If you are reaching all your business and marketing goals with content that reaches your target audience effectively with clearly defined buyer personas then this post is not for you.

However, if you are falling short of your goals, metrics, KPIs, you know all the buzzwords to measure performance in the business realm, then this post is for you.

Making the Case for Buyer Persona (Target Audience) Research

Are you considering personas for your business? Are you updating your personas? Are you seeking to improve the creation of personas using a better way?

Whether you’ve never created buyer personas before, or you’re working with poorly constructed or outdated personas, this post is for you.

The good news is that it’s not too late, so let’s get started.

Personas Definition

According to Adele Revella, the leading buyer persona authority provides a great functional definition to help guide your efforts:

One of the fundamental questions to ask is:

 

When was the last time you made invested time and resources to understand your customer at a deep level?

 

If your answer is never or not lately, that’s okay it’s not too late, and you will want to read further.

Return on Investment (ROI)

buyer persona Photo by GotCredit

If you’re still weary of starting on the journey of creating a buyer persona here’s more evidence to validate persona creation.

There is a direct relationship between high ROI and a strategic and methodic approach to buyer persona creation.

The better you understand your customers, the better your organization will be able to meet their needs increasing happiness resulting in customer retention and advocacy.

High Level Benefits of Persona Creation

Bottom line Buyer Personas drive sales and those that have adopted using them have displayed a significant boost in ROI.

The most crucial element personas influence is an improvement to customer experiences. The use of a well-constructed persona results in more effective marketing and sales.

Personas help to:

  • Improve value propositions
  • Increase profits
  • Provide a better understanding of buyers
  • Create higher lead conversions

 

Need more convincing?

 

Additional Benefits of Personas

persona photo

Listed below is a list of additional high-level benefits provided by developing well-constructed personas:

  1. Targeting and positioning
  2. Messaging and media planning
  3. Purchase motivations in the customer buying process
  4. Enterprise alignment
  5. A relatable human face for sales and marketing

Please see the post 31 business building benefits of Buyer Personas from leading marketing authority Mark W. Schaefer that expands on the benefits in each of these key areas.

 

Still not sold yet?

 

Stats That Make the Case for Using Personas

Listed below are powerful statistics to help you understand the importance of developing and maintaining personas. There are significant benefits that you can reap across the board as listed above.

The various areas listed below provide more specific details of the improvements that are possible by creating well-constructed personas.

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General Persona Stats

  • 44% of the B2B marketers have already discovered the power of Personas.
  • 83% of B2B marketers expect to use Personas in the near future.
  • 63% of marketers create content by buyer persona; 38% by vertical; 30% by geography; and 30% by account or customer

Profit Stats

  • Companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are twiceas likely to create personas than companies who miss these goals.
  • 71%of companies who exceed revenue and lead goals have documented personas.
  • 37%of companies who meet revenue and lead goals have documented personas.
  • 47%of companies who exceeded sales and revenue goals consistently maintain their personