To create a captivating customer experience, your brand serves as a window to the world, offering a comprehensive vision of your business to both existing customers and potential prospects. Your customers have high expectations, seeking a seamless blend of utility, convenience, and value in every interaction with your brand, tailored to their individual needs.
To meet these expectations, it is crucial to design the customer experience (CX) based on key moments and decision points throughout the buying journey. This can be achieved by utilizing personas, buyer's journey mapping, target groups, and segments. Once you have a clear understanding of who you want to reach, it becomes essential to strategically design the experience accordingly.
Let's begin by understanding what is a Persona and how to create one.
Customers increasingly expect a personalized, or at least relevant, experience, and what better way to get it right than to start with personas with rich details about the motivations and goals of your customers?
Personas have been in existence for a considerable amount of time, but their popularity is steadily growing. This is because customers now have higher expectations, and relying solely on demographic data, market segments, and role descriptors is insufficient for understanding their needs, behaviors, and preferences. To truly comprehend your audience and effectively engage with them, it is crucial to master the art of creating and managing personas over the long term.
What is a persona?
A persona is a fictional character created as a proxy for a target audience. These audience archetypes commonly include illustrative pictures and fictional names that make them tangible to digital designers and marketers. Personas identify similar patterns of behavior that result in commonly held goals. Digital marketers craft personas by analyzing primary and secondary sources, including ethnographic insight arising from direct observation of people and data on their behavioral patterns.
To illustrate the importance of personas, consider this example. According to statistics from CyberCollege, only a small percentage of individuals without a high school education use the Internet, while the majority of college-educated individuals are regular online users. However, these demographic insights alone do not provide specific guidance for designing interactions or creating engagement plans. Similarly, comScore has discovered that women account for a significant portion of online spending on clothing and accessories. While this information is valuable, it does not offer the necessary details to tailor experiences for a particular target audience.
Now, let's delve into the persona of Carey, a professional woman with a college education who often finds herself multitasking due to time constraints. Carey relies on her mobile device to purchase name-brand clothes for her two-year-old son, both from the comfort of her home and during coffee meet-ups with friends who have children of the same age. She prioritizes finding competitive prices as her peers view frugality as a virtue. Carey's shopping habits reflect her desire to spend quality time with her family rather than engage in stressful shopping trips. By understanding this persona, digital designers and marketers gain valuable insights that can guide the creation of effective campaigns, engagement plans, and digital experiences.
How to create a persona
Personas are derived from a combination of five research modalities:
- Demographic — Defines the basic structure of a population based on geography, income, level of education, and other standard descriptive attributes.
- Psychographic — Focuses on values, opinions, interests, aspirations, attitudes, and lifestyles.
- Ethnographic — Involves participatory observation where insights are gleaned by watching subjects in their daily routines and capturing what isn’t explicitly reported.
- Transactional — Reveals insights through a historical customer relationship, including first- and third-party purchase histories and post-sale service records.
- Behavioral — Captures data passively through engagement with websites, mobile devices, and other media, content, and channels that reveal how audiences engage throughout a relationship.
Blend the persona’s behaviors and goal descriptions with a context (such as the availability of a mobile device) to create scenarios. These scenarios form the backbone of an initial campaign, storytelling, or UX design. Personas and scenarios also help to make complex situations comprehensible to management.
Manage personas over time
Consider applying an estimated lifetime economic value to each persona based on the idea that customers aren’t valued equally. This will help you prioritize customer experience investments based on what delivers the highest yield to the business. It’s typical to develop four to eight different personas as a series of abstract profiles that help illuminate your target audiences.
Personas are not a “set and forget” activity. They do not lend themselves well to an initial flurry of activity to create a poster that’s pinned to cubicle walls. Your audience’s behavior links tightly to its context or environment. When the environment changes, audience behavior will likely change, too. Thus, personas should be dynamic — at times you’ll even need to retire them. Here, persona research informs your top-down view while continuous measurement with analytics informs your bottom-up optimization of these personas over time.
What is a segment?
A segment is a group of people or other entities, like companies or stores, that share quantifiable attributes that matter to your business. According to Gartner, most B2B marketers do not use a single approach to segmentation for all their efforts but rather apply several different approaches for different business reasons.
For example, a major pharmacy retailer uses five different schemas:
- Psychographic — Lifestyles and attitudes toward managing family health, for brand and other awareness campaigns
- Behavioral — Frequency of shopping by category and engagement with marketing tactics, for couponing and promotions
- Benefits — Functional or emotional benefits (e.g., whiter teeth) for product advertising
- Geography — Region and density for product mix and pricing
- Occasion — Special occasions (e.g., birthdays) or purchase intervals for reminders and recognition.
Define your goal
While you can create as many segments as are statistically different and useful, good segmentation includes only those that are large enough to have an impact and that are stable, addressable, and unique enough to reward different treatments. Begin by defining your goal across a framework for positioning internal/external (customer or noncustomer) and strategic/tactical goals.
