New Marketing Approach: Segmentation & Persona Development

The essence of successful marketing lies in simply dividing your market into meaningful customer groups (segmenting), choosing the customer groups to serve (targeting), create offerings that best serve the group (differentiating) and occupying a place in the customer’s minds (positioning). This needs to happen as a continuum for which understanding your customer is key.

Understanding your customers can sometimes be difficult but marketers can significantly improve their customer approach if they incorporate the right kind of segmentation. However, most companies need to go beyond traditional s e g m e n t a t i o n categories and base their segmentation to include prospect roles, needs, problems, preferences, motivation, etc.

By applying customer centric segmentation criteria and principles of scenario design, marketers can develop communication strategies that resonate with specific business challenges and real life-cycle issues.

A New Approach

Traditionally, companies segment their customers on criteria like company size, industry and geography, which serve a limited purpose. Unfortunately, with this approach, it is difficult to understand and align benefits as marketing messages with buyer pain points or purchase cycle stages.

There are approaches where consumer marketing companies use analytics to mine transactional and behavioural data and spot differences that pure demographics do not uncover.

This is then supplemented to understand customers’ subjective desires, refine marketing communication strategy and create messages that speak to individual customer needs. A new term—‘persona’ development (coined and researched by Forrester Research Inc)—is making its way into the industrial marketer’s vocabulary. This can help identify marketing methods & messages that can be applied segmentally relating to buyer pain points and their buying process. Because of the complex and often protracted nature of capital buying decisions, machine tool marketers have trouble tracking/building personas of customers.

Tracking/Building Customers’ ‘Persona’

• Improve segmentation by taking both the top down and bottom up approaches and including behavioural, attitudinal and aspirational aspects of customers
• Consider the existing segmentation data, analyse the current segmentation approaches & combine the internal quantitative data available with qualitative insights by interviewing customers to get attitudinal and behavioural insights. (Why do business with me? What value do I add?) Use professional interviewing and observational expertise.
• Refine customer segmentation approach to analyse who the contacts are, the role they play in buying, the reason they are buying and the stage of buying process they are at
• Invest in technology to improve data collection, analysis and retrieving processes.
• Finally, set clear goals for segmentation & persona development like improving lead quality, increasing sales efficiency, decreasing sales cycle time, etc. These goals and metrics should initiate segmentation and persona development projects.

(TK Ramesh, CEO, Micromatic Machine Tools Pvt Ltd)