First, let's declutter the terminology. How do buyer personas work? How are they different from customers or prospects? These terms are a bit vague. The trouble is that these terms are vague and defined. There are some subtle differences in their definitions and usage. . The Audience Persona & Customer Persona AAs per the agreed definitions, these are almost the same. We need to keep in mind that the Digital Marketplace is a fast-changing ecosystem. You have to keep refining your Personas to stay relevant. That is where we use these terms with very specific purposes. Audience Persona is a concept born of Social Media. The key success factor for any brand is to grow its Social Media Audience . The best Digital Marketing Strategy never depends too much on paid promotions. We need to keep in mind that not all your followers may become your customers. Unless you are a content marketing agency. The Example from Luxury Car Market in India For instance, as you can see in the figures below, Mercedes Benz has around 621,000 Twitter Followers. They sell only around 1000 Cars per month. This does not mean that we can ignore the Social Media Followers. If you check yourself, MBIL is the leader in Sales as well as Social Media following. The Social Media Audience today is your best Brand Ambassadors. who can get that Marketing Holy-Grail of "Word of Mouth" about your Brand and your Products. You can catch your customers early by engage with the millenials. Often times, it is a kid who can influence a Car buying decision a home. How we define the Customer & Audience @ Digitsthra In Digitsthra, we love simplicity. Simple things work wonders! The table shows our definitions of these terms. You can define these terms based on your usage. The key is to be consistent with the usage and the application of these terms. You can write to us if you have any further queries or questions. Please feel free to click this link and tell us about your query or feedback.

Right questions are the critical success factor to get the right insights. Understanding and listening to the customers will lead to the right decisions. The process of analyzing is by nature a process of active listening. Active listening includes listening to key information like; Market needs, Consumer behaviour, Economic situation, Trends & Reviews, Competitors, and many more. As-Is Analysis is an overview of the brand’s position on all conventional channels. This also will tell you on how that position will affect the position in the digital channels. A robust Digital Marketing practice is possible only when the analytics and the creative processes talk to each other. We use qualitative and quantitative methods to know the current status. As-Is Analysis forms the baseline reference to measure the effectiveness of the DM Transformation.

360 Degree View: What you need to know Your Key Stakeholders are Customers, Employees, Shareholders, Partners, and Peers. They hold the key for understanding the current position of your Brand in the Market. Stakeholder Interviews We have to augment the Quantitative Surveys with Qualitative information. This is very vital during the Inception Phase of the DM Transformation. Stakeholder Interview gets the human insights. They can further fortify the insights from the User Surveys. If there is an interesting insight or observation, we mark it with a follow-up tag. We further analyze, synthesize the observations and provide you with a comprehensive report. Focus Groups Our focus groups provide a greater sampling of feedback. Our Market Survey Experts will assist your focus groups. We will focus on the ways and means to reach your target audience. Brands, market realities, and the competitive landscape, to name a few,. Audience Surveys Our Survey and Analysis Framework consist of powerful tools and robust processes. Survey questions are designed to receive the useful feedback from remote/online surveys. Survey questions include the insights drawn from stakeholder/focus group interviews. Competitor & Peer Audit We conduct competitive audits that focus on the top players in the digital market. This is to understand your position in the Digital marketplace. This also includes analyses ; Web Traffic Analytics, Social Media Trends, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Analytics, and Audience Analysis. The Survey outcomes get mapped to the SWOT Analysis. Insight-based decisions will ensure your result

The conventional approach to understanding the Customer Segments is using the available Demographic Data and Purchasing Behaviour to create the Customer Persona and Digital Segments. Digitsthra uses a combination of our proprietary and Commercial Analytics Solutions to define Customer Persona and Segmentation. You can do that yourself using various online tools many of them are available online for free. You can use Google Trends, Various SEO Tools like Keywords Everywhere, SEM Rush, etc. to know how the searches happen in every segment. Google Ads/FB Ads Audience Analysis functions are very effective tools as well. Customer Segmentation Vs Customer Persona We need to keep in mind that the Customer Persona is not the same as the Customer Segment. Customer Segments provide the physical states like Age, Gender, Parental Status, Profession, Income Level, etc. Whereas Customer Personas are built based on preferences, behaviors, and affinities. In short, the Customer Persona adds the psychological dimension to the segmentation. The term Audience can be treated as an equivalent of "Prospect" in Digital Marketing (Unless you are in Content Marketing like an OTT Provider or a YouTube Channel, where the Audience is your Customer) The Tactic to develop the Customer Persona and Segments based on Customer Persona. In the conventional way of the Segmentation process, Surveys are used to understand and map the Customer Persona (Figure 1). In the Digital World, you have the luxury of understanding the Persona first and then mapping out the dominant Demographic profiles within that persona. The sample given here is Digitsthra Segmentation done on the people with interests in Digital Marketing. The data is populated from the Social Media are populated & data scraped for finding in-depth details (Of course, with full compliance to the Privacy Policy) A Sample Output is given in Figure 2. Here as you can see the Dominant Demographic Profiles within each Customer Persona can be mapped. Then we will be able to assign the Persona and the conventional segmentation using any Analytics Tool. Such an example can be seen in Figure 3, you can see the most dominant demographic profiles within each persona. It is worthwhile to that in the data given in here, the Demographic Profiles are all the same across all the subsegments. However, they have a very different Purchasing Behaviour, Affinities, etc. Customer Segments will have multiple Customer Persona. The task is not yet over, as you can see in Figure 3, you will find that the demographic profiles of all three segments are the same. However, When you explore further through the other dimensions like Personality, Interests affinities, etc, you will find prominent variations within the same Subsegment itself. (Figure 4 & Figure 5) Customer/Audience Segmentation is the Key Process that can arise out of the Customer Persona if you use the Segmentation Analytics tools. Read our Blog on the subject to know more. Please keep engaged with our blog for more on how you can do that for yourself using open/free online tools.