It’s not enough to create buyer personas and leave them getting dusty on the shelf. Find out how to apply customer personas to inform each stage of your marketing strategy
What are marketing personas?
Customer or buyer personas are fictional people who represent target customer segments. Personas are used by marketing teams to segment and target key demographic, psychographic, and behavioural traits of their target audiences.
The term ‘user personas’ is also commonly applied when analyzing particular online users’ behaviours, such as website experience (CX, UX) or in response to marketing automation (e.g. email or mobile campaigns).
Why create customer personas?
By researching and creating customer personas, we as marketers, managers, and business owners can gain valuable insights into our buyers’ preferences, motivations, pain points, and online behaviours.
Persona-based marketing techniques enable businesses to tailor their digital marketing campaigns and always-on…
Discover how to use our customer journey mapping template to create actionable insights to improve your marketing
In today’s digitally connected world, customers have a myriad of choices when it comes to connecting with brands and businesses. There are many benefits to this, such as greater reach and more touchpoints to connect with customers, but there are also some drawbacks. When looking at customer journeys, there is rarely only one route available, making understanding how your customers find and interact with you more challenging.
Consider the London tube map. Let’s say you want to get to Oxford Circus. You know you can always get the Central (red) line, but you could also get the Bakerloo (brown) line or the Victoria (blue) line, depending on where you are coming from. Each journey is slightly different, and will give you a particular type of experience.
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Your ultimate guide to creating a user journey map with step-by-step instructions, a template, and an example to follow
Creating a user journey map has many benefits for both your users and your team. A journey map will help you discover friction points for the user and opportunities to improve user experience. Ultimately, you’ll discover opportunities to increase engagement and build customer loyalty.
The process of creating a user journey map will help foster team alignment, clarify priorities and surface opportunities for increased revenue or saved customer service costs. Creating a journey map means that you’re prioritizing user experience as a means to create long-term value.
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Template to use
Don’t be intimidated by the thought of jumping straight into creating your user journey map. Starting with a blank…
Techniques for mapping your digital customer journeys across different touchpoints with the RACE Framework
Understanding your customer and how they interact with your business, directly and indirectly, is critical in driving improved value, repeat business, and longevity (and value) of your relationship. That's why you need a digital customer journey example.
Digital customer journey mapping helps you create a communication strategy that builds a conversation with your customers. Following your digital customers' journies helps you visualize current and planned customer journeys and the key touchpoints across different marketing channels.
So, where do you start when looking at your business and the journey a customer takes in the initial phases of a decision-making process and in follow-up phases as the relationship builds?
Using the RACE Framework to create digital customer journey examples
Our popular RACE Framework gives marketers a solid structure upon which to base their market research, customer experience (CX) analysis, customer journey mapping -…
10 ways to segment website visitors using Google Analytics
When I work on E-commerce projects to identify methods to increase conversion, I always start with a structured analysis of the current effectiveness of customer journeys for different segments, using Google Analytics to help identify potential improvements to site page templates to test.
Segments are powerful since they help you isolate and compare different traffic sources, so in the screengrab below we have selected organic traffic to just find out how these visitors behave, for example, which landing pages do they arrive on?
Note that to encourage usage of Advanced Segments, Google renamed them a couple of years ago to 'Segments' in order to make them less scary and encourage adoption amongst GA users who don't see themselves as advanced.
A key part of this approach is to go beyond the…
Personas, Journey mapping, AB testing, VoC or NPS: Which Digital Marketing Optimization techniques do you use?
Our latest research on Digital Marketing Optimization demonstrates there is a major challenge for many marketers of creating integrated strategies and communications plans with less than a fifth of businesses using a structured, continuous approach.
From a customer point-of-view there is also likely to be a poor experience if their customer journeys are unclear or restricted by the inability of brands to integrate their communications and experiences.
Customer Journey Optimization
Since improving your customer journey can be one of the most effective ways to boost online leads and sales, we asked respondents which analysis techniques their businesses were using to research and improve the effectiveness of their customer journey.
Digital Marketing Optimization - What's hot?
You can see that A/B testing, customer personas and customer journey mapping have become…
A single bad review can have a huge impact on your business, which is why customer service is key. A customer journey map can help improve conversion
Are you facing issues while trying to provide a stellar customer experience? The onus is on the businesses to rectify this situation quickly because customer experience has been a cornerstone of business since the very beginning. However, today, the business landscape is growing increasingly competitive. Businesses are doing more than ever to get customers' attention than ever before.
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Not so long ago, the need or want for a product meant we were supposed to drive miles to get to a brick and mortar store to spend hours looking for the desired product. From test driving…
Showing how integrating personalisation and automation can deliver a more personal experience
Long gone are the days when a website was a 'one size fits all' online brochure. Now your web presence needs to play a fundamental role not just in reaching prospects, but also leading them through a personalised customer journey toward conversion to customers and long-term engagement.
According to Econsultancy, 77% of companies are currently planning to increase their digital marketing spend in 2016. Whilst 38% of companies are focussed most heavily on acquisition, 62% recognise that retention is either as important or more important. It’s vital to remember that getting visitors to a website through acquisition tools is an expensive exercise if you don’t also successfully convert the customer and grow your customer equity. Estimates of how much it costs to acquire a new customer vary wildly from the conservative 3 times to an eye-watering…
Optimising and connecting customer touch points
Marketing expert Dr. Jeffrey Lant, says that in order to penetrate a consumer’s consciousness with your brand, and to make significant penetration in a given market, you have to make contact with the prospect a minimum of seven times. These seven “touch points” don’t have to be dedicated sales outreach, but refer to the different ways consumers interact with your brand: browsing your mobile site, for example is a touch point, as is receiving a flyer or trawling through your social channels.
Although this “Rule of Seven” is not absolute, it gives marketers an idea of the kind of effort and variety it takes to make an impression on a potential customer.
With the dawn of the digital age, the numerous channels and devices available for interaction mean that optimising each consumer touch point is more important than ever. It has…
A process for content mapping and workflow
I've posted a few weeks ago on marketing automation and also this week on lead nurturing, the concept is reliant on having great content at each and every stage, so I thought a post might offer some further insight. It's also easier than you think, a relatively simple and practical process that can be tested and improved upon over time.
What exactly is content mapping?
Content mapping is (amongst other things) a process for lead nurturing by which a team prepares and organises relevant and valuable content. Once done, this content can be distributed to prospects depending on the type of lead (persona) and their point in the buying cycle (scenario).
Create and map content that generates buyers
Persona definition - you'll already understand your personas from my last posts - once again Im stressing how effective persona definition is key, otherwise how do you…
