While the evolution of humans (“Man”) took approximately 6 million years, the evolution of Customer Personas has happened much faster - over the past decade. The availability of data has made this possible, and continues to evolve as organizations (both internal and external) make sense of their big data in an effort to make it more understandable and actionable. This process of change shows the demographic, psychographics and behavioral traits of people (consumers) and provides greater insights today than ever before… assuming one has the capabilities to unlock them.
How the evolution of data compares to the evolution of Man.
Using a data-science approach to better understanding customers, the evolution began:
- Clusters: identifying patterns in the data
- Archetypes: a statement around a pattern of behavior
- Segments:
- Personas: by connecting existing first party data, and combining it with the right, new second and third party data, a much deeper understanding of customers was “born”
At AccessFuel, we call them Audience Personas - comprised of both (customer personas and prospective customer personas (every organization is sitting on conversion opportunities, that if understood better, is a very low cost way of acquiring, well converting, new customers).
Once the customers (the Personas) are deeply understood (demographics, psychographics, interests, etc) actionable insights can be derived and applied to various forms of “intelligence”, including behavioral, experiential.
The Result:
The value of creating Personas includes:
- A deep understanding of the customer WHO
- Organizational alignment by department, goals, objectives and KPI’s
- The ability to Audience “shape”
- Marketing growth
- Sales growth
