Better personas thanks to artificial intelligence

Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify are masters when it comes to personalizing content for users. Netflix knows which series have addictive potential - and suggests precisely these as recommendations. The trick behind it: Artificial intelligence that collects data and creates personalized user profiles. In short: data-driven persona, which updates and develops itself. The result: the more data the AI collects about users, the more accurate the movie and series recommendations. Via the AI-based recommendation system, Netflix saves an estimated one billion dollars a year. The good news: You don't have to be a media giant to save money and increase your profits with AI and data-based personas. That's because with the right service provider, any company can data-driven personas afford.

Artificial intelligence as data manager

The amount of data worldwide is forecast to increase by 61% to 175 zettabytes by 2025. By comparison, in 2018, the global data volume was still 33 zettabytes - equivalent to the storage space on 660 billion Blu-rays. So by 2025, it would take more than five times as many to store the global amount of data on them. Thanks to machine learning, artificial intelligence is able to capture and analyze huge amounts of data to extract relevant information - in the shortest possible time.

Companies can benefit from this by analyzing their target group individually and deriving actions for marketing, sales and product development from this. In short, artificial intelligence helps to personalize customer experiences. And it is a prerequisite for reaching your desired target group without wastage. Every piece of information that companies use to develop their buyer personas brings them closer to potential customers. The result: targeted communication and advertising that generates leads and turns a profit. An AI-based persona is usually composed of data from the following sources:

Traditional vs. AI-based Buyer Personas

The idea of designing marketing for specific stereotypes has been around since the beginning of advertising. While advertising posters used to be geared to either the female or male middle and upper classes, knowledge of target groups was later expanded to include age- and generation-specific characteristics. The buyer persona breaks with this tradition by perceiving customers more individually than as a stereotype. This is a prerequisite for reaching customers in a targeted manner in the age of an overabundance of goods and information. But even in the development of traditional buyer personas, problems arise that an AI can easily solve:

The AI takes into account online and media usage behavior

Whether it's social interaction, media use or consumption - life today is primarily digital. While the manual development of a persona can only map this data via elaborate customer surveys, via own market research and the figures of the own website, the AI collects a multitude of user data in a very short time. Using millions of data points, the AI extracts relevant data from existing and potential new customers and uses this to create a detailed persona profile. In doing so, the AI includes transaction and behavioral data as well as digital experiences of users.

AI-based personas can be afforded by any company

No matter if start-up, medium-sized company or large corporation: With service providers like Persona-Institut, every company can afford AI and data-driven personas . Because instead of expensive market research and project groups that invest several working days in persona development, AI-based tools take this effort away. In numbers: While the development of a traditional persona takes several days and can cost up to 10,000 euros, companies can obtain AI-based personas for as little as 1,200 euros in a very short time.

AI-based personas rely on data instead of guesswork

Personas, where artificial intelligence and machine learning meet, are based on scientifically sound data sets. Instead of filling knowledge gaps with gut feelings, data-driven personas leaves nothing to chance. This is important in order to use marketing budgets in a more targeted manner and to create theme and product worlds in which customers feel at home. Another advantage: with data-based personas, you can awaken needs where there were none before. Thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, you know the pain points of potential customers down to the last detail.

Flexible work processes thanks to data-based personas and artificial intelligence

data-driven personas can be updated quickly and flexibly. In concrete terms, the persona grows and changes with your customers - in real time if necessary. Especially in competitive market segments, this is a prerequisite for staying one step ahead of the competition. Tools such as the Persona Profiler rely on structured and automated workflows to create customer and candidate personas in the shortest possible time and at low cost. Thanks to AI-based persona tools, companies can conduct customer-centric and personalized marketing on a large scale.

data-driven personas Increase the efficiency of marketing and sales

Sales and marketing in particular, but also recruiting departments in companies, prioritize the use of data-based personas. After all, they make workflows efficient, generate high-quality leads, and lead to the conclusion of a sale more quickly overall. For example, the time to generate a lead is reduced by 72 percent with data-based personas. And 9 out of 10 companies that outperform the competition use personas for data segmentation. In summary, data-driven personas contributes significantly to the success of companies.

data-driven personas as a powerful tool for customer retention

Companies like Netflix are so successful precisely because they not only win customers, but keep them for the long term. One reason for this is that AI matches existing user profiles to the streaming habits, visual preferences, and interests of its users in a very short time. Consumer studies have shown that a typical Netflix member loses interest after 60 to 90 seconds after skimming 10 to 20 titles and not liking them. In this case, the risk that the member will switch to another streaming provider increases significantly. The decreasing attention span of consumers: inside in particular illustrates how important it is to individualize products and customer communication today. And AI-based personas support this.