This guest post comes to you from Randy Parker, Senior Developer at Movéo.
Today, we will explore combining two modern techniques – Personas and Big Data – which can work together to form a tool greater than the sum of its parts.
Personas are a method of segmenting your unique customer base to create humanly accessible descriptions of the different customer audiences you are attempting to reach. Different portions of the entire customer universe will often respond to different features or communication methods about your product and their engagement will increase if you speak specifically to their interests. Imagining a virtual person, in detail, for each one of these segments puts a human face, desires and goals to what would otherwise be a dry set of statistics.
These personas can help lead gen, marketing, media placement, sales and customer support get a feel for who they are communicating with. Properly designed personas are instantly relatable to the average person.
Moreover, there is immense value in going one step further and tying all those dry statistic values or ranges to these personas. Go through all of your Big Data properties and match which values would best fit each persona. It’s a big job, but once it is accomplished your data can talk to you not only in masses of numbers and categories, but will let you know WHO you are talking to by matching its data to a best fit persona.
On the flip side, Big Data helps inform the creation or optimization of Personas. Through cluster analysis you can see groupings of customer behavior that could indicate an attribute that defines one or more personas. You can see if the personas you developed match the actual data, if you created distinct personas that don’t show up in the data, or you might have missed a grouping that gives you an opportunity to refine your communication with a new persona type.
Image via (cc) Travis Isaacs
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