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5 steps for researching accurate buyer personas

Posted by Perceptive Insights Team - 01 November, 2017

When creating your personas, you’ll want to ensure you’re asking the right questions to get the information that you need. Here, we’re sharing our best tips on how to develop your buyer personas—including the questions to ask when you do.

Why data-backed personas are important

Personas help to keep your company on-target.

Salespeople chase the right leads, marketers construct the correct content to appeal to them, and research and development study the problems your audience is facing and work to create new product features to resolve them.

However, buyer personas are often formed on the basis of too little data and too many assumptions. This can lead to them becoming a distraction, rather than being informative. In the worst cases, they can even generate tension between and within various departments, as people argue as to who is "better representing" the persona in question.

In other words, poorly formed personas do the exact opposite of their intent: they distract, they fracture and they mislead.

This is why you need to ensure that you have the right process in place for researching the right data needed to create personas that actually represent your customers.

How-to-develop-your-marketing-personas-step-by-step-cropped

Related content: Understanding your audience

 

Asking the right questions

Before you can begin researching, you'll need to determine the right questions about your audience. These questions will make up your surveys, forms, queries to your team, and so on.

Questions like:

  1. Where are your customers from?
  2. How old are they?
  3. What do they do for a living?
  4. What interests and hobbies do they have?
  5. Where do they hang out with their friends?
  6. What does their household look like?
  7. What challenges are they facing?
  8. Which of these are they hoping to solve with your product or service?
  9. What are their goals, desires and dreams?
  10. What media channels are they active on?
  11. Where do they begin their purchasing journey?
  12. How do they evaluate different offerings?
  13. What is the key deciding factor in their purchasing decisions?

The list above is not exhaustive. Depending on your business, you will need to consider additional questions, and remove others.

For example, in a business-to-business context (B2B), you may need to ask other questions like: 

  • Who are the decision makers?
  • How much budget do they have to invest in your product or service?
  • How large is their company in terms or revenue or employee size?

In a business-to-consumer market (B2C), those questions will be irrelevant but you might be better off asking things like:

  • How active is your audience on social media?
  • How likely are they to recommend brands they like to their friends and family?
  • What is their overall household income?

 

Tip: If you aren't sure what questions you need to ask, start with the basics: demographics and geographic; who they are and where they're from. The rest will flow from there—keep your mind open to any factors that might influence their buying decision.

 

5 steps to collect the data you need to create your personas

Once your questions have been defined, you can begin gathering your data.

There are a variety of methodologies you can use to get the data you need, but here's five common ones to get you started:

 

1. Interview and survey your customers 

Interviews can be done either face-to-face or over the phone, and will help you to understand what customers like about your product or service.

The face-to-face option is ideal, as it allows you to record the plethora of non-verbal communication present in such conversations. However, this does tend to take longer and may not always be a practical method for your business. In these cases, phone interviews are perfectly viable.

You should also consider a survey at the same time. While the interviews will gather the deeper experiential insights from your customer, a survey can gather equally important demographic data.

You may even want to arrange your interview invitations based on the answers to the survey. For example, if you find a significant portion of survey respondents are from a particular demographic, it could pay to interview a few of them to get more insights into this important portion of your target audience.

These interviewees will also often be the primary examples from which you build your personas.

 

2. Analyse new and existing data for trends

You will have a host of data from these interviews and surveys. However, your existing database, if available, can also be an excellent source of data for persona analysis.

Start by analysing how your current customers are interacting with your content:

  • How are they reaching your site; search, social media, or directly?
  • What do they do once they are there; do they head to the blog, to a particular landing page, or immediately click away?
  • What kind of content are they engaging with? Is there a particular subject they seem to be especially engrossed in?

This behavioural analysis gives you insight not only into how your content is performing (and how to produce more of it), but also gives you a look into the mind of your customers: what they want from you, what challenges they are facing, and how they seek to solve them.

We recommend using Google Analytics as a tool to get a basic idea of these trends on your website. You may need to wait some time for data to collect, however, if you haven't already implemented the tracking code required for the use of Google Analytics.

 

3. Ask your sales and marketing teams

This bedrock of data will require more refinement. You will need to segment this data out into usable chunks—but separating the wheat from the chaff can be difficult. Your sales and marketing teams can point you in the right direction.

The sales team should be able to tell you about the kinds of leads that are most valuable (and which are not), and how these leads respond to their sales approach. 

  • Do the leads seem excited from the outset, or do they require a fair amount of cajoling?
  • What kinds of features do the leads appears to be most interested in?
  • What problems do the leads seem to be facing the most?

 

The same can be said of the marketing team. They will be able to let you know what kind of content is having the most impact with certain groups of people.

  • Did a particular advertising campaign hit home more than others?
  • What is the most popular piece of marketing collateral produced to date?
  • Are you focusing your efforts in one particular place? Why?

 

Your internal stakeholders are excellent sources of qualitative information in particular, and they should be able to help you gain a picture of the more human side of your personas.

 

4. Utilise form submissions

If you use the questions above as form fields, you get instant persona direction every time an engaged part of your audience submits a form.

A word of caution, however: be careful with the number of form fields you use. Too many, and even the keenest lead might be put off and click away from your offer. Too few, and it can undermine the qualification process.

Some platforms, such as HubSpot, provide you with the opportunity to use "smart form fields". These allow you to gather further new information about a contact after their first submission.

For example, if you have a lead that has already submitted their basic demographic data (name and email, for example), the next time they visit the site and go to fill out a form, they will be asked for their company size, geographic region, or whatever else is pertinent to your business.

This is an effective way to gather persona data without irritating your users.

 

5. Brainstorm with your team

Sometimes you simply don't get the data you need. Sometimes a survey gets a poor response rate, or a website’s traffic volume is too low.

In times like these, a certain level of assumption may be permissible—if only to get you down the right path.

But you must still rely on accurate data if you want usable personas. To do that, you need to avoid the major problems that persona development runs into: misleading data and inconsistency across departments.

To do this, gather all the important internal stakeholders together and hold a brainstorm session. This is much like step 3, but casts a wider net. Anyone who may have insights into the mind of the customer—sales, marketing, customer service, executives—should be invited. 

This way, you ensure that you are getting at least a modicum of informed data on your persona. Perhaps more importantly, you are also ensuring that everyone is on the same page about the personas you are pursuing: no inter- or intra-departmental discord due to persona miscommunications.

 

Summary

To develop truly accurate, useful personas, you need to have the right data. 

That data is gathered from qualitative and quantitative methods, and is based around forming and answering the right kinds of questions. 

While there are many ways to get the data you need, the five places we recommend any business should start are:

  1. Interviewing and surveying customers.
  2. Analysing new and existing data.
  3. Obtaining insights from your sales and marketing teams.
  4. Utilising form submissions to get more specific data.
  5. Brainstorming with your wider team if necessary.

From these insights, you will be able to create personas that direct your business towards a more customer-centric and more profitable future.

 


Want to learn more about how to maximise your lead generation with inbound marketing by targeting the right audience? Download our free ebook.

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Topics: Customer Insights


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