In today’s fast-paced business world, understanding your clients is more than a necessity; it’s a strategic advantage. This is particularly true in the realms of customer insights, e-commerce, marketing, and sales. Enter Artificial Intelligence (AI), a revolutionary tool that acts like a digital cartographer, mapping out the intricate contours of human behavior and predicting customer actions with remarkable accuracy.
Grasping the context in which consumers operate – their time, relationships, and location – is crucial for making each interaction as relevant as possible. Delving into customer preferences and shopping habits is not just beneficial; it’s essential for enhancing the user journey, one touchpoint at a time. This requires a deep understanding of what prospects or clients are thinking, seeing, hearing, feeling, doing, and even the devices they are using.
But why is this focus on the customer so critical? The answer lies in the data: customer-centric businesses consistently outperform their peers in revenue growth and market share. This highlights a clear link between a customer-focused approach and robust financial performance. For example, companies that prioritize their customers are found to be 60% more profitable than those who do not. This leads us to an important question:
How to Achieve Greater Customer Centricity?
A key strategy is life stage segmentation. This approach transcends the simple division of demographics; it’s about creating marketing that deeply resonates on a personal level. Each life stage comes with its own set of unique priorities, challenges, and aspirations. Marketers can explore different types of life stage segmentation:
- Life Events: Targeting consumers during significant life moments, this strategy aims to foster loyalty and drive profits.
- Moments of Life: Utilizing ongoing events or periods for timely marketing communications.
- Places of Life: Focusing on a specific location to promote its unique attributes and business opportunities.
Examples of life events, moments and places of life
Harnessing AI to Understand Individuals
Research across various fields indicates that individuals possess inherent traits that can predict future behaviors. While surveys are a traditional tool to measure these traits, they often have limitations in terms of length and objectivity.
Our approach leverages multiple insights:
- Personality Insights: This employs linguistic analysis to predict a wide range of behavioral traits.
- Social Media Analysis: A rich source for completing the consumer profile with publicly available data.
- Visual Recognition: Enhances the understanding of a consumer’s context beyond sociological, demographic, and psychological data.
- Semantic Analysis: Offers a detailed view of what consumers think, see, hear, feel, and do.
The many user insights that can be gathered and leveraged for marketing purposes
The journey into the digital realm to map the various facets of individual consumers is akin to an odyssey. While AI can cast a broad net, the ocean of human experience is vast and deep, with much more lying beneath the surface than what our digital tools can grasp.
Theory Versus Practice
The changing dynamics of consumer needs, such as fluctuating wedding rates, significant population movements (27.3 million of Americans in one year), and the growing retiree demographic, highlight the necessity of life stage segmentation. This strategy enables marketers to tailor their approaches to these critical life transitions, maximizing engagement and relevance.
In practice, focusing on life moments for marketing means creating personalized campaigns triggered by significant personal events. A case in point is Sofinco’s use of NextUser’s solutions by leveraging AI to analyze social media data to identify moments like new jobs or family changes without relying on third-party cookie.
NextUser demonstrated this approach with Sofinco by profiling individuals from a database (containing 3775 members) and predicting life events like needing a new loan or home renovation. This was achieved by meticulously tracking shifts in family status, employment, and personal interests, utilizing text and image analysis techniques. It involved segmenting profiles into clusters for targeted advertising campaigns, By leveraging a predictive model, Sofinco streamlined its process, effectively reducing the timeline to a mere 6 to 8 weeks.
Examples of moments of life for Sofinco
In Sofinco’s case, most members were monitored (75%), with a smaller percentage showing identifiable life events (15%) and product needs (10%). This multi-criteria approach proved effective in engaging customers at pivotal moments.
Conclusion
In sum, life stage segmentation is a revolutionary strategy for creating personalized marketing that genuinely resonates with consumers’ evolving life journeys. With NextUser’s AI Segmentation, businesses can effectively segment their audience by life stage, crafting dynamic personas that align with each individual’s life events. This results in the delivery of finely tuned, personalized content and advertising, enhancing the overall brand experience and solidifying the brand as a trusted partner through the various stages of life. Embrace the future of marketing with NextUser and transform your approach to customer engagement!
