7 best practices for marketers using virtual personas

Like other marketing leaders, you need to deliver on growth at speed. Unlike them, you can skip the costly mistakes whilst using Virtual Personas by Savanta.

The benefits of adding virtual personas to your insights portfolio include:

• Exploring new audiences without costly traditional research
• Optimising acquisition and retention with “what-if” testing
• Developing new offerings tailored for customer adoption

The opportunity for your team is knowing which virtual persona best practices to follow and which mistakes to avoid. Read on for the 4 dos and 3 don’ts you need to know when adding virtual personas to your market research initiatives.

Virtual persona best practices

• Do start with robust real-world data. To synthesise credible insights, you need to start with trustworthy inputs. Inform your virtual personas with the breadth and depth of surveys and interviews. Remember to layer in brand perception data (like Savanta’s BrandVue tracker).
• Do add flexibility with supplemental use cases. Adopt virtual personas as a way to supplement, not replace, traditional methods. For example, Savanta is helping a global consumer electronics business to augment segmentation efforts.
• Speed up time to insight with directional findings. Another ideal use case for virtual personas is to inform and accelerate traditional work. Imagine the head start your team can get when gauging price sensitivity with today’s economy-concerned customers.
• Validate virtual findings with a human touch. As the old saying goes, “trust, but verify.” First, are your virtual personas providing insights that pass the eye test? Second, does real-world research down the line provide confirmation?

Virtual persona mistakes to avoid

• Do not use virtual personas to completely replace traditional research. With anything AI-powered, your outputs can only be as good as your inputs. Continually inform and refine personas with the most up-to-date audience data, market conditions, and sector expertise.
• Do not lose sight of the human factor. Human behaviour and decision-making is complex. Some virtual persona offerings rely purely on ChatGPT to mimic user feedback without any of the human drivers. At Savanta, we layer in personality traits and user values for realistic human behaviour.
• Do not obscure your use of AI. Building credibility with other stakeholders requires transparency. Be open about your team’s usage of virtual personas, including best practices adopted to mitigate concerns. Demonstrate their value in specific projects and how you stay mindful of limitations.

Your next to-do for virtual personas

We understand if you have more questions; the best marketing leaders we know are curious by nature, and there’s a lot of nuance with emerging technology.

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