Customer profiling and web personas presentation from Hannah Marshallsay, Mackman Group at CIM Digital Marketing Bootcamp, Chelmsford, May 2013

1. Who are my customers
and how do
they behave online?

2. Why is it important to understand the profile
of your website’s target audience?
The more specific you can be about your target
audiences and markets the more effective your
website will be:
Creation of interesting and engaging content
Better messaging and calls to action
Build better and more meaningful
relationships with customers
More likely to attract new customers who will
care about products and services
What does ‘target
audience’ mean?
A way of defining the
group of people that
buy your products
and services via your
website
It’s a segmentation
of all potential
consumers –
grouping them by
characteristics that
identify them as
being potential
customers

3. Profiling your customers requires a good
database
Customers
Consumers
Employees
Who and where Response and
purchase
Values and motivations
Behavioural dataDemographic data
Attitudinal data
Webographic data – web experience, usage location, platform,
frequency, social media use
B2C
Age, gender, where they
live, occupation, income
levels
B2B
Position in business,
location, size, range of
products and services,
tenure
Interests, lifestyles,
goals and needs
Product/service type,
channel, value,
frequency, marketing
response

4. Establish what customer data you
already have
Contextual data
- Accounts - Transactions - Customer Feedback - Newsletter Sign-up
- Web Analytics - Social Media
Demographic
Sales data – data you’ve captured at
point of sale
Google Analytics – localisation and
language and audience profile
Facebook insights – details on
people that click on the Like
Facebook button. Age, gender,
location, marital status, interests
Email service provider – add fields
into newsletter sign up or Mail Chimp
SocialPro feature offers
demographics about your visitors
automatically
Google Webmasters Audience Report

5. Establish what customer data you
already have
Contextual data
Demographic
LinkedIn provides demographics for individuals including Occupation, Industry, Skills and Expertise and
for businesses the available insight includes Region, Industry, Company Size and Products & Services
- Accounts - Transactions - Customer Feedback - Newsletter Sign-up
- Web Analytics - Social Media

6. Establish what customer data you
already have
Contextual data
Behaviour
Attitudinal
Webographic
Surveys
Ongoing customer feedback
Sales – online and offline via
which channel
Email – open and click through
Google Analytics
Social Media insights
Surveys
Google Analytics Dashboard
- Accounts - Transactions - Customer Feedback - Newsletter Sign-up
- Web Analytics - Social Media

7. Build your database including key variables
Your database should contain: name, address, email and telephone number together
with purchase history. It should also contain the contact names of people involved in the
decision making

8. Create web personas to complete the
picture of your target audiences
A web persona is a summary
of the characteristics, needs,
motivations and environment
of a key type of website user
Creating web personas is a
process which adds to the
existing data you have on
your customers – Attitudinal
and Webographic
They enable you to design
the best user experience for
its website customers

9. Creating website personas
First stage – collecting data
Complete the picture of your website users through a simple staff survey
based on their experience and knowledge of customers
• Demographics – age, gender, type of business and size
• Web technical knowledge/ability, usage location, platform, frequency, social
media site etc
• Motivations to use your website, how did they find it?
• Values and goals for your website, what they want to use it for, where do they go
for information?
• Obstructions/frustrations – what stops them choosing a service/product?
Your staff should think of two or three customers that they have worked
with/on behalf of in the last two years and answer the questions with that
person in mind
Example questions:
The questionnaire can be carried out face to face, via telephone, using a
simple Word document or a more complex online survey….

