How to Use Personas and Audience Segmentation to Increase your Marketing Results

At XMPie we talk a lot about generating personalized marketing campaigns but to ramp up the power of your communications you should consider adding audience segmentation with personas to the equation.

In today’s competitive marketplace, marketers are all vying for the eyes of the consumers. Developing campaigns that stand out and grab consumers’ attention are essential for engagement and action.

Key factors that create this synergy are relevancy to the recipient and timeliness. Does your campaign inspire action? Is it timed to reach that recipient when s/he is most likely to be interested? If the answer to one or both of these questions is ‘no’, then you may be risking the chance of your communication ending up in the trash, deleted or just ignored.

So what can you do to inspire more actionable results and develop more meaningful communications for your current and future customers? One tool marketers are using to make campaigns more relevant is persona mapping.

Personas and Audience segments help marketers to connect with different types of customers.  By distinguishing different representative customer groups and identifying how each group makes decisions and interacts with the brand, marketers can create special profiles or personas to target each group differently. These personas can be based on existing customer data, industry surveys or other research and will shape the way you connect with your customers for years to come.

As you craft different personas you will be able to better gauge what type of content is useful and relevant to customers associated with that group and identify what will motivate them to react to your communication.

Here are some categories to consider as you identify your personas:

1. Demographics – Here you can address basic personal profile elements such as age, gender, location and education.
2. Professional life – Classify their profession, title, industry, income, etc.
3. Preferences – Where and how are personas consuming information? What kind of devices are they using? Are they on social media? What are their viewing habits?
4. Interests – What topics are they most interested in? What are they passionate about? What are their hobbies?
5. Challenges – By identifying persona challenges, you will be able to make connections as to how you may be able to help address said challenges in your communications. What are the biggest pain points they face? How can you help them solve challenges?

At XMPie, we’ve developed a new feature in our Cross Media software called Audience which helps marketers to plan their variable data campaigns with strategy and logic from the get go.

Marketers can easily divide customers into different personas, each with its own campaign logic and rules and with messaging and offers adjusted to the attributes and parameters of each.  For example, you can plan a comprehensive marketing strategy that targets singles and families separately, on the assumption that each segment requires a different marketing approach to achieve maximum results.

This Audience segmentation feature compliments the work you are doing to drive your design with personalized information such as recipient names or personalized landing sites or PURLs.

Are you using marketing personas? Tell us about your experience below!