Conducting effective buyer personal research can help you reach high-quality leads and close more deals. Learn why, how to do it, and the mistakes to avoid.
Buyer personas can be a salesperson or marketer's best friend. They're one of the best tools for understanding and finding your target audience. They can help you craft personalized messages and valuable content to send to your leads. They can help you optimize your entire sales and marketing campaigns. They can even help you close more deals. But before you can do all of that, you have to master your buyer persona research.
Conducting effective buyer persona research is where many sales and marketing teams fall short. For example, they may not be utilizing all potential sources to gather data. This can lead to building an inaccurate profile that just costs you time and money in the future. Get it right the first time by following these four essential steps:
1. Collect Quantitative Data
Gathering quantitative sales data should always be the first step towards creating a new buyer persona. Start with the internal customer data reports that you already have access to — what you have stored in your CRM, SEP, and other sales tools, or any data you collect manually. This can give you insight into your current customers' behavior. You can also find data via your website's analytics and your social media interactions.
2. Collect Qualitative Data
While quantitative data is an important foundation for your customer activity, collecting qualitative data takes it a step further. This is the data that you can't quantify. It might come from customer feedback that you receive through your website, third party sites, or your customer service team. You can also offer surveys and questionnaires on your website or via email or social media and use the answers as part of your research.
If you have the resources, conducting interviews or setting up general consumer focus groups is another great way to gather information. You can do this in person or virtually, and you can compare the results to feedback from your actual customers.
In some cases, rather than having consumers come to you, you can observe them in their natural habitats. For example, many sales and marketing teams conduct research through social media listening or observing and analyzing what people are talking about in relation to your industry, niche, or product.
Be sure to include a competitive analysis or an in depth look at what your competition is doing. Depending on your specific goals, you can compare your content, marketing strategies, pricing, product features, and more.
3. Analyze and Segment Data
Once you've thoroughly gathered your quantitative and qualitative data, you should have a variety of sources available. As you begin your analysis, you'll start to notice patterns and trends. As they emerge, segment them into various groups based on characteristics they have in common. This could include demographics, like age, family status, income, or geographic location. It could include their interests, values, or lifestyle information. You can also segment customers based on behaviors, motivations, or pain points.
4. Create Detailed Buyer Personas
The final step is using all of the information you've gathered, analyzed, and segmented to build a detailed buyer persona or, in many cases, multiple personas. Ideally, you'll create one for each prominent segment of your target audience. What you include will largely depend on your goals, but typically, assigning as many details as you can to each profile is ideal as long as they're relevant.
Give your persona a name. It can be a literal name, like John, or it can be something more descriptive, like Middle Aged Soccer Dad or Female Solo Traveler. Next, assign your persona's basic demographics, like age, income, geographic location, relationship status, and what they do for a living. Once you have the basics, you can add psychographics, like hobbies, interests, values, and lifestyle preferences. Round it out with information like goals, motivations, pain points, buying patterns, challenges, and buyer journey. If you have direct quotes from your customers, focus groups, or interviews, you can include those as well.
You've conducted your buyer persona research. You've analyzed and segmented the information. You've created your personas. Now, let's take a look at how you can use them to improve your sales strategies.
1. Aligning Sales and Marketing Efforts
Once your buyer personas are complete, share them with your sales team and your marketing team. This can help ensure everyone is on the same page and offers cohesive, consistent messaging. When this happens, it leads to more targeted campaigns, stronger lead qualification and nurturing efforts, and a positive customer experience.
2. Personalizing Sales Pitches and Communication
Your sales reps can use your personas to personalize their pitches and outreach. You might find that a certain segment of your target audience prefers communication via social media to phone calls, or you might use their pain points and motivations to tailor just the right email. This can enhance engagement and possibly even speed up your sales cycle.
3. Enhancing Customer Journey Mapping
Your buyer personas can help your team create a strong customer journey map. Because they provide you with insight into your buyers' behavior, you can pick out relevant touchpoints and better understand why each of your personas behaves the way they do at each stage of the sales cycle.
While researching and creating buyer personas goes a long way in helping you revolutionize your sales cycle, there are some common mistakes that far too many sales professionals make. They can ruin your campaigns before you even get started.
1. Relying On Assumptions
Every single aspect of your buyer persona should have data to back it up. Don't make assumptions based on previous experience or your intuition. Simply remembering the way something happened a year ago doesn't take the market changes, buyer preferences, and your competitors' actions over the last year into consideration. Buyers can change the way they behave seemingly overnight. Even the most skilled and experienced salespeople in the world need data.
2. Neglecting Regular Updates
Those market changes, competitors, and buyer preferences are also some of the reasons why creating a buyer persona isn't something you do just once. Like the rest of your sales strategies, you must take time to update them regularly. In addition to those external factors, your business model might change. You might gain new customers who offer insightful feedback. There are dozens of reasons why a buyer persona you create in December may require reevaluating in May.
3. Overlooking Qualitative Data
Sales professionals are often obsessed with numbers. We get it. They provide so much insight and are the foundation of many of your strategies. But you can't overlook the qualitative data. Data reports tell you that a customer did something. Interviews, focus groups, and feedback tell you why they did it. When you understand the motivation behind your leads' and customers' actions, you can create a stronger campaign designed to reach those specific people.
One way to ensure you get the most accurate data — both qualitative and quantitative — for your buyer persona research is to utilize the right tools and platforms. Technology can help collect information, store data for future use, and generate reports without having to worry about doing it manually and potentially making costly errors. Some tools you might want to use include:
Creating the right buyer personas for your sales campaign starts with mastering the research behind it. Combining quantitative and qualitative data can help you identify your target audience and build a persona that gets results. Just remember that you can't make assumptions, and you must update your personas regularly, or you'll end up with outdated information that can sabotage your efforts.
