Blog

Segmentation and Persona Building With MarTech

September 4, 2018 Author: Mario X. Carrasco

MarTech has traditionally focused on the execution of marketing and advertising campaigns. Whether it is DSPs, DMPs, content marketing, acquisition, etc., MarTech stacks concentrate on the implementation of marketing campaigns. However, as MarTech data becomes more diverse, there is an opportunity to help on the front-end of marketing campaigns—through segmentation and persona building—enabling marketing strategists to create more holistic pictures of their target consumers and ultimately increase marketing ROI on the backend.

What is segmentation and persona building?

Customer Segmentation is the practice of grouping sets of similar people (customers or potential customers) based on distinct needs or characteristics. Segments are typically developed through large-scale market research and defined using demographic information like age, ethnicity, or location. Segments can also be created using psychographic and behavioral information like interests, opinions, values, lifestyle, or lifestage. Customer segments don’t provide insights into a specific consumer, but rather groups of consumers within a broader marketplace. These groups can help marketers differentiate between the different types of customers that exist and the interests of those customer groups.

Personas are fabricated characters created by marketers to approximate real customers. They are generated based on profiles, which include demographic information collected through research of real people. These profiles are meant to be a direct representation of a customer cohort that shares similar values, behaviors, and aspirations. Personas begin with basic profiles, but then are given names, faces, personalities, and families, to paint a more vibrant picture of what that person would want and need in real life. Personas add the emotional and behavioral component to marketing—the more human element. Once complete, personas can help determine need state or end goal for a particular consumer, so that your brand knows how to target them precisely and what messages or calls to action will resonate with them.

How MarTech Enables Segmentation and Persona Building

Both customer segmentation and persona building rely on a wide variety of data sets ranging from first-party survey data, qualitative focus groups, purchase data, behavioral data, and online tracking data. Segmentation and personas have historically been built from one or maybe two data sets. With the advent of MarTech and big data processing technologies, segmentation and persona building has entered a new era. With the ability to combine a massive amount of data from different sources, MarTech enables segmentation models and personas to extend beyond simplistic views of consumers to robust frameworks that combine the best of segmentation and persona building in an instant.

This powerful segmentation and persona hybrid has infinite potential for marketing and brand strategists willing to jump into the MarTech world for their research needs. Gone are the days of having to wade through multiple syndicated reports, client data, and click data to build segments and personas. MarTech tools such as ThinkNow ConneKt combine first-party, behavioral, and custom data to enable strategists to create segments and personas that allow marketers to hyper-target users in a fragmented media environment.

This blog post was originally published on MARTECHCUBE