There’s a lot of focus at the moment about who brands should be talking to – but can data inform these decisions and drive our brands’ marketing personas? I believe it can and, more importantly, it doesn’t have to be a daunting task – if you know where to look. The secret is aggregated data.
Google Analytics holds a wide range of demographic data. Want to know if women spend more time using your app than men? The age groups that are most prevalent among your visitors? It’s all there. And, by understanding who visits your site and who buys or downloads your product or signs up to your service, you can start shaping your main personas.
Similarly, Facebook’s app library provides anonymised demographic data for free, plus you can search deeper with Facebook Analytics for Apps, which has a wealth of information. This is important because tracking social media engagement allows you to go even deeper into who your users are. Those who engage the most on one platform may not necessarily do so on another. Likewise, engagement might not necessarily represent revenue.
Once a user has signed up or downloaded something from you, that user becomes a data point. The more data you have, the more you can start shaping that initial persona sketch.
A customer analytics platform such as GoSquared allows you to clearly see your user’s behaviours – from which actions they have made before they convert to which features of your product or service they use the most. You can also quickly understand who is more likely to convert, who is more likely to make a repeat purchase and who are your most loyal users.
Now that you have been generating ideas of who your users are and cross-checked them across multiple channels and tools, your personas are clearer than ever. You can further validate them with even more data from other sources, perform qualitative research such as focus groups or user interviews, or start using them right away.
At Urban Massage, our personas have been defined by our data. We have also used more traditional qualitative research methodologies. However, it’s the information we gather from every visit and every booking that allows us to stay up to date with our audience’s needs, make user-centric design decisions, create targeted marketing campaigns and optimise conversion.