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With online reviews to a better buyer persona

Online reviews say a lot about customers. How companies can use this data to develop and improve personas: An overview.

 

Companies that collect and structure online reviews can benefit from this data in many ways. After all, customer feedback helps brands achieve greater visibility and brand awareness. In addition, companies can use this data profitably to develop new personas and sharpen existing customer profiles.

In the process, information can be gleaned from ratings that provide relevant data for personas:

  • Demographic data: This is the heart of any persona and often comes from assessments. Depending on the quantity and quality of the assessment, it provides information about data such as age, education, profession, salary, function, gender, family, and location. Important: As a rule, demographic data from assessments is not sufficient to develop representative personas from them alone. Better: Tools such as the Persona Profiler, which filter and process relevant data from different sources.
  • Challenges and goals: Ratings provide information about the goals that consumers pursue with a product or service. Negative feedback indicates weaknesses - whether in product development, customer service or shipping. Companies can use this to their advantage by including the problems of existing customers in the development of personas.
  • values: Detailed ratings in particular say a lot about the moral values of consumers. This is a prerequisite for personalizing the customer journey. In concrete terms: If a large proportion of customers are interested in sustainability, you can focus more on this aspect - for example, by using sustainable materials and packaging.
  • Recommendations and consumer behavior: In some cases, ratings also show where customers get their information - for example, whether they discovered the product through a friend's recommendation or through social media. Statements like these help to optimize the customer journey and to use advertising budgets in a more targeted way - for example, for influencer marketing or a bonus program for personal recommendations.
  • Exchange of experience: Specialist forums and social networks in particular thrive on the exchange of experiences. The feedback here goes beyond the regular online evaluation. Numerous users share knowledge and insights about how and for what products are used. Extensive discussions, tutorials and unboxing videos provide information about what consumers think of products - a treasure trove of data that you can use to identify pain points early on and solve target group problems in real time.

How personas and online reviews improve the customer journey

Personas, which are based on customer feedback, among other things, help companies to sustainably optimize the customer journey. A buyer persona pays off especially in the following areas:

  • Segmentation: Who buys your products or uses your services? Ratings, among other things, provide information about this. They show how many personas a company needs to represent all buyer groups. As with demographic data, the same applies here: It's all about the mix. For this reason, you should rely on a variety of different data sources for segmentation, which you can use to differentiate and classify customer groups.
  • Product development: When it comes to developing new products or optimizing existing ones, evaluations provide data on how, for what and why people use products. With targeted feedback monitoring, companies often uncover completely new areas of application for their own products - a decisive advantage when it comes to design, development and marketing.
  • Content marketing: The way and where consumers talk about companies and their products shows what existing and new customers want to see, read and hear. This is proven, among other things, by the success of user-generated content (UGC), in which users of social networks recommend company products.
  • Sales: The personalized customer journey allows you to address people individually. data-driven personas has been proven to accelerate the purchase decision and ensure that customers remain loyal to your company in the long term.
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