Long gone are those days when a high form of content was believed to be independent, aloof from the critical viewership. Now the content is manufactured under the microscope of highly defined characteristics and features of consumer-base that irredeemably curates content in the range of personal to desirable results. What makes that happen, you may ask. It is the art of creating segments, fashioning hypothetical personas, and categorizing people of similar choice and behavior. But how is that possible, you may ask again.
We have a fairly simple method, and by the end of reading it, you will know why it is important and what you have been missing out on. In a nutshell, the business of segmentation is all about learning demographics, culture, ethnicity, thought-structure, and behavior of your target audience to make your content more relevant, useful and suited to your audience. And installing this mechanism means, you are embarking on the journey of knowing about your audience from the point of not knowing them at all. Before we lay out the methodology, you should see how and where customer segmentation is going to come in handy.
a. In order to make content that your audience appreciates, learning about their choice is incredibly important.
b. Instead of spending hours on finding the right content, experimenting with colors and styles, you can simply trust your database. Sometimes logic, in the form of data, is the best strategy for creativity.
c. Look at the amount of money you’d be saving by taking every step calculatedly, instead of brainstorming on new ideas that may cost a lot and won’t come to fruition.
d. Knowing your audience does not mean we are entirely preventing creativity from the process, in fact, creativity is going to be needed the instant you realize you know enough, deep well, to take a leap ahead and drive the contemporary fashion style, trend, and time-spirit, in the direction you want. For now, you know quite well what your audience already likes, and what they “may” like even more. So digging into this data, either through site traffic, surveys or reports is going to pay off quite well in your endeavor.
e. Of course, you are going to save a lot of money with this approach, but what else? Time. The more time you spend on analyzing the audience, the lesser time you spend on experimentations. You will, in fact, have a system of working that thrives on data and can do well without human input as such. In more technical terms, data mining, machine learning, and artificial intelligence are going to do three-quarters of your work, and you will save enough time to lead multiple projects at once.
f. Automation systems eliminate the possibility of mistakes.
Marketing Persona
A marketing person is a hypothetical individual that centrally fits into a specific segment of your audiences for they share the most common features and characteristics of your existing customers. Do not delude into thinking this persona is limited to age or income level. Consider this persona as that of a character of a novel. It has to have weaknesses, strengths, passions, choice or opinions. This persona has to be taken as seriously as your next-door neighbor. By adding characteristics, you whittle down the customer segments so much so that it filters all down to a single person. THIS is your persona.
Step-by-step Guide to Creating Persona
You have the option to either look into your database, perform a series of interviews and surveys from your existing customers/audience-base. After that, you can collect common characteristics into one persona for each demographic. Or, you can start from scratch, go the long and hard way but with a high success expectancy rate.