Predictive Marketing: 1.2 – Personas & Contexts

Customer Personas and Contexts in which they are used

In the context of Customer persona, creating a Persona can be defined as profiling a person with what his/her buying interests and motivations are.

Is Persona applicable only in one context?

No. Not at all. A sense of classifying who will buy or not buy, what behavioral characteristics motivate someone to buy/ not buy a given Product, has been part of many contexts. A persona insight is valuable in Marketing in all contexts.

What are the various contexts that are relevant in the realm of E-Commerce/Retail?

Context 1: Defining Target Addressable Market (TAM) with help of Market Research

• When Persona creation is done before a New Product Introduction, this exercise will be a part of the Market Research activity.
• Typically, high-value products or big companies invest in this area, to be able to get a hold of TAM (Total Addressable Market – All population who may buy your product).
• Typically, persona in this context is established by the form of personal interviews, surveys etc.,

Context 2: During Marketing Ad Campaign, in Identifying a Segmented Addressable Market.

• The outputs from the Market Research exercise in defining TAM will be used to create Marketing Ad campaigns to generate Prospects.
• A Persona defined at this level becomes a more precise exercise that will help with high Customer conversion.
• This will help in maximizing the revenue potential from your SAM – Segmented Addressable Market.
• This is where the Persona creation exercise is mostly missing currently in many businesses.

Context 3: Sales and Marketing: SOM (Share Of your Market)

• The outputs from the Marketing Ad Campaigns in identifying the Segmented Addressable Market, will be used to create targeted campaigns for up-sell, cross-sell, and customer retention. A further refined customer persona is arrived at. This helps in targeting the right set of your existing customers with
  • what they would want to see/know about your product(s)
  • what will motivate them to buy again (repeat purchase)
    • or buy a different product category (cross-sell)
    • or buy more of related SKUs of their favorite product category (upsell)?

What context are we talking about today?

If we assume that every organization does some minimal Market Research efforts to build their TAM for their strategic play, we can drill down into Marketing Ad campaigns for the generation of Prospects and targeting existing Customers for repeat purchases. (Refer to Context 2 and 3 in the above diagram). Let’s call it the Marketing tactical zone for Sales boosts due to Customer conversion or retention.

There is a lot of opportunities for E-Commerce/Retail to adopt advanced techniques of deep learning algorithms, that help with clustering your customer base into personas that matter to your business. These algorithms are driven by the lessons learned from your Customer purchase history, drawing the deeply hidden patterns, appending rich attributes, and identifying behavioral and motivational patterns, that are dynamically created as the data changes. Predictive Marketing Cloud solutions like VectorScient can enable the creation of personas in all the contexts discussed above.

In the next blog, let’s expand further on the specifics of Persona building using some examples.

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