Very few small companies have an identified target customer segment. They are not aware of why they get some business and lose others. There is no possible way to calculate the ROI of their marketing campaigns.
The first step is to identify a clear target and build a customer persona. However, most of the customer persona tools, including the one provided by Hubspot, focus too much on demographics. A sample persona sheet for a retail chain read:
32% of the customers are Graduates.
67% are married and have two kids.
They are in the age group of 35-45.
They shop in the evening on working days and during the day on weekends.
There were other details. However, the challenge is how do we draw any inference from this information?
I hung around this place one of the evenings. Here is one of my observations:
A woman walked into the store with two kids - a five-year-old and the other must be around two. The woman was carrying the toddler while the elder one walked beside her. She had a hard time picking up the provisions. She put the young kid on the top of the trolley while the elder one was busy picking all sorts of stuff from the rack and putting it in their trolley. The woman had to put them back again. She must be health conscious. She read labels for their contents before putting them in her shopping cart. It seemed like she was a working woman and would have apparently picked up the kids from the daycare on her way back from the office.
There were several ways of making her buying experience a little more comfortable. Here is a partial list:
Daycare facilities at the place.
Separate section for healthy foods and labels with better visibility.
More checkout counters.
But none of this is possible with lame numbers captured in the customer persona. These numbers do not reveal the experience, challenges, aspirations, and choices of the customers. The buyer journey and the ethnographic study are great tools to aid us in understanding them.
What applies to the customer persona is true of most of the business data we present. So, take your customer personas, discard the numbers and focus on the story they conceal. Make the numbers speak.
Subodh Gadgil
May 20, 2022
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