How To Create A Buyer Persona [Customer Research]
How To Create A Buyer Persona [Customer Research]
Let’s talk about how to do customer research that will help you to increase revenue in your business.”
If you plan on getting customers in order to generate revenue from your services, you need to become an expert in your field but you also must be become an expert in understanding your customers.
A lot of new business owners make the mistake of spending a massive amount of time on SEO and other traffic tactics before getting a real understanding of their target market. This is a huge mistake. If you attract the wrong people they will have no interest and your services.
There is simply no point in bringing people to your website if you are not confident that you’re offering exactly what those specific people want.
The research that we’re about to discuss relates to individuals but if you want to take a B2B approach then the only difference is that this research should be applied to the individual decision maker in the business that you will be targeting.
Demographics
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age
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Gender
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Location
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Educational level
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Income
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Ethnicity
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Number of children
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Marital status
If you already have traffic coming into your website it’s relatively easy to figure out the demographics. All you need to do is install Google analytics and it will tell you everything you need. If you have an active Facebook presence you can also get demographic information from the analytics in Facebook.
If you’re just getting started and need to know how to get demographic information while having no existing customers, you can do your best to predict your customer persona. For our example, you can just Google “demographics of [insert target customer type]”.
Go ahead and repeat this for several related keywords and look for trends.
Psychographics
Psychographics allow you to add an additional layer of information to your persona buy also describing your client’s values, preferences, and attitudes. You can do this by you considering the following questions:
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What are the most common questions that they have about the problem that you can solve?
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How knowledgeable are they about the problem you can solve?
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How important is the problem you can solve to them? Is it just something they want or need?
Look for information about what they like and don’t like. Look for common problems where people are struggling to find satisfactory solutions.
Think about how your service would be perceived by these people. What do you think they would like or not like? Do you need to add or subtract something in order for your services to appeal to these potential customers? Do you need to add or subtract content in order to appeal to these potential customers?
If you don’t have any forums of groups in mind you can obviously just Google them but one good place to start is Reddit. The reason Reddit is useful is that it usually has very large number of participants and this is obviously important when you’re trying to develop a persona. You need your persona to reflect the needs of your entire audience rather than a small number of individuals that might dominate the discussion on a small forum. The other reason that Reddit it Is useful is that it uses the concept of upvoting. This makes it easy for you to see what your audience likes and doesn’t like because they’re literally voting on what they like and don’t like.
Behavior
You spent a lot of time looking at what people are saying but interestingly people don’t always act in a way that is consistent with what they say. For example, there’re a lot of people that pretend to read a lot more than they actually do. If you’re planning on offering content that will attract real paying customers then you need to understand how people actually consume content rather than how they say they will consume it.
- What formats do they prefer – text, video, audio?
- How often? Daily, weekly monthly?
- What length of content do they prefer?
You can get some answers by going back to the groups forums. When people link to content from a post do they link to a video or a blog post? I if they’re linking to videos, take a look at the videos. Do they have a large number of views? More importantly, look at the like to dislike ratio. If it is very high this could be an indication that people prefer to consume this particular type of content by video. If they link out to blog posts, take a look at the blog posts. Do they consist of brief summaries or do they include a long-form content that goes into a lot of detail?
![How To Create A Buyer Persona [Customer Research] Adam Radly](https://startandgrowabusiness.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2020/08/AR-Still-2.png)
Adam Radly
Founder of 'I Imagine'
> $100 Million raised for his businesses
> 1 Million views for his Tedx Talk about passion
Founder of World Reconciliation Day with Nelson Mandela