey need to work together; companies cannot separate the two,” notes Gretchen Cordova, vice president of strategy at NP Digital, a marketing agency. “Corporations must take what they know and align their marketing around it. The information helps them build out the journey components. It creates a framework, a metamodel about who they are, who you are, and how you can reach them more effectively.”
Then companies need to be sure they’re open to the results of persona research. In some cases, they might run up against institutional bias and try to use the data to confirm existing approaches rather than evaluate its potential effectiveness.
“The evaluation is the hardest part when [it’s] forcing you to say no to some things that certain buyers really want,” says HubSpot’s Dick.
An organization, for example, might have been tweeting a lot, only to find that its persona doesn’t use Twitter anymore and has moved to Instagram instead.
Diving too deep is another potential pitfall. In some cases, companies could get caught up in the nuances of each persona and create so many that managing them becomes impossible. When nearing that stage, limiting rather than expanding the numbers is the best option.
There is also danger when analyzing the data. Companies could easily get lost looking at a specific data point and miss the bigger picture. They need to put the work in as they begin the process and the research to make sure that they have a strong focus. “As a business, who do you want to focus on?” Cordova suggests. “Many businesses, especially those in growth and those new to the industry, have a lot of options for who to serve.”
Another pitfall is that companies typically have multiple initiatives in the planning stages but limited budgets, so not every idea will get funded.
Should they ultimately get the funding, they are likely to find a market that is flooded with a broad suite of solutions designed to help them improve their personalization efforts. Corporations must pick the best toolsets. If they select the wrong one, their marketing efforts could be misaligned and they’ll miss out on many opportunities. Given the complexity of the challenge, companies might want to bring in outside consultants to help with the selection.
THE DATA DILEMMA
Businesses can also have trouble collecting customer information, which is only getting more difficult given the regulatory environment that has been created by statutes like the General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act.
“It’s amazing the number of black holes in the data, so companies do not have the information they need to draw on,” Cordova says.
Furthermore, all data sources need to be in sync and work cohesively. Sometimes, one persona-building tool is not a good fit because it might not support legacy media input.
In other cases, the data integration is not as deep as needed. Holes arise because data is often siloed. Departments collect it for a specific purpose. Later it becomes challenging for other groups to access and leverage it for other purposes.
To be successful, companies need to integrate their information and develop common sets of attributes. Such work often represents a massive undertaking, and in many cases, companies become so immersed in their immediate needs that they push the work to the back burner.
Finally, companies might not have the right strategy in place to analyze and leverage the data once it is collected.
Given all of the variables, fixing such problems can be costly. A comprehensive, all-encompassing solution could run into six, seven, or eight figures. “Marketing managers need to tailor their level of investment to what the organization can tolerate,” Cordova says.
Perhaps, they should start with a small pilot and grow the initiative as the results come in.
But that is not always easy. Companies are under immense pressure to improve their marketing to get better results as quickly as possible. They have the ability to collect more customer information than ever before, but they often fail to use that data to its fullest potential.
Customer personas enable them to bring information to life by consolidating it into fictional customer profiles. The process often improves messaging, enhances service, and grows revenue, but it can be daunting to implement.
Paul Korzeniowski is a freelance writer who specializes in technology issues. He has been covering CRM issues for more than two decades, is based in Andover, Mass., and can be reached at paulkorzen@aol.com or on Twitter at @PaulKorzeniowski.