Marketing Personas for the Modern World

Being we live in a world of vast amounts of data, we are no longer confined to viewing our target audiences through the lens of outdated marketing personas. Instead, we have data on our audience behavior at our finger tips in real-time.

By scoring these behaviors, you can understand how certain types of content, and actions taken by users on your website, drive conversions. More on user scoring from Ellen – Analytics team Sr. Analyst – in her blog post here.

Segmenting Audiences by their Behaviors

Say your construction company has 2 primary audiences for the website: Field Workers and Sales Managers.

User scoring can help you understand what people are looking for from your website so you can come up with strategies to find ways to give it to them.

Using this example, our actionable data analysis may find that Field Workers visit the website to apply for job openings. While it’s the Sales Managers who want to learn more about the company by reading reviews, exploring Services, and downloading project success stories.

Traditional Marketing Personas

• “Family Field Workers” persona
  • Field Workers ages 34-55 who live in rural and suburban US cities – typically married homeowners with 2-3 children
  • Hard working and dedicated to their family, they value family time over work any day
• “Go Getter Sales Managers” persona
  • Sales Managers ages 25-34 who live in the city unmarried with no kids
  • Loves closing a deal and getting the job done when they come across any new opportunity

Although this information helps for context into our audiences everyday lives, it doesn’t necessarily drive any decision-making.

User scoring counts the actual actions taken on the site by all users in a given period. We’re then able to analyze how each persona acts on the website and determine what type of content they view prior to conversion.

Behavior Driven Personas

1. “Sales Managers” behavior driven persona
   1. View more than 2 About pages in their initial sessions – Organic and Paid Search are highest drivers. Once they’ve come across the website, visitation becomes more frequent. As they get closer to sealing a deal, they visit Direct and stick to high level pages of the site like the homepage, Services, and Specialties entry pages. Sales Managers who submit a contact form have a lifetime value 3x higher than those who don’t submit the form or view the Contact page at all.
2. “Field Workers” behavior driven persona
   1. Have a clear goal in mind when visiting the site directly. They go straight for the Contact page to find their local field office, and exit the site from that page every time they visit it. Ultimately, most of the people who come into the construction company’s office wish to submit a job application.

Behavior Driven Insights

• “Sales Managers”insights 
  • Those who are mid-funnel stick to higher level pages, let’s test adding a clear CTA on each entry page that prompts them to Contact Us Now! to shorten the time to conversion from the website.
• “Field Workers” insights
  • They rarely view the Careers page for open job listings. In-person job applications are the #1 source for new Field Worker applications. If we add a top bar CTA with a tool like Sumo, we can show Field Worker audiences We’re Hiring – Apply Here! messages to increase online job application submissions.

Interested in testing behavior-driven audiences on your website? Hit up the Analytics team to learn more about it.