I have a user portrait, but why can’t I understand the user?

The concept of user portrait has been around for many years, but why can’t I understand users even though I have user portraits? If you expect to understand a person through a few labels, then laugh. It’s not that user portraits are useless, but that you can only discover the user’s specific needs in specific scenarios.

1. What kind of user portrait do we want to create?

User portrait is a commonplace topic, but the user portrait we often want to build is as follows: User A, male, 20-30 years old, from Hubei, working in Beijing, a programmer in a small factory, usually likes to eat hot pot, watch technology exhibitions, and buy new technology products.

This is a standard user portrait, but what next? What's the use? During the holidays, we sent him air tickets from Beijing to Hubei, information about hot pot restaurants, development-related information, and recommended new computers, mobile phones, keyboards, and headphones.

So the question is, such a user portrait requires data from multiple parties to build, but what kind of user portrait does a travel website have?

User A purchased two round-trip tickets from Beijing to Hubei in a year. He likes to buy discounted tickets, rarely travels on business and has never booked a hotel. He browsed three travel routes in the past year but did not place an order. His motivation for travel arose in August.

What can this user portrait do?

First, traffic information from Beijing to Wuhan was pushed to users during holidays. Second, travel coupons and destination recommendations were pushed to users in August.

So why do you think user portraits are useless?

The two user portraits mentioned above are not entirely data, but also speculation based on the data. So what data do we actually get ?

User A purchased Beijing-Wuhan air tickets and air ticket details in February and August, and logged in three times in August. Building a user portrait is an actual insight into user behavior data and association with related scenarios. For example, based on air ticket information, we can associate the ticket price, flight time, purchase discount, and the order of ticket prices at the time of purchase to draw further analysis.

If we want to do more marketing plans through user portraits, such as travel websites recommending hotels to users, we will not be able to get accurate information.

Therefore, the establishment of user portraits is to create labels for users based on the association of user behavior data, and the next marketing behavior is carried out according to the associated labels.

2. How should user portraits be used?

Faced with a large number of users, we cannot analyze every single user. User portraits represent the typical characteristics of users. In specific applications, we establish user groups based on differences in user behavior and establish user portraits based on the characteristics of each group of users. In actual use, we need to call up user groups based on the purpose, rather than designing operational objectives based on user characteristics.

For example, if our goal is to increase the sales of air tickets, we can filter out high-frequency users who fly more than 4 times a year, retrieve user groups from this dimension, and further analyze the users in this group, such as common destinations, ticket purchase preferences (price/airline/aircraft model/cabin), and flight time, and design promotional copy according to specific user attributes. For example, we can recommend air ticket coupons to business class passengers every month, and recommend relevant route information to users with fixed destinations.

What if it’s the other way around? We fine-tune a group: passengers who fly more than 10 times a year and have an 80% chance of flying business class. What can we do? This requires us to design marketing activities for this group of users, but what is the purpose?

The difference between the two ideas is that one is to find the target users through user portraits and guide the details of the marketing activities through the characteristics of the target users; the other is that I know the preferences of this user and take the next action based on the user, which will affect the achievement of the overall operational goals.

Summary: Applying user portraits from the perspective of user segmentation is a common idea in marketing. User portraits can guide us in setting up event copy, posters, and preferential benefits, but they cannot tell us what kind of marketing campaign to design.

User portraits are a rational and effective use of existing resources to improve operational results. We cannot predict the next action through user portraits, but we can only establish an effective connection between user needs and existing resources to achieve the goal of informing those in need of useful information.

Source: Zhuge io Data Coach