Digital Personalisation – The Revolution is upon us! Part I, developing Personas

Summary

  • Understand the key first steps in developing a digital personalisation strategy
  • Know more about your customers and their needs
  • Convert more customers by delivering relevant content to them
  • Throw away your product benefit sheets and design your messages around your customer, not your company

Introduction

According to recent Gartner research, 80% of CMOs are not ready for the next big step in digital experience management. Digital personalisation is here. With the technology getting cheaper more and more organisations are taking note. By personalising your customers’ digital journey you can achieve better conversion rates and more leads and sales. But it’s not easy. You need not only the right technology but also the right strategy behind it. This article explores the first strategic steps you need to deliver relevant, personalised user journeys.

Throw away your product benefit sheets. No-one cares apart from you!

1.     Develop user personas

User personas are more important now than ever, having a deep understanding of what your users, customers or buyers core challenges are will allow you to build marketing messaging that helps to solve them. Technology allows you to personalise users’ experience and opens new possibilities for marketers. Accurate B2B user personas help you tailor content to users, increasing leads and conversion and ensuring that your Content Management System achieves a good RoI.

Your User persona is so much more than just a list of job titles, you have to get under the skin of your user, and discover what is aspirational, from what is achievable. You need to look at every aspect of your target personas professional life, by having this understanding you can increase conversion rates by delivering relevant content to them. If your content does not fulfil a need then the user is less likely to engage with you.

Digital Personalisation

Fig 1 – Persona Matrix

Figure 1 details the core elements that you should be looking at when developing your user personas. Some personas are more complex than others, it really depends how complex your proposition is.

By developing these personas you can then start to build your marketing messaging around the customer, what their initiatives are, what is success for them etc.

It is normally good practice to develop these in line with the account handlers and customers respectively, this will help to certify better conversion rates when you come to build your messaging.

Next week I will be examining how to plot an interactive user journey.

You can read the whole series by filling out the form below

[Form id=”19″]