How to source accurate data for your buyer personas

A quick definition: buyer personas, also referred to as marketing personas, are the closest representation of what your ideal customers look like. The purpose of buyer personas is to provide you with answers to the all-important question, "Who are we making this for?"

The importance of buyer personas

Like most business owners, you are probably crunched on time and looking for ways to prioritize. But this doesn't mean you have to abandon insightful tools—such as your buyer personas—as soon as you’ve built them. Having documented personas, even in their simplest forms, will not only help you crystallize your ideas, but also serve as a single version of truth for everybody creating content for your organization. 

If you’d like to learn the some essential steps for creating and applying your personas more successfully, stay tuned!

How to build a persona

Personas enable you to focus on only the data that will help make your content more relevant and actionable. To get started, you’ll need to put together a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. Here are some common questions to consider:

The answers to these questions will allow you to come up with ideal content topics, types, and channels that will encourage your intended audience to make a purchase. If, for whatever reason, you are not about to answer these questions, don’t panic! There are many other ways to learn about your buyers’ needs, motivations, content preferences, and typical purchase behaviors.

How to source accurate customer data 

A/B testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is a marketing experiment wherein you split your audience to test variations on a campaign and determine which performs better. In other words, you can show version A of a piece of marketing content to one half of your audience and version B to another.

Testing your existing content can provide quantitative insights into what works for your target audience and what doesn’t, so you can ensure you don’t make incorrect assumptions about what your audience likes.

Progressive profiling

This technique uses smart lead forms and directed questioning to gather audience insights that grow more detailed over time, allowing your marketing team to craft effective strategies that connect with the consumer. Progressive profiling can be used to build out your personas and  streamline your lead nurturing process based on actual data points such as company size, job role, industry, location, etc., instead of making educated guesses.

Current content consumption analysis

Do you know how your audience consumes content now? Analytics data such as page views, time on site, downloads, newsletter open rates, and bounce rates can provide insight on where your audience’s top needs and interests lie.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis, also referred to as opinion mining, is an approach to natural language processing (NLP) that identifies the emotional tone behind a body of text. It can be used by your marketing team to determine and categorize your target audience’s opinion about one of your products, services or an idea.

Mining your CRM system 

By tracking buyer persona activity in your CRM, you can start to identify patterns and record trends around specific data segments. In your CRM analytics dashboard, these attributes will help you create the most accurate buyer personas:

• Demographic information
• Geographical information
• Purchasing information
• Previous interaction
• Customer feedback
• Marketing data

A final thought 

Each potential buyer has their own specific expectations and a story that data alone will rarely tell. But when these stories are merged into one ideal buyer, your company will gain a more holistic understanding and what does and does not work with your current strategy.

Although there are many secondary research sources available to help define the demographics and psychographics of your buyer personas, nothing beats the ability to get information directly from your customers and prospects… There’s no substitute for the personal interview!