In today’s competitive market, you can’t afford to make your “best guess” about how to reach your customers. Big data can give you the information you need to create, analyze, and connect with your customer personas.
Perception Versus Reality: Defining Your Target Audience
You’ve got a lot on your plate, so it’s easy to fall back on some of your original, and often incomplete, perceptions of your customer base. However, buying habits change over the years, so even your best customer surveys and focus groups can quickly become obsolete. Targeted strategy and content that misses the mark wastes time, money, and opportunity. This is where the beauty of big data comes in – with objective, consistent, and automated data always at your fingertips. Numbers, of course, don’t lie. They point to a customer persona just waiting to be reached.
Big League Big Data
Several categories of big data can be mined from analytics. Here are a few of the most important sources you can analyze when developing your customer personas:
Google Analytics: Nearly every customer begins the shopping experience online. Google Analytics is an important tool that can provide information about demographics, such as the age, gender, and location of your buyers. Analytics also points to the types of devices customers use to access your site, along with their searching patterns. Are they using desktop or mobile? Which pages do they visit first, what content brings them to your site, and where do most conversions take place?
Social Media: What are your customers sharing and discussing? You can mine valuable quantitative information, such as demographics, from analyzing posting habits on Facebook and Twitter. Qualitative data, such as trending topics, can also help you hone your approach. Even images on Instagram and brief mentions on Tumblr can reveal a lot about your target audience.
Machine-Generated Data: We’re a society on the go, and machines know how to keep track. How can you use data derived from sensors, mobile, transportation, and computer logs to reach your audience?
Traditional Business Systems: Your customers may not always think about the trail of information they leave behind when ordering, purchasing, and registering products. However, these transactional records–and the patterns they reveal in your customers’ habits in the world of e-commerce–can help you refine your target customer persona.
Big Data and Customer Personas
Forming a customer persona based on big data analysis will help you target your marketing strategies and content creation. Does your data show that your customers skew younger than you originally thought? Perhaps you will want to modify your presence on social media channels. Are you a local business trying to build a following in your community? Geo-targeted SEO can bring them to your door.
Big Data? Big Job
It’s clear that today’s SMB business owner must make those crucial connections between big data and customer personas. However, finding the time and resources, including staff, to take on this task can be a challenge. Managed or On Demand IT services can offer you the time, insight, and peace of mind that a one-stop big data shop can provide.
Ready to make big data work for you? Contact us to learn more about data mining and how to use big data to better target your customer personas.
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