The most important person for the app marketer (after your boss) is the app user. These are the people that dictate how successful your app will be from the time and money they spend using it. So these are the people you need to know everything about. The more you know about your users, the better your marketing efforts will be. And the better your marketing efforts are, the higher your engagement rates will be. Part of an app marketer’s job is to build a lasting relationship with the app users, and it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that you can’t build a long-lasting relationship with someone you know nothing about.
The next best idea is to segment your users into a number of imaginary customer profiles (say, 4 or 5) of your ideal app user… aka, user personas.
A user persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. This includes demographics, app usage, behaviour patterns, motivations, goals and more… the more you know, the better. A better understanding of the needs and wants of your app users allows you to do a more efficient job of appealing to their specific desires.
Hubspot summed up buyer persona’s pretty quickly with this gif…
As I’m sure you know, lead generation requires the tailoring of your marketing efforts towards the right people; buyer personas are a crucial tool in this. A detailed buyer persona will help you determine where to focus your time, guide product development, and allow for alignment across the organisation, allowing you to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to your business.
So I think we’ve come to the conclusion that developing persona’s allows for more specific and targeted marketing. But this is only scratching the surface when it comes to how much your app can benefit from them. Let’s take a look at a few other reasons as to why user persona’s are important…
Once you’ve pulled together and evaluated a persona’s app usage, behaviour, motivations, goals etc. in the persona development stage you will know exactly what it is they are trying to gain from using your app. An understanding of these things is crucial in knowing how to approach them with in-app purchases, push notifications or even when asking for app reviews. It may even lead you to identify new opportunities to develop new app features to solve other problems they might have.
Knowing where, when, and how your personas spend time in and out of your app provides you with a key insight on how to communicate with them, how to reach new customers, what types of content to produce and where and how to promote it.
Since you will understand what is valuable to each of your personas, you will have a better understanding of the type of content that will appeal to them. It will allow you to write more conversationally, instead of being general and vague, and use words, phrases and examples that are more personal and they can relate to. The more personal your content, the more likely your user is to engage with it.
If you don’t know what your app users want or need then it’s going to be nearly impossible to know what new features they may require from your app. That’s another reason why personas are great. The knowledge you’ve gained on who your users are spills over into product development, allowing you to create high quality app features that resonate with your target user.
When you work with a team of people it has to be expected that everyone has their own individual thoughts and opinions. This is true also for who everyone believes your target user is. The differences may only be slight, but they will exist. With the development of user personas you can be more confident that everyone ends up with the exact same view of who the customer is. With everyone on the same page it is easier for your team to focus and get the job done right.
Social media is a very important element of your app marketing, but it can be difficult to know how exactly you are meant to interact with your followers. However, when you have developed a number of detailed personas you have a way better idea of who the different individuals that follow your social media might be. This provides direction in terms of your messaging, tone of voice, imagery etc. that could be used on your social media pages.
Predictive analytics takes creating personas to the next level. The huge amount of data available to marketers today enables the creation of much more powerful personas. Current persona development processes take a considerable amount of time and remain static, but that should not be the case.
Over time, people change, their situations change, their priorities change, their needs and wants change. Someone who fits into a certain persona one year, may fit into a totally different persona the following year. Predictive analytics provides a solution to this problem as it helps you add to your personas and mould them over time as data provides you with more and more detail.
With Hurree, a marketing automation and CRM platform for apps that learns, your users will be automatically assigned to a persona using any data available, such as demographics, in-app behaviour, past purchases etc. If a person's situation changes, Hurree will pick this up and re-assign a different, more relevant persona to the user. These deeper insights allow for more relevant messaging, which generally results in more active, more engaged and more satisfied app users.
Level-up and become a master of Market Segmentation with your very own FREE guide: The S.M.A.R.T Guide to Market Segmentation 💌 Don't hesitate to get in touch with me directly via emma@hurree.co with any of your questions or comments you may have!