Her Data Method

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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

Sign up below to receive our Customer Persona Worksheet for FREE!

Data Matters! HerDataMethod.com Nashville, TN

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How Data Made Her Do It

When it comes to the day-to-day tasks involved with running a startup, Shannon Ware knows the routine. She and partner Melody Jennings Bowers founded the Virtual Collective, an online network of contractors that provides digital services to clients and businesses of all kinds and sizes. Shannon’s role is that of virtual team manager as well as project manager for the company’s clients. “My role is to oversee team productivity and functionality,” she says. “I make sure the right team members are in place and that all projects are moving in the right direction, on time and under budget.” But she says, “I have to be honest, data is not what excites me. I do not love looking at graphs and charts, but I do love knowing who our customer is, what they want, and knowing that we know how to deliver. THAT is exciting to me!”

“I have to be honest, data is not what excites me. I do not love looking at graphs and charts, but I do love knowing who our customer is, what they want, and knowing that we know how to deliver. THAT is exciting to me!”

Since launching Virtual Collection in 2014, Shannon and Melody observed that most of their clients came to them in search of help solving a problem, yet they weren’t quite sure what the problem was. “They want a website without knowing what they want their customers to do on their site. They want blogs without knowing what their customers want to read about. They want a copywriter to match their voice when they haven’t truly defined their messaging,” explains Shannon. And she and Melody were quick to identify the fact that without having these sorts of answers in place, it was highly unlikely that their team — or any team — could help these clients without data to help guide them.

The pair quickly learned that if they brought on clients who admittedly didn’t have all of these things figured out, their ability to actually help those clients was slim. And that was a turning point for the duo. They decided to shift their approach and redirected their potential clients to begin working through the necessary steps of understanding their customers and data first, before doing anything else much less spend another dime on marketing and growth efforts.

“They want a website without knowing what they want their customers to do on their site. They want blogs without knowing what their customers want to read about. They want a copywriter to match their voice when they haven't truly defined their messaging."

Check your stats - image

Both Virtual Collective and their clients have seen dramatic results.

“The difference in the outcome of the projects where we insisted on sticking to our own proven processes versus the projects where we allowed the client to dictate workflow has been very eye-opening,” shares Shannon.

Eventually, this eye-opening journey is exactly what led them to create Her Data Method, an online education platform that teaches female business owners how to collect relevant data for their company. And to ultimately use it to guide decisions for company growth in a much more effective and targeted way. “Melody kept saying, ‘We need to teach people how to collect data!’

After enough rounds of backtracking with clients, I totally agreed. So we mapped out what we thought were the essential pieces of information that each client needed to know before implementing any marketing efforts, and that’s how Her Data Method was born.”

Thanks to a successful iFundWomen campaign Shannon and Melody were able to raise enough seed money to start building the course. They are working towards a launch date for Her Data Method later this summer! They are excited to start teaching the ins and outs (and whys) of data collection to other women so that they can make more informed decisions.

Three Powerful Data Questions, Answered

To hold you over until the course is launched, we picked Shannon’s brain on the three most important questions about data that women business owners (and men, for that matter) should be asking. Take a look and see if YOU can answer these essential questions about YOUR data? And then make sure you sign up to be the first to find out when the Her Data Method course is live!

Step 1

What is the most useful datapoint that people overlook when launching into marketing efforts?

I feel like at least 50% of our small business clients miss the mark on who their target customer really is. They all know who they think their customer is and then wonder why they are missing their sales goals. Data doesn’t lie. And more than likely, they have no clue how to figure out who they should be marketing to.

Step 2

Describe a real-world scenario where you used data to help make a strategic decision for your company?

We had been cranking out content for our Virtual Collective blog for over two years before we realized we were creating content for the wrong customer. We stopped, revisited our value proposition and made sure we were offering services that provided solutions for the customer we wanted to serve. Which is why we no longer have a blog published on our website! Two years of awesome content (that we spent a LOT of time and money on to create) is sitting on our website, unpublished. If we would have known to go through the simple steps that we teach in Her Data Method on the front-end we would have made adjustments a lot earlier in the game. But what a great example of a real-world scenario to learn from, right?

Step 3

If you could offer one piece of advice to future clients and/or someone starting a new business regarding the importance of data, what would you say?