10. More complex online questionnaire
Creating website personas
First stage – collecting data
Survey Monkey questionnaire

11. Creating website personas
Second stage – grouping customers
Survey Monkey reporting graph
Survey Monkey
out-puts pie
charts and
graphs that
summarise key
data variables
from your
customer
questionnaire

12. Creating website personas
Second stage – grouping customers
Survey Monkey reporting graph

13. Creating website personas
Second stage – grouping customers
Cross tabulation of the data on key criteria allow you to identify groups of
customers with similar profiles
These groups of customers with similar profiles become your segments

14. Creating website personas
Third stage – creating fictional characters
Start-up Sally – owner of an independent business in the arts
Corporate Christopher – CEO of financial sector company
Family Firm Frank – Manager at a family firm in manufacturing industry
Sally is has a solid business idea that is well researched and thought out. She
needs a marketing partner over the long term but branding and a website to
get her started. She needs to spend her budget wisely. She found the Mackman
website through a recommendation. She is concerned about price and the
possibility that her business is too trivial compared with Mackman’s larger clients.
Christopher is looking for a reliable marketing research company who will help
him gain knowledge and solve a very specific problem that he needs to illuminate.
He is quite ruthless and is careful to choose an agency that he can keep coming
back to if the job is done well. He references newspapers, friends and colleagues
for information and found Mackman through recommendation.
Frank has inherited a family business and needs help to bring it up to date. He is
under pressure to turn the business around and prove he is worthy of leading the
organisation. He has little experience of marketing so will initially need help with
his marketing strategy. He is well informed in his sector frequently reading
industry magazines. He wants to team up with ‘real people’ who share his values
and have a knowledge of his sector

15. Creating website personas
Fourth stage – applying personas to website content
Start-up Sally Case studies and examples of work for smaller
clients and indication of price are crucial

16. Creating website personas
Fourth stage – applying personas to website content
Corporate Christopher Simple browsing menus, plain speaking
information and easy to contact function are essential as he is not
proficient with the internet

17. Creating website personas
Fourth stage – applying personas to website content
Family Firm Frank Information showing the knowledge of staff and
quality of work is important. He is looking for a demonstration of
multi media content as he is aspirational about making his business
appear more forward thinking

18. Web persona summary guidelines
1. Build a number of personal attributes into personas
• Demographic
• Behaviour
• Attitudes
• Webographic
2. Remember personas are only models of characteristics and
environment
• 3 or 4 usually suffice to improve general usability
• Establish a primary persona
3. Involve all stakeholders in your business to create and sign off
personas
• Ensure they are accurate representations
4. Ensure your personas become the language of your business
• Bring them to life with pen portraits and display them

19. Creating website personas
Fifth stage – measurement
By understanding what proportion of visits belong to which personas you can
understand how well your website is catering for them
1. Keywords – identify personas by the key word they use to find your site
e.g. for the Mackman website we could separate out who found us on a
search for PR vs. Market Research
2. Landing pages – if someone lands on one of our ‘Marketing’ pages, they
must be interested in one of our marketing services. We could separate
out visitors who landed on ‘Marketing’, ‘Design’ vs. ‘Staff’ pages
3. Referring sites – may indicate a persona from the site they came from e.g.
Twitter vs. Yell.com
You can build persona based segments using these dimensions and analyse
them using Google Analytics Advanced Segments

20. Creating website personas
Fifth stage – measurement
Advanced Segments let
you isolate and analyse
subsets of traffic
These can be applied to
current and historical
data - giving you greater
insight into your data
You can use pre-defined
segments such as ‘New
Visitors’, or ‘Mobile’, or
create your own. Our
‘East Anglia’ segment
allows us to monitor
traffic levels from
Chelmsford, Colchester,
Ipswich and Bury St
Edmunds
Google Advanced Segments Overview Report

21. Using your web personas to improve the
relevance of your customer communication
1.Make your website more relevant e.g. make sure that there is at least one
case study on your site that will appeal to each web persona
2.Make your emails more relevant e.g. consider your web personas when
devising your email content. Is there something of interest for your key web
personas?
3.Make sure you are using the right social media platforms e.g. LinkedIn
for B2B
4.Use your web personas to help identify priority prospects when enquiries
are made
Over to you – what are your ideas?

22. Hannah Marshallsay
hannah@mackmangroup.co.uk
01787 388038
@MackmanGroup