How to Apply Segment Personas in Your Marketing Strategy

In the marketing world, everyone is talking about customer segmentation and customer personas. If you are a beginner in marketing strategies, then chances are, you might not be aware that they are different from each other. Every organization creates audience segments to find out their potential customers and maintain their interest. This helps them create a successful website or application for the growth of the business. But to learn about user segment personas, you will have to begin with other aspects of the subject that creates the need for customer segmentation. Let’s find out those aspects now.

Introduction to Personas and Market Segmentation

Both personas and market segmentation have the same mission: to help you understand your target audience so that you can create effective marketing plans. However, personas and market segmentation are different from each other. 

With market segmentation, you can identify your target audience based on a wide commodity such as geographical location, profession, marital status, etc. But with personas, you can represent a particular person within a segment. Market segmentation is the best way to plan high-level marketing strategies. But personas are more useful in managing daily operations. First, you will have to find out your market segments and then use personas on those segments to identify individual users more accurately. 

How to Create a Well-Defined Market Segmentation?

With market segmentation, you can find out the two most important marketing strategies:

You can establish the availability of a particular market segment such as married women, students, retail store owners, etc. so that you know which audience to target for your business. Or you can find information about their needs, buying preferences, lifestyles, etc. so that you can spread your marketing campaigns more effectively. For example, to married women, you are providing organized items, to students, you are providing cheap items, and so on. Typically, a well-researched and accurate marketing segmentation strategy will help you divide your target audience into more specific segments based on their priorities, daily needs, interests, etc.

Examples of Market Segmentation

There are various ways to conduct market segmentation. You can perform them by-products or services requirements, by price perceptiveness, geographic area, demographic segment, lifestyles, or psychographics. However, if you want to create a successful market segmentation strategy, then try to combine all three into your market segmentation method.

What Do You Do with Market Segmentation Data?

With market segmentation, you can determine the size of your target audience and what they can avail of from your business. You will have to make sure that the portion of your audience is big enough to carry out market segmentation campaigns. And then you will have to divide these audiences into personas so that you can collect more accurate data to target the target audience and promote your marketing campaigns. 

How to Use Market Segmentation to Create Personas?

Creating personas will only be possible once you have found out specific target audience based on market segmentation. Personas are more detailed than segmentations because they target the individual needs of your users so that you can provide more accurate products to them. Here is how you can create personas with the help of segmentation:

How to Create Personas?

Personas are useful in programming your application and user interface. They help you create a program that serves one particular user with great satisfaction. When you are posting and advertising something on Facebook, you will have to make sure that the content is beneficial for the target user. You will have to gather the person’s data and create the persona and they should also be related to the kind of marketing campaign you are creating. Personas are mainly based on a user’s personal life and they can be specific. For example, if you are creating a streaming site like Netflix, then you will have to find out what type of continent a particular user likes to watch. You can gain this insight by observing their search activities, streaming activities, and more. Once you create the personas, there are multiple steps to apply them to your segmentation.

3 Steps to Involving the Personas to Market Segments

Now you have spent a considerate amount of time creating personas and you have put them in a category. You have written out all the details of the personas, and everything related to them. However, the next step is to apply these personas in the marketplace. You will have to use the technology to create personas and then assign these personas with a segment. Here are the steps to do it:

1: Map the Personas to Segments

The marketing team creates a set of personas to understand the customers. These personas are detailed and contain data about the customers’ purchase history, motivators, pain points, and so on. But you can make the personas workable by mapping them to the segments. You can collect personas by asking the customers their personal preferences by creating quizzes, surveys, etc. This will also help you create progressive profiles for each customer to create more leads for your business. 

2: Create Segments According to the Attributes

Create a scoring method by determining the demographic and behavioral attributes such as geography, company size, industry, seniority level, event attendance, website engagement, etc. For example, if the personas you created are focused more on making some quick money in a week, then offer them an article on making quick money in several ways. Many massive organizations tend to create robust and complex segment scoring systems. You can first determine the buying stage and then the investment plan needed for a certain type of interaction such as attending an invitation. And after that, you can create segment scores.

3: Apply the Personas and Segments to Your Marketing Campaigns

After creating both market segments and personas, it’s time to apply them to your marketing strategy. Here are the channels where you can apply this information to create marketing campaigns:

• Email marketing is a great way to provide personalized content to a group of users. You can easily set up email marketing messages and deliver them to the customers using Mailchimp, Marketo, etc.

• You can use content syndication to blend the intent data with attributes and your company name. This will help the target customers find out about your business through research and will create more engagement and eventually conversions.

• Creating ads is also a huge part of the marketing strategy. You can target your audience on Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Google, etc. If you spread your campaigns throughout multiple channels, this will help more of your target customers to find you easily.

While creating and applying personas on segmentations, you will have to keep several things in mind.

Tips for Creating Personas

While creating personas, you should remember to update them frequently because personas change along with cultural shifts, industry competition, and more. To update your personas, you will have to keep in touch with the customers constantly and for that, you can take help from social forums, groups, additional research, etc. Customer segmentation is not subject to change but personas will, based on various industrial impacts that change a user’s behavioral attributes. Take a note of these recommendations while creating personas based on segments:

• Encourage your business partners and employees to include someone they know in the personas. This way, you will think about them while creating a product and this will boost your brand image.

• Conduct workshops to learn about the personas on a personal level.

• Create names of the personas depending on their personal interests. For example, if you are creating a persona of your uncle and his name is John who likes to cook, create, “John’s cooking recipes”.

• Don’t include any kind of gender-biased stereotyping because they don’t come up as strong. This might offend your customers if you are designing a site solely for women under 30 years of age.

Conclusion: What to Do With Personas?

Personas are created using segments and can help you with a wide range of data based on someone’s personal interests. This will not only help you create products and market to them but also build user engagement and more conversation. Just when you collect the personas, make sure to add details to the profiles with computed traits and metrics. You can also create a list of users that match certain criteria. For example, put all the inactive users into one group so that you can use analysis tools to create more marketing plans. With the help of market segmentation and personas, you can easily boost your conversion rate and create a better brand image in the industry.