The most important thing you can do is build a framework from the beginning. If you have a solid foundation of information about your customers, any stressful decision you need to make becomes less stressful. When you have real data about YOUR customers you can be more confident about making the next move for your business.

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What is your No. 1 goal for Her Data Method?

To empower women. The entrepreneur/business owner scene can be brutal and is predominately male-driven. We women have to stick together! I don’t expect everyone to care about data, but I like to think we can all learn something from each other in the process.

Can we get an amen?! If you’re ready to find out how to collect data and use it to grow your business beyond your wildest dreams, sign up to find out when the Her Data Method course is live, get our newsletters filled with handy tips and more. Data made us do it, and it’ll make you do it too!

Data Matters! HerDataMethod.com Nashville, TN

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Why is iFundWomen Founder Karen Cahn Disrupting the Norm?

Here at Her Data Method, we are building and growing and evolving and thriving for one key reason: our iFundWomen campaign. Thanks to the hands-on coaching and support from the team at iFundWomen our project was funded three weeks into our campaign. Which is why we felt it was the perfect time to interview iFundWomen founder Karen Cahn to find out more about what led to the founding of iFundWomen, her thoughts on digital culture and, obviously, why she thinks data matters. Enjoy!

As Karen Cahn says it, she was born on the internet.

“I was one of those Gen-Xers who was in college when email became popular,” she explains, “and I’ve only ever really worked in the internet.”

Indeed, the iFundWomen founder has spent her entire career in the digital space, working at heavy hitters like Google, YouTube, AOL, and Salon.com to name a few.

And while she enjoyed supportive communities of female co-workers who worked alongside her in media sales, she is quick to acknowledge that that sort of support wasn’t as present on the tech side of the digital world. “I know that my sisters on the engineering side had very different experiences,” Karen shares, referring to the largely male-dominated tech industry, which she says is still, in large part, a “good old bros club.”

Which, in fact, was the impetus that led her to launch iFundWomen.

iFundWomen Crowdfunding Website Homepage Image

She looked specifically for crowdfunding sites for women. And when she couldn’t find any, she decided to build one.

“When we did our first crowdfunding campaign in 2016, I realized how little coaching, mentoring, and information there was available to entrepreneurs in general, let alone female entrepreneurs. Crowdfunding can be confusing, and it’s hard to raise money in general, let alone with no human help to ask questions to or to guide you along the way,” she says.  “Very quickly into our crowdfunding campaign, I figured out that it was just about having basic sales skills. Truly, it’s just sales. Selling people things they want to buy, through your crowdfunding campaign, as a way to fund your business. If you prepare and you have a community and coaching, then it’s do-able.”

That Kickstarter experience led her to the internet where she looked specifically for crowdfunding sites for women. And when she couldn’t find any, she decided to build one.

“Silicon Valley culture hasn’t evolved really. Sure the funding gap for female-run companies is starting to get a little bit better in the Silicon Valley specifically, but everywhere else, it’s not getting better,” she says, “and that’s exactly why we started iFundWomen.”

It's time to disrupt the norm.

We definitely consider her a trailblazer for women in the digital space, and she does too.

Not boastfully, but proudly. And passionately. And with an enthusiasm that is downright contagious.

When only 2%-6% of venture money goes to women and even less than that to women of color, iFundWomen is here to disrupt the norm and close the funding and confidence gaps.

To be clear, it’s not about chest-beating, man-hating females staking their claims.

In fact, it’s just the opposite. “Half of the backers on the platform are men who are excited about the same mission,” says Karen. “iFundWomen is not just a platform, it’s a movement, and it’s going to take all of us working together to get there.”

iFundWomen Founder Karen Cahn - Her Data Method Blog
iFundWomen Founder Karen Cahn - Crowdfunding Platform Build Exclusively For Women - CNBC Executive Edge

Data can open up a whole new world.

Karen’s mission and ours here at Her Data Method are definitely in sync.

Hers is to help women get equal access to not only funding but to the resources and support needed to help them launch their businesses. Ours? Well, we’re excited to help women successfully launch, grow and thrive with the empowerment that data provides.

“Data is SO important! And I love what Her Data Method is doing because you’re not dumbing it down,” Karen says, with the same level of excitement that we have as well.

