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December 3, 2018 - Melody Jennings Bowers

Customer Segments vs. Customer Personas

What’s the difference?

Whether you’re in the earliest stages of planning your business or you’re going through a relaunch of a company you’ve been running for years, it’s important to have a clear understanding of the market you’re hoping to serve and the people you’re trying to convert to clients. And all of that starts with determining your product or market fit. Once you have established that there is indeed a need for your services, then you’ll want to hone in on your customer segments and the customer personas within those segments. Here’s what you need to know to get started — and how it all works together for the betterment of your business.

Determining Product / Market Fit

Product/Market Fit is just a fancy way of saying you can find enough people with the pain point that will jump at the chance to pay for the solution you aim to provide. These are your people.

Figuring out how to find these people to get an accurate headcount can be daunting. If you start with trying to pinpoint a “market,” it’s going to be too broad and vague. If you start with defining a single customer persona, that will be too narrow to determine if there are enough of these customers to warrant launching a business created to serve their needs. The sweet spot you are looking for is a customer segment.

When we started Virtual Collective we thought our ideal customer was:
A small business owner who needed digital services.

Any guesses as to what might be wrong with THAT definition?

That describes a very broad, vague, vast portion of the market. What business owner doesn’t need digital services these days?

It wasn’t until we drilled down into our existing customers after we launched that we figured out that one small business owner was NOT the same as the other. What emerged were two distinct customers who each needed the same services, but they each needed to be communicated within very different ways. This impacted our ability to effectively market to either of them, and it indicated that we needed to do a little more research to help us find the customer segments within the small business owner market in which each of our unique customer personas existed.

And we needed more of them if we were going to stay in business.

How do you find these Mythical customers?

For this post, we are going to assume that you:

  have identified a problem that needs to be solved
  know there are enough people who WANT to solve this problem to be profitable
  can find more of these people
  have some consistent data points to track and measure

Customer Segments
vs. Customer Personas

Customer Segments are the community of customers or businesses within the larger market to whom you are aiming to sell your product or services. Segments help you to forecast overall market interest for a product or service.

Susan and Theo - Marketing to Everyone is Expensive - HerDataMethod.com

Customer Personas help to understand the emotional and behavioral triggers behind individual customers within that market. We want to be careful not to get too finite into the customer persona before you conduct your actual market research.

Note: It’s always best to clarify your customer segment before you get too focused on your individual customers. You might make some inaccurate assumptions causing you to miss key factors within a segment that might even reveal a customer that you never anticipated.

There are at least four basic factors you need to identify about your customer segment: demographics, geographics, psychographics, and behavioral. These are all characteristics that are unique to your customer’s story. While there are a lot of methods that can be used during the customer discovery process, such as customer interviews, surveys, and focus groups, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts. It’s going to be up to you to figure out through trial and error what works best for your company and your customers.

Customer Segment Factors - Her Data Method Blog

Demographics are concrete facts. These are known truths about your customer that you can pull from customers directly through interviews or surveys, or you can use census reports, articles and past research.

Geographics are also concrete facts and can sometimes be rolled into your demographics if you have an online business and your customer segment isn’t specific to one location. You’ll want to drill into that later when marketing your business but for brick and mortar businesses, location is vital information at the beginning stage.

Psychographic and behavioral factors are more abstract. This information is not as black and white as demographics and geographics. You will need to extrapolate this information in creative ways through your customer interviews and by observing their online behavior and buying patterns.

This is the customer segment description we identified for Her Data Method:

Customer Segment - Part 1 - HerDataMethod.com

Do you think this is complete? Do you think this segment is defined based on our factors or are we missing anything?

Customer Segment Part 2 - HerDataMethod.com

If we added that last section, would we have a better understanding of what our customer is struggling with and how we can help her?

Yes. Now we have a problem for which we can provide a solution. You cannot effectively define your segment if you are looking at these factors hiding in independent silos.

Customer Types Image - HerDataMethod.com

It’s crucial to know whether you are providing a product or service in a B2B (Business to Business) or a B2C (Business to Customer) role. You may have both kinds of customers and need to determine where to focus your energies on first as you launch your business. Make sure to include this clarifying question whenever you are doing customer discovery.

NOTE: We recommend addressing both customer types in your interviews in order to define both customer segments during your initial research stage so you don’t have to do it all over again at a later date.

IN SUMMARY

Now that you know the order of things and, more importantly, why these steps matter, you are equipped to get started on identifying your Product/Market Fit, your Customer Segments, and Customer Personas. The more intimately you know your target customer, the more efficient you will be at marketing to those who want what you’re selling. And as all business owners know, time is absolutely money. Be smart with both!

Customer Persona Worksheet PDF - HerDataMethod.com

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Data Matters! HerDataMethod.com Nashville, TN

Filed Under: Because Data Tagged With: customer discovery, customer personas, data collection, how-to

March 29, 2017 - Ashley Haugen

The Day I Fell in Love With Data: A Google Analytics Love Story

Today’s blog post is written by our friend and fellow data lover, Ashley Haugen. Her editorial and management experience has spanned both digital and print formats across local and national markets throughout her career and she currently serves as the Managing Editor at Styleblueprint.com. Keep reading to find out more about Ashley and her love affair with data.

