Buyer personas are one of the essential building blocks of personalized marketing. These data-backed representations of your buyers should deliver an archetype of who they are. In other words, they tell you what your users are trying to do, why they're doing it, how they think, where and when they buy, and whom they buy from. You can use this to tailor your process for each persona, improving both your lead quality and your leads' marketing experience.
https://www.business.com/articles/data-driven-buyer-personas/
Today's marketers are facing a paradox: We have better intelligence and tools for driving growth than ever before. Data-driven digital marketing, programmatic and audience buying are proven to be delivering results. But if return on investment ROI » is going up, why are sales in decline?
There are some simple causes and effects: Media inflation continues to increase across all channels, while reach has declined for most every channel and publisher. Rising costs combined with declining reach drives up Cost-Per-Point CPP » , which means creative needs to be exponentially more effective to deliver the same results (and that's before attenuation of media attention is factored in). In most cases, even the best creative cannot offset the decline in efficiency. It's just math. And as the math suggests, in most cases we'd expect to see a decline in payback. Yet most channel-specific measurements show a positive ROI. Why?
http://adage.com/article/neustar/marketer-s-paradox-roi-sales-decline/310415/
One of the most popular passwords in 2016 was “qwertyuiop”—the string of horizontal letters from the top line of a keyboard. Even though most password meters suggest that it's weak, none offers advice on how to strengthen it. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Chicago have unveiled technology that offers real-time feedback and advice to help people create better passwords. To evaluate its performance, the team conducted an online study in which they asked more than 4,500 people to use it to create a password.
“Instead of just having a meter say, ‘Your password is bad,’ we thought it would be useful for the meter to say, ‘Here’s why it’s bad, and here’s how you could do better,’” said study co-author Nicolas Christin, professor in engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.
https://news.uchicago.edu/article/2017/05/09/research-utilizes-data-driven-feedback-help-users-strengthen-passwords/
Beware of the HiPPO in the room. When a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) is in play, your organization is most likely not relying on data to inform decision-making. In fact, I believe the HiPPO effect is one of the biggest barriers to more evidence-based and data-driven decision-making. With the quantity and quality of data available today, it is just poor business for organizations to ignore data in favor of making decisions solely based on what the HiPPO wants done...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/26/data-driven-decision-making-beware-of-the-hippo-effect/#1131f38280f9/
