In a previous blog post back in July, we talked about what buyer personas are and how to create them. A lot of thought should go into your buyer personas in order to have successful marketing campaigns.
You may know the job titles of your top three personas…
- Social Media Expert Sally
- Marketing Manager Marg
- Entrepreneurial Erik
But how do you come up with the little details – where they shop, what their interests are, or how they respond to incentives? That’s where research steps in. In this blog post, we’re going to shed some light on how to research buyer personas.
Buyer Personas
Buyer Personas are fictionalised representations of your ideal customer(s) that in turn help you better understand your potential customers. Building buyer personas allows you to point out precisely the type of person who would be interested in, and eventually purchase, your goods – their age, sex, location, job, family life, hobbies, communication preference – all information you need to efficiently tell the story that your goods can, (and will!), solve their problem.
While there is no perfect way to gather all of this information, here are some creative ways to find this information and build a strong persona:
- Interviews – face-to-face or over the phone
- Look for trends in your database on how customers find and consume your content
- When creating forms for your website use fields/questions that will help you match them to personas
- Ask your sales team for feedback – what generalisations do they have about the customers you serve best?
- Utilise LinkedIn – find a few people who have your personas job title and see what they are posting, what they have listed as interests, what level of schooling they have, what skills they possess, and any other information you can gather
- Find out behaviours from Twitter – navigate directly to https://analytics.twitter.com/, click on the audiences tab, change the filter from ‘your followers’ to ‘all Twitter users’, then click on ‘personas’ and it will drop down with plenty of options for you to browse through
- Facebook Audience insights – You can find tools like what you will find on Twitter, but it’s important to look at both as they will have different users
- Use free tools like Google Trends to analyse activity around specific trends to see when and where people are searching for your products. This can help you decide when your personas are most likely to look for information, ultimately helping you decide which days and what time to publish content
- Use free forms like Google Surveys or SurveyMonkey to create your own surveys and data if you are having trouble locating statistics to contextualise your research
If you’re building buyer personas, this is a great place to start. Make sure to read our previous blog post ‘Buyer Personas and How to Build Them’ for a comprehensive list of what to include when defining your buyer personas.
If you have any questions or want some advice on building a buyer persona, get in touch! Our expert team is ready to help!
