Harnessing Business Data to Create Marketing Personas

The use of Marketing Personas has grown considerably in recent times.  The fundamental idea is to create detailed, segmented definitions of the customer or member groups that comprise a customer or member base.  This is done to facilitate market understanding, analysis and action.

Personas can include characteristics such as age, education, gender, years as a member or customer, along with purchase preference activity and frequency.  Often Personas are given “names” to make them more human.  This can help everyone “visualize” a customer persona.

Personas help marketing and sales teams have a uniform understanding of the variety of individuals and organizations in their customer base and to more precisely create and focus marketing communications and product offerings to help retain, develop and grow relationships.

The data used to develop Personas must come from a variety of sources.  One essential data source is an organization’s internal data, including customer and member relationship data and transaction data.  It is of utmost importance to be able to harness this data and evaluate it to discern the characteristics that affect customer behavior.

Harnessing internal data for Marketing Persona creation involves 3 steps:

1. Identify all pertinent internal data resources, including any CRM, Member Relationship data system, website, order, billing and usage systems.
2. Organize this data into an ongoing Data Framework with customer/member data facts as well as derived transaction data.  Develop transaction data over time, to help determine attrition.  Keep this Data Framework up-to-date. 
3. Determine characteristics and attributes that indicate and correlate to behavior.  Several data tools are available to help determine correlations between and among data characteristics.  One effective database tool that can be used to create correlated analysis clusters is Microsoft Analysis Services.  Analysis Services is available as part of Microsoft’s SQL Server product.

If you would like to learn how to build a Data Framework for Marketing Persona development, analysis and action steps, please let us know.  Also, we would be pleased to show you how to use Microsoft Analysis Services clustering for Marketing Persona development.