If you’ve been involved in traditional persona creation via focus groups, you know that it’s no longer efficient for fast-paced ecommerce brands. Building out the personas would take months and come with a significant price tag. As new customers were acquired, there was no efficient way to funnel them into the appropriate persona. This meant that the process would need to be re-run regularly, and by the time it was updated it was already out of date. The alternative was making assumptions or going on “gut feelings” rather than concrete data, which led to inaccurate or incomplete customer profiles.
Today, there are much more efficient ways to build out brand personas - both from a time and cost standpoint. Let’s take a closer look.
Key Takeaways
- Automated personas replace static manual research with dynamic, data-driven customer profiling for better targeting accuracy.
- First-party data combined with third-party enrichment allows for deep, person-level customer segmentation and analysis.
- Decile’s AI models identify clusters of similar customers and automatically assign newly acquired customers to bespoke persona groups.
- Automated generation reduces the investment of time and cost compared to traditional manual persona creation.
- Platforms like Decile integrate insights and activation, allowing direct use of personas in marketing channels.
Creating and Using AI-Generated Personas
Creating rich, accurate personas can help with everything from personalization to targeting. Using tools like Decile can help bring ease to the process.
Your first-party data is your best marketing asset. When customer purchase metrics are combined with third-party enrichment attributes (like demographics, interest and behavioral data), you can dive deeper into your analytics and segmentation capabilities in a way that is nearly impossible with manual persona creation. Customer records are enriched at the person-level which makes segmenting and analysis on any dimension possible.
AI models analyze millions of data points to create clusters of customers who look and behave similarly to each other. As new customers are acquired, they are automatically sorted into the most appropriate persona group in real time. Automated persona generation allows users to track how personas change over time and perform further analysis on each persona group - like product and channel preferences.
Not only is this process efficient, but significantly less of an investment than traditional persona creation.
Which Tools Generate Brand Personas Using My Customer Data?
Traditional CDPs can help build out brand personas, but still leave a need for a BI tool to pull insights and act on them - again, making the costs to create brand personas high.
By combining first-party data, enrichment attributes, and the use of AI, Decile is uniquely positioned to create bespoke brand personas quickly and cost effectively. As mentioned earlier, algorithms identify groups of customers with similar characteristics to build your unique personas based on your own data. Decile generates these segments in minutes, and they are continuously updated for ongoing use. Your personas can then be used in comparisons - like identifying the highest LTV groups. You can identify preferences of particular personas, and even send them directly to your marketing and advertising platforms for personalized marketing activation.
A few common use cases include:
- Understanding persona growth or decline over time
- Creating an audience of high value personas for activation
- Product and channel preferences of specific personas
- Identifying why customer churn accelerating for a specific group
- Pinpointing groups most likely to become a subscriber or loyalist
- Understanding product seasonality for each persona
Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Automated Persona Generation
Personas built from AI models have different pitfalls than you’d expect in traditional persona generation. Here’s what to look for, and what to avoid.
- The quality of your enriched third-party data should be thoroughly vetted. Understand where the data is coming from, its reliability, and the ethical practices of the supplier. Avoid companies who get data from scraping the web, with low match rate, or low reliability ratings. SOC2-Type 2 certification is an essential safeguard. Incomplete or low quality data can negatively affect the accuracy of your personas.
- Confirm frequent auto-refreshes of data, and automatic persona assignment for newly acquired customers. You should be able to track any changes to the makeup of your personas regularly to see how they evolve over time, without any manual work.
- Ensure personas are based on your unique customer data, and are not generic, pre-built personas. Personas should represent qualities and behaviors of your real customers, rather than canned profiles.
- Select a platform that incorporates insights and activation. You should be able to easily take your personas and send them directly to marketing and advertising platforms for activation within a few clicks. Avoid platforms which require persona data to be exported to a spreadsheet, or one that requires additional BI tools to surface insights.
Interested in learning more about how Decile uses AI to generate accurate, brand-specific personas within minutes? Book a demo to learn more.