• by Hellena Marsh , March 15, 2016

Even big brands struggle with personalised customer communications. They traditionally divide their customer base into age-old personas -- the student, the small business owner, the family man, etc. - this leaves them unable to market to them with relevant, timely content. Steve the family man might have two kids and be in his mid-forties, and he might slot nicely into one of your persona brackets, but if that's the extent of your brand’s understanding of Steve, then you're going to struggle to sell to him in future.

To make things worse, these personas are often reinforced by self-referencing. Rather than analysing data on their customers, marketing teams can be guilty of over-generalizing personas based on their own experiences.

And to top it off, marketers often base communications on out-of-date customer data; but people and their needs change: Steve was in his mid-forties… but now he's fifty, his kids are at university and he wants to travel the world. All of which makes a big difference to what, how and when brands should market to him.

Brands can overcome natural bias by continuously learning about their audiences. Building a 360-degree customer view that is automatically updated with real-time data ensures properly segmented, profitable personas. A more detailed view of each customer enables marketers to engage in predictive propensity modeling, establishing what each individual customer will buy, when they will buy it and how much they will spend over the course of their lifetime. It also helps marketing teams understand which personas are worth the most.

Not all customers are created equal, and to make the most of your marketing budget you need to target the ones who are most likely to spend the most. If a persona doesn’t have the potential to be profitable you should either change your approach or minimize investment in that specific group.

For example, by developing a better understanding of the marketing channels their customers were likely to respond to, and modeling purchasing behavior based on similar customers’ spending habits, we helped Honda predict the next model of car a prospect would purchase with an 80% level of accuracy. This information enabled the manufacturer to send its customers targeted communications and information on offers that were relevant to them, boosting sales as a result.

After all, if you know which vehicle a young family is most likely to buy you can market the car by focusing on the features they would find most beneficial -- e.g., doors that open 90 degrees so that you can get a car seat in with ease, and a convex rear-view mirror that lets you keep an eye on the kids as well as the road.

Personas need to focus more on the customer as an individual. Real-time relevant data from online and offline sources should be automatically be pumped into 360 degree customer view databases. Ensuring you’re sourcing the right data, and providing it to the right people in your organization so they can seamlessly interact with customers, on a one-to-one basis, at the right time and in the right ways, will be key to increasing profitability in 2016 and beyond.