At the simplest level, segments and personas are generalizations representing groups of individuals. The primary difference between the two is that personas attempt to resolve a group generalization into a relatable character, into someone that has a name, a face, qualities that are recognizably human.
Conversely, segments are homogeneous groups that are often profiled across a common set of characteristics. Understanding how each segment indexes on any given characteristic gives marketers tools to understand how segments differ. These differences provide a solid foundation to develop segment strategies to increase the rate of engagement with customers and prospects – and turn leads into closed deals.
Business Relevance and AI
Using segmentation for market sizing is an intelligence tool that helps business leaders understand their addressable market for any given product or initiative. Segments and personas also provide the foundation for developing new products and their appeal to different types of consumers by understanding coherence of interests and demand throughout a market.
On the brand front, both segments and personas can map the emotional landscape of different parts of the market, helping marketers and brand teams customize messaging to appeal to specific groups, creating greater resonance and campaign effectiveness. In essence, both segmentations and personas give marketers the insights needed to effectively target specific groups within any given market.
Current AI-driven solutions leverage new data sources and go a step further than conventional solutions because they make it possible to build individualized targeting algorithms that bring the right message or product to the right individual – rather than generalize a solution for a group. This has led to a new era of hyper-personalization that makes dynamic adaptation to changing market conditions possible. AI-driven segmentation and personas access the enormous digital assets of a social media and CRM-driven world. This makes AI-driven solutions more scalable and dynamically updatable. More importantly, the advent of AI solutions means that scalable solutions can readily transition from group to individual-level personalization, quickly.
An Example
Markets are not homogeneous, so delivering a more effective program means targeting the right message to the right group of people. This means identifying the type and level of interest in a new or existing product offering among different groups of people, and knowing how best to communicate the product’s value proposition to each group. Take a client’s specific use case as an example, there were two main goals they wanted to achieve:
- Increase ROAS (Return on Advertising Spend)
- Increase conversion rate for sales team
The First Step
Believe it or not, the first thing we do is start with words. Specifically, brand and product descriptions that include unique characteristics and all of the dimensions that convey value and meaning. Following the brand/product descriptions we help clients break the process down into key elements that impact the conversion process:
- Triggers: phrases or words that connect people to your brand or products, emotionally or rationally.
- Events: Phrases or words that represent events that are relevant for marketing initiatives or indicate potential sales opportunities.
- Targets: Phrases or words that represent types of individuals or groups that are relevant for marketing initiatives or indicate potential sales opportunities.
These elements are loaded into Wrench’s AI platform, followed by a list of contacts (we do this through a CSV upload or an API integration) – this initiates the automated persona and segmentation builder.
The Results
Believe it or not, the first thing we do is start with words. Specifically, brand and product descriptions that include unique characteristics and all of the dimensions that convey value and meaning. Following the brand/product descriptions we help clients break the process down into key elements that impact the conversion process:
Triggers: phrases or words that connect people to your brand or products, emotionally or rationally.
Events: Phrases or words that represent events that are relevant for marketing initiatives or indicate potential sales
The builder assigns contacts to one of seven standard segments based on their product or brand disposition. At Wrench, we use the adoption curve methodology that provides a framework for understanding who is more likely to adopt a product or brand, what is the dominant personality of the individuals within each group, and what are the persuasion techniques that will be most effective.
- Innovator: A small number of people demonstrating the greatest affinity with a product or brand category and signaling a familiarity and a more sophisticated understanding of the category.
- Influencers: Whether they be celebrities or content creators, are a small number of individuals who have some affinity with the category; but what distinguishes them is their significant social media presence.
- Early adopters: Have some familiarity with the category and can be viewed as following innovators in category adoption. While more common than innovators this group is generally smaller than Early Majority or Late Adopter groups.
- The remaining groups show relatively lesser affinity with the category and generally taper in numbers as one gets closer to the Laggards, who are the slowest to adopt and generally have fewer numbers than either Early Majority or Later Adopter.
The seven groups, defined by their tendency for category adoption, provide a basic tableau from which marketers can overlay metrics on triggers, events and targets. An accompanying report provides demographic and interest estimates for each segment.
How to Use Results
The conventional way marketers use the automated persona reports is to inform their creative and campaign strategy and process for each segment profile. This means using the way personas over index on any triggers, events or targets to inform a marketing initiative (this could also include sales development outreach) that is likely to “move the needle”. A detailed description of the dominant personality and persuasion techniques also provide important inputs into campaign design.
However, the automated personas also provide marketers with a methodology that extends beyond market intelligence. Each valid uploaded record contains a persona label, personality label, persuasion approaches and all their brand related scores. This information at the individual record level gives marketers a wide range of options.
Just One Use Case
A simple example is when a marketer uses the information for all contacts assigned to a persona for input into a social media campaign. This can be handled as look-alike data to be uploaded in any of the conventional social media platforms as a targeting parameter for a campaign. This can be customized so the marketer may take a smaller persona that meets their marketing goals and increase the size of the persona list by adding those individuals with high scores on selected characteristics. Alternatively, a marketer can completely customize their look-alike by using all those with the same personality, or having a particular combination of scores.
In the case of direct marketing, the record level scoring means that anything suggested above can be tailored for precision targeting. For example, an email campaign can target subgroups within a persona by using trigger scores to create content specifically for that trigger and the contacts within that subgroup.
Interested in learning more? Please reach out to a member of our team; we are happy to answer any questions you have.
