What is Persona Segmentation?

Persona Segmentation

For modern companies living in the digital age, persona segmentation has become a common and necessary practice. Persona segmentation is identifying and categorizing similar personas together. You can use varying segmentation methods according to your business and your objectives.

In fact, you can categorize your buyer personas according to how frequently they use your marketing products, or how engaged they are with your brand, products, or services. You’ll definitely use various channels to communicate with your audience. Segment your personas according to their preferred channels. Therefore, you can examine which channel you should focus on, as well as how you can effectively reach your customers.

How to build a persona?

Have specific people you know in mind

Start with a handful of people or customers you know by name.  In fact, by starting with real people, it will bring validity to your persona building. As questions come up in building features for those personas, you have a reference focus group to go back to.

Provide demographic information

People talk about millennials or Gen X’s in terms of what they expect from their interactions with technology.  While fairly general, including their assumed age, job title, family, with a picture can help craft a background story for collaborators to understand intent and expectations.  As well as, this allows readers to correlate that persona to other people they have personal connections with in order to develop ideas and assumptions further.

Frame their day

Frame this as what will make this person successful in their job each day and each week.  Definitely, don’t get into features or requirements, this is what will drive that person.  In fact, understanding the application of technology can be noise or a bump in the road on their day.  An example might be developing a commerce solution for a healthcare professional, their goals are servicing patients, not ordering products from you.  Therefore, framing their goals for success as a professional or as a busy parent on the move will help you design a more frictionless and task-oriented experience.

Benefits of persona segmentation

Segment personas and the customer life cycle

Your persona segmentations all have different levels of engagement and commitment to your marketing brand. Understanding how your personas make decisions and how they feel about your brand and product is crucial. Hence, creating and segmenting personas for customers in different stages of their lifecycle can help you adapt to those variations and focus on the most ideal prospects.

Reach the most valuable segments

Customers in your persona segments likely expect different things from your company. Different users will use your product for different purposes, and it’s crucial to adapt to their needs. Hence, creating persona segmentations for different categories of customers will make building out the right features to reach your most valuable segments easier.

Choose which channels to focus on

Every marketer knows that taking an omnichannel approach is necessary to reach your audience. Persona segmentation helps choose which channels are the best to focus on. Using your persona segments, you can determine how best to reach different groups within your target audience. For instance, A/B testing complements your persona segmentation efforts to find the best copy, design, and distribution method for your campaigns.

Persona segmentation and customer experience

Persona segmentation is also extremely helpful in understanding the various implications of your buyer personas and determining which segments are taking up the majority of your time and resources. In any case, persona segmentation can help identify which customers to turn your focus to.

Pricing model optimization

Defining your audience and the persona segments within it is an essential part of determining your product’s pricing model. Understanding those segments in your audience helps you make better estimates in areas like your cost per acquisition. Optimizing your pricing model is a huge process, as well as, using persona segmentation to group your customers by their financial potential can help plan for growth and determine the best margins for your product.

Predict users’ needs and wants

Unless your product is highly specialized, it’s likely that you have a variety of people interacting with it. And in some cases, it might be a connecting agent between different customers. This is important to understand, especially for UX teams, as each type of user will have different goals and crave a different experience. Creating and using multiple persona segmentations helps predict your users’ wants and needs throughout each group and determine which digital users need to access which features.