Did you know that 80% of the new data incoming for firms is unstructured, according to Gartner? What’s surprising is that for enterprise firms, this accounts for 80% of their data. With the type of unstructured data available, I believe this represents a significant opportunity for forward-leaning firms and CMOs to dive into unstructured data to identify new intelligence to inform their personas.
What is unstructured data?
Unstructured data exists in various formats, including text, video, images, and social media. These formats encompass zero-party data, which is text data filled in a survey; first-party data, which includes emails; and third-party data, which includes social media text.
What makes it an intelligence-rich layer are:
📊 Variety of formats.
According to Forbes, almost 50% of Gen Z use social media instead of search engines, followed by Millennials at 35%. On the video front, about 60% of Gen Z use and between 50% and 80% of Millennials use YouTube and TikTok. For Gen X and Baby Boomers, YouTube is the primary platform, with between 8% and 25% using TikTok.
These rich forms of intelligence provide firms with multiple modalities to quickly understand and personalize it for Gen Z and Millennials. To ensure Gen X and Baby Boomers aren’t left behind, firms will need to prioritize YouTube and social media.
🤖 New formats, new insights.
Large Language Models (LLMs) like Perplexity, Claude, or ChatGPT can read large volumes of text data, summarize, and conduct sentiment analysis. This provides quicker insights into how customers feel about or engage with your product.
For sales, it means they can personalize their presentations to align with the customers’ personas and predict the anxieties and goals they have. Marketing can adjust the messaging and roll out new content to address the questions early in the sales process.
🎯 Discover new segments.
With unstructured data, firms can augment existing personas, deepen those relationships, and eliminate the unprofitable personas. New personas can also be created based on uncovering new customer behaviors and segments.
✨ Personalization at scale.
As firms integrate structured and unstructured data, they will become more strategic in their data collection and governance approach to deliver a personalized customer experience. Its success requires an end-to-end vision of how the entire organization manages its data portfolio. According to Accenture, 74% of customers value it when firms consistently match and maintain their communications preferences.
Forward-leaning firms building an intelligence layer must embrace both structured and unstructured data with AI, as each contributes unique benefits to the development and personalization of personas. When customers are understood, they buy.
How are you using unstructured data to enhance your personas in the era of AI?
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