Her Data Method Team at iFundWomen Nashville Marketplace Event

“Historically, women have not been encouraged to go into STEM fields where you are trained on how to use data for every decision. We have been encouraged to go into literally any other field other than STEM, fields like fashion, beauty, lifestyle, or even public service, which is fine, but if you demystify the world of numbers and analytics and tools, and make all of that less scary and more approachable, an entirely new world opens up, and the sky’s the limit. I just think that the mission of Her Data Method is amazing!”

And coming from an amazing woman like Karen Cahn, we will most definitely take that as a compliment!

“Data is SO important! And I love what Her Data Method is doing because you’re not dumbing it down!”

Conclusion

iFundWomen founder Karen Cahn spoke with Melody about what led her to launch a crowdfunding platform for women-led businesses. After completing a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds when launching her first startup she realized how little information, coaching or handholding is available to entrepreneurs in general, let alone female entrepreneurs. The crowdfunding process can be overwhelming without human help and guidance. When she was unable to find the resources that she was looking for she decided to build a crowdfunding platform for women. Now iFundWomen is here to disrupt the norm and close the funding and confidence gaps for companies like ours to launch projects that we thought not previously possible.

Data Matters! HerDataMethod.com Nashville, TN

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How to Grow Your Business With Data

Any entrepreneur knows that figuring out how to grow your business is challenging in the beginning, no matter how amazing your idea is. For my business, ArtSquare, a platform designed to help visual artists sell their work online by creating beautiful digital portfolios, it was no different.

As the marketing guy, I was on a mission to find the right channels and messaging that resonated with the artists we were trying to reach. And we tried everything. Paid ads on social channels, search engines and websites that attracted visual artists. We advertised on big artist bloggers’ email blasts. Basically, anywhere we thought we could grow our customer base, we ran ads, and all these efforts produced mixed results. Our business was starting to grow, but not quickly as we needed to early on.

We shifted our focus to growing our social media following to reach more artists, tweaking our messaging to increase conversions. We tried email marketing to grow our list. Again, some success, but not the type of growth we needed.

Bottom line? We knew that to prove the viability of our idea to future investors, we needed to find more significant user growth. And the key to that growth was data and using it to steer our marketing and product development efforts.

How Data Helped Us Grow Our Business

With critical investment talks looming on the horizon and a very small marketing budget, we could only afford to put our energy into things that mattered. We revisited what had actually helped us grow and re-evaluated what we should focus on. We doubled down on our efforts to understand our customers with daily phone calls, emails, surveys and experiments, all geared towards getting a clear understanding of their needs. In this time, something we already vaguely knew became crystal clear: Artists desperately needed to be educated on how to be business owners.

We designed several experiments around solving this problem and were hyper-intentional about tracking it all. We set up funnels in our analytics software, used tracking links for any and every link, monitored all data in a shared Google Sheet and followed a strict protocol for analyzing the results.

Our hypothesis: If we create useful, educational business content for artists, we will grow our influence and increase our email and product signups.

“Be generous” became our mantra. And it worked.

All marketing efforts shifted to creating free educational content through offers on our blog, as well as through guest articles on other websites with large artist audiences. We hosted monthly webinars, created free guides and wrote practical how-to articles. The single goal for everything created was to be certain that all of our efforts led people back to our signup page or email list.

The data from these experiments began to reveal the types of content that was resonating with our target audience. It also became clear which traffic channels had the best reach and where we needed to spend more time and energy on engagement efforts.

Here are some numbers that illustrate what I mean:

  • In 3 months, monthly blog traffic grew from an average of 400 to 30,000 views (7,500% growth)
  • In 6 months, email subscribers grew from 150 to 6,000 (4,000% growth)
  • In 6 months, our three most popular articles were shared by artists over 1,600 times each
  • In 6 months, users of our product grew from 300 to 3,000 (1,000% growth)

That is the power of data and experimentation. All of the above growth was done with almost no marketing spend — we tested and let real world results determine our next steps. And that’s exactly what you can learn to do with Her Data Method, which offers an easy and approachable method to data collection and interpretation you need to help your business thrive.

Good luck! You got this — just follow the data. It doesn’t lie!

If you’re not willing to leave the growth of your business to chance, and you need help learning how to collect data, sign up for the Her Data Method course here. The course will be released in Summer 2017; early signups get discounts, access to free resources and the opportunity to have their business spotlighted as a featured case study.

Data Matters! Her Data Method Course

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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.

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