I’ve been an editor for nearly two decades. Having worked on both print and digital publications on both local and national levels. But the day that I was introduced to Google Analytics felt like a rebirth — I fell in love with my work in ways I hadn’t felt in years!

This…is my Google Analytics love story.

The Day it All Began...

I was running a print magazine at the time — one publication in a family of a few. Though my magazine had a web presence, the print publication was my main focus. I basically threw the print content on the website each month and would toss in the occasional web exclusive from time to time as well.

Talk Data To Me Image - A Google Analytics Love Story by Ashley Haugen - Her Data Method Blog

Our IT and web design department was tiny but mighty — two guys and a gal. One of the guys, Freddie, asked me to attend a meeting one morning to go over Google Analytics and SEO, neither of which were terms I was familiar with. But after that morning when he projected his screen and walked us through the Google Analytics dashboard, I was a changed woman. An analytics devotee. A data junkie who, from that point forward, has been posting, measuring and fine-tuning. I now live for pageviews and uncovering organic traffic search terms!

"After that morning when he projected his screen and walked us through the Google Analytics dashboard, I was a changed woman."

That day in that small conference room, I saw for the first time the URLs of my magazine articles on the screen, and I saw them with the number of pageviews on each one. It was a concrete validation that people were actually reading what I had posted (or not)! 

Sure, the print magazine consistently enjoyed 100% pick-up rate, but it was impossible to know whether it was one magazine per person, one reader grabbing a few copies, or hell, it could have been someone picking up the entire bundle and dumping them in the garbage for all I knew.

But Google. Google was giving me what I never knew I craved. It was giving me hard facts and concrete numbers in ways I never thought possible.

Google Analytics Image - Her Data Method Blog

My love continues to grow.

Now, long after that print publication has shut down, and years since I have left the world of print entirely, I happily work 100% in digital media as the managing editor of StyleBlueprint.com.

I live online. I breathe online.

And I never tire of the weekly editorial call when our marketing director goes over our analytics. It’s a real-time look at the successes — and yes, the occasional failures — of the content we create. That is the very data that drives our content strategy.

Quite simply, if an article tanks, we can look at why — was it the time of year? The day of the week? The topic? And on the flipside, if the article takes off, we can see why as well — was it the keyword? Does the topic have a ravenous audience? All of this information helps us decide what direction to take our editorial. Obviously, we like to ride the highs by creating similar content — giving the readers what they clearly want. (OR, we’ll never talk about the topic again if an article bombed!)

A Google Analytics Love Story by Ashley Haugen

Data helps me give 'em what they want.

In short, the data equips my team to provide the best content for our audience, and as an editor, that is my commitment — remembering the reader and giving them what they want. Data helps me do that.

Her Data Method is filling a TREMENDOUS void in the market by inviting the world of women business owners to start their own love affairs with Google.

It’s not scary, I promise. It’s empowering! And once you see in the data the impact of a decision you’ve made? You’ll fall in love with data too.

And if loving data is wrong, I don’t wanna be right.

Related Posts

Filed Under: Because Data Tagged With: analytics, data collection, google analytics, women in business

March 15, 2017 - Shannon Ware

Data Made Us Do It!

My business partner Melody and I have been building the Virtual Collective for over three years now. Last fall, we sat down to plan out what 2017 was going to look like, and we actually had things to plan!

We had a whole wall filled (FILLED!) with ideas, tools, and prospects because we had spent the previous two years collecting information … we had data!

Our Post-it Note Brainstorming Session

With that data, we were able to map out the coming year in an efficient, meaningful way. That information was insightful and told us what our clients wanted and needed as well as how they were interacting with our business. That feedback — the data — provided the hard facts we needed to prioritize our next steps and determine where we should focus our time and money. 

When you own your own business there really isn’t room for guessing, right? Data has helped us make smart, impactful decisions, and we want other women to know how to use it too!

Who Knew Data Could Be So Empowering?

That day last fall was by far the most empowering meeting Melody and I have had because we could validate our intuitions for what we thought made sense to do next. Now, each decision was backed up by real data and client feedback.

To be clear, data is not what excites me.

I do not get a rush out of perusing graphs and charts. But what does excite me is the fact that we know exactly who our customer is, what they want and how to deliver it. Which is exactly why our company continues to grow and evolve.

Close-Up Post-It Note Session Image

It's not rocket science, it's just data!

We created Her Data Method to empower other women business owners (like us) who have the same ability to collect this crucial information but just don’t know where to start. We found out that this process is not rocket science, it’s just data. But first, you have to have data before you can use data, right?

Related Posts

Filed Under: Because Data Tagged With: data collection, female founders, Growth, planning, women business owners

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