Many marketing agencies develop customer “personas” - profiles of typical customers for clients in order to better understand them so that they can sell more of their clients’ products. They may be developed using segmentation systems, such as Claritas, derived from research using customer surveys, or some other traditional method.
While these personas are often interesting, they quickly lose traction with moving a client’s business forward. Creative teams tend to want to focus on one audience, so you choose one profile or combine them, watering them down. Media teams are often perplexed as to how to reach people in the profile because media is not set up to target people described in the profiles. The result is that expensive research becomes diminished in campaign execution that more often than not, generates diminished results.
What makes customer personas actionable.
If you want to make customer personas - or segments - actionable, you have to start with the premise of having both the ability to execute on multiple segments together with a clear, simple targeting methodology. This means that the research or segmentation system has to be designed from the ground up to solve these two requirements.
AI is now solving for executing creative for multiple segments by bringing language models to the table that jump start content. Without AI, developing creative for multiple segments is daunting, time consuming, and expensive. But in order for AI to help solve this problem, it has to provide not just creative content - it has to deliver content aligned with a segmentation system. In other words, customer insights - embedded in personas - must inform segmented creative.
To inform media plans and optimizations, profiles must also come with clear targeting criteria, which is rarely the case. The challenge is that increasing privacy concerns are doing away with the most effective targeting of the past. Third-party cookies or any other use of market PII is evaporating because it opens up liability.
A strong solution has to rely on a more simple approach, which today is best solved by looking at groups of people with distinct values, which are embedded in segments and personas, as well as simple geographic targeting.
AI Makes Customer Personas Actionable.
Lifemind delivers on these requirements by helping you see the marketing your agency teams create through the personal values customers use to make purchase decisions. These values are encoded in 41,000 zip codes to enable precise targeting. AI brings it all together - rapidly identifying the strongest segments, creating content aligned with each segment, and providing targeting that is immediately actionable by media teams. In minutes, you can have a faster, better, and less expensive segmentation strategy with personas that you can leverage in your marketing right now.