Internal — Focuses on customers or others who have some engagement with your products — for example, visitors to your website. Primary uses include improving customer experience and retention, upselling and cross-selling, and gaining a greater share of wallet from competitors. Data sources include CRM, web analytics, point-of-sale systems, etc.
External — Treats people who are not existing customers, generally targeted for prospecting or growth. The outcome is often to find new prospects and leads for growth, or new products and launches. Lacking internal (e.g., first-party) data, external segmentations rely on syndicated and other third-party data, media vendors, market research, government, and other outside sources of information.
Tactical — Tactical segmentations have the goal of determining which types and groups of people are more or less likely to buy product X or service Y. For example, Kraft segmented its customer base by whether people searched for recipes and were interested in Easter for a promotion around its Easter Bunny Cake recipe.
Strategic — Strategic segmentations are more interested in exploration and discovery among groups of customers or prospects and often used by marketers who want to discover new insights for targeting, messaging, or product development. This was the goal for tax preparation company H&R Block when it performed clustering analysis that identified three broad groups of customers: “Do-it-yourselfer,” “do-it-for-me,” and a previously unknown hybrid group it called “do-it-with-me,” who preferred some help but not full service.
Develop attributes for data collection
At the heart of any segmentation exercise, think of attributes as quantifiable characteristics that can be aligned to a customer, prospect, or market.
Attributes come in three basic types. They describe what people:
- Are — Persistent personal attributes such as age, gender, household income, language group, and marital status. Less persistent attributes include transition states such as moving, pregnancy, wedding, and bankruptcy.
- Do — Behaviors that can be observed, such as products bought, media or devices used, websites visited, and content consumed. This includes where they are.
- Think — Attitudes and values that are sometimes explicit, such as when a person calls or tweets a complaint, but often must be inferred (e.g., a political party based on zip code).
After defining data collection sources and integration, build segments with a needs/value or clustering exercise. If you want to determine, for example, the key factors or needs that make a person a profitable customer, a decision tree can help spot which combinations of attributes have the greatest impact on value. Clustering methods are used to find groups of people who share similar attributes and are reasonably distinct from other groups. Both types of results give you powerful insights for product development, pricing, targeting, messaging, and measurement.
Next, use personas to give depth and expression to segments that can seem cold, inhuman, and incomplete. Here, a collection of attributes such as women over thirty who visit cooking sites becomes the persona, “Tammy,” a proud mother of two young children who entertain with flair.
Next Map segments and personas to customer buying journeys
Combine them with the when, what, and how to define pathways that draw audiences from engagement to conversion to transaction, and advocacy
When: Map personas to key moments on the buying journey
By understanding the behaviors, preferences, media consumption habits, technology adoption patterns, and detailed day-in-the-life routines of these audiences, you can begin designing a journey map that becomes the backbone of your customer experience architecture. Wherever you’re interviewing customers, seek to capture an as-is view of their relationship with your brand, across all touchpoints. What’s working? What’s not? This will be an important input into your overall prioritization of customer experience investment candidates.
Begin by mapping personas to specific moments on the buying journey. Do this by modeling the specific paths each persona traverses, pre- and post-sale, throughout their relationship with your brand. It’s often useful to illustrate this freehand on a whiteboard or large sheets of butcher paper hung on the walls of a conference room. Be as detailed as possible. You can always simplify and consolidate steps later.
Think of persona, Magen, a 28-year-old single professional who wants a new fitness routine and begins a journey to purchase a bike. A cycling brand would identify her steps from the first Internet search to questioning her “hardcore” cycling friends, to when she begins to formulate purchase criteria, among many others. More importantly, the brand seeks to understand Magen’s true motivations and goals, turning this “need-state” into the blueprint for a high-value customer experience.
What: Define Stories, Experiences, and Services That Engage and Delight
Next, create a table by mapping personas to moments. At the intersections, there are opportunities to create an inventory of stories, services, and experiences, where:
- Stories are the use of content to engage audiences in contextually relevant ways.
- Services are discrete features and apps designed to engage and/or serve audiences.
- Experiences are how key moments are tightly orchestrated over the arc of engagement.
How: Identity Systems, People, Processes and Data to Enable Experiences
Once you’ve defined the what, you need to address the how. Begin by mapping the stories, experiences, and services you’ve conceived in the previous step to the systems they implicate, the people they rely on, the processes they impact, and the data they require.
Keep in mind that creating discrete experiences isn’t enough. These experiences should be connected by logical linkages that drive engagement, progression, and conversion across a decision journey and throughout a customer relationship. For example, one audience-centric content asset should set up the next, which becomes progressively brand- and/or offer-centric throughout the engagement. But be sure calls to action are appropriate to the moment. Going for the “close” in the earliest moments can turn brand engagement toxic.
Ultimately, it’s necessary to define pathways that draw audiences from engagement to conversion to transaction and advocacy. Design these pathways with two specific journeys in mind:
- The path to purchase for a specific offering
- The lifetime relationship with a known customer.
Use segments, personas, and buying journeys to create exceptional customer experiences. Your investments in the second pathway will yield a lifetime of loyalty and advocacy.
