In the lead up to our webinar on personalising cause marketing on December 7, we’re diving into the world of segments, personas and data driven marketing. The obvious place to start for an organisation looking to develop a personalisation strategy, is to create personas.
Every person your brand interacts with is unique, with separate motivations and different levels of previous interaction with your brand and category. However, when you start to examine qualitative and quantitative data sources, you’ll find you can organise your audience into a few segments; groups who behave in similar ways and have similar goals.
A persona is a profile of an imaginary person who represents a segment within your database. Personas have names, demographic information, interests, giving levels, goals and motivations. Segmenting your stakeholders into persona based groups helps you understand them better and communicate with them more effectively.
You can use insights from personas to help figure out what people want to achieve, how they would go about it and what you can do to help them achieve it. How do you know which segment a person fits into, which persona represents them? Sometimes the information you have in your database is enough to determine this. Alternatively you could ask them questions to help them self select into a segment or even better, can design your website so that there is a clear path for each persona to follow.
Here are some ideas to get started with developing personas of your own:
- Your database is gold. Use the demographics and other data there to group people together. You do have a database right?
- Review your Google analytics. With the right goals and settings, your analytics account can provide insights into which genders and age brackets are visiting your website, and which of those are taking the desired actions, like donating or joining a movement.
- Use your intuition. Sketch out who you think the archetypal segments are within your supporters.
- Interview people. Both within your organisation and outside of it. The people who deal with your supporters or customers daily will be the most valuable here. See where your existing supporter or customer base fit into your segments and refine the segments to suit.
- Include values, goals and challenges. Segmenting along demographics is one thing but people connect with nonprofit through shared values, goals and challenges. Make sure your segments include these motivators.
- Give people the chance to self-select into segments. Add multiple choice questions to your membership or contact forms that include an I’m interested in the question.
If you’re interested in learning more about personas and personalisation for cause marketing, register for our upcoming webinar.