@ John-Scott – excellent question! My initial reaction is that you need to test additional personas until you’re at the point where the cost of investment exceeds value received. Having said that, my gut reaction is that the more specific the need of the prospect, the more likely they are to buy if you site has what they’re looking for. Folks with a specific need aren’t ‘tire-kicking’, they want what they want and they’ll get it from who’ll deliver. Overall, we will be talking smaller numbers, but the % of those numbers who convert to customers will be higher.

But like I said, you really have to run and test the numbers to see what works best for you.

Our technology enables marketers to welcome market segments differently upon arrival to their websites. Sometimes, we are met with – Wow so we would have to create content for each market segment that we choose to detect! We are always bewildered by that comment because the winning formula seems to be “Increased Relevance = Increased Conversion”.

However, we do recognize that diminishing marginal returns occur as you continue to add personas to the mix. For example, our oldest implementation (about 9 months) only has two personas, but they impact the majority of interactions (62%). So, by adding another Semantic Persona, we might move to 75% of interactions. With each addition impacting a progressively smaller percentage of visitors.

Here is my question:

If you’ve read “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson, do we stand to have even greater gains in conversion by welcoming the smaller, niche groups with meaningful (more relevant) content? Are they likely to appreciate it even more than the more mainstream visitors?

Here is an illustrative example – Let’s say we own a computer products company with thousands of products available online. We might recognize that Apple is becoming a larger share of the market – so we create a Semantic Persona, Apple Enthusiasts. And, it is triggered when we see that a visitor has been visiting Apple.com, checking out Apple related blogs and is using an Apple computer. We welcome them with Apple products – iPhones, memory, external monitors, etc. That’s pretty relevant, and it saves them time (convenient). But what if they were using a G3 iBook? Obviously, it can’t take advantage of many of the more current peripherals, upgrades or software. But what if we welcomed people matching the G3 iBook Persona with G3 compatible products? Would catering to this smaller market pay off with an even bigger conversion rate? As a baseline, we are experiencing a 26% increase in conversion with our Semanticator technology today.

Interested in your thoughts as to whether “The Long Tail” approach would be worth the additional investment in content development.

I especially agree with your point about starting on the next product now, it is easy to sit and wait without being productive and time quickly races by.