Developing a buyer persona requires more than pooling your stock knowledge of what you believe the ideal customer to be. The process must also always include concrete data to back-up the profile.
Online survey tools, focused group discussions, and interviews are the go-to sources for learning more about the target audience’s goals, interests, and needs. If you want to create more detailed and multi-faceted buyer personas, using these alone won’t cut it. You’ll need to add more sophisticated data-sourcing instruments to your Buyer Persona Creation Toolbox.
Quora
If you’re familiar with this social surveying tool, you might associate it with questions like:
- What are the most surreal places one can visit? or
- Why do so many people quit their 6-figure jobs?
But that’s only the tip of the iceberg where the potential of Quora as an avenue for gathering buyer persona data is concerned. The tool strives to be “your best source for knowledge” by allowing users to post and answer questions on over 400,000 topics.
Remember, even if you’re 80 percent done with your buyer persona, you’ll still have 20 percent room to make it better. Asking targeted questions on Quora can help you flesh out the target market’s interests and motivation further.
For example, you’re a wedding gown designer that helps brides find their dream dresses. You know that your customer is profile is solidly in the brides-to-be category. But learning more about their preferences paint a bigger picture of what they want and how you can market yourself as having the solution to their needs.
In this scenario, you can ask the following questions on Quora:
- What’s the first characteristic that attracts you to a wedding dress?
- What makes you say yes to a wedding gown designer?
Google Surveys
This Google-powered platform offers a quick and cost-effective way to gain real consumer insight through custom surveys. Its easy-to-use survey creator can get you results faster compared to traditional research. All you have to do is design your survey and tell Google what you know about your audience.
Marketers use Google Surveys to understand the motivations and habits of real people who represent your target audience. It also provides marketable quantitative data by offering to poll outside of your marketing network (using your website visitors, email lists, etc.) and collect quantitative data.
Unlike other crowdsourcing tools, Google Surveys respondents answer questions to gain access to premium content around the web while you learn more about their needs. Apart from being a good source of consumer insight, it also directs more potential leads into your funnel.
Mechanical Turk
Mechanical Turk connects businesses with a sizeable on-demand workforce to accomplish tasks effectively. While most companies use Amazon’s tool to outsource lower-level tasks, its features (content creation, feedback tools, and monitoring services) improve the accuracy of buyer persona development. Users can build screen shares and heat maps, allowing a more in-depth insight into how workers engage with content or use it to venture deeper into specific engagement practices.
The Bottom Line
Instead of just relying on interviews and online survey tools, strengthen your data research processes by adding these tools to your toolbox. With their help, you can answer more than just who you’re marketing to and round out your buyer persona. You’ll know who they are, what they like, how they’re likely to receive you, and how you can make sure they accept you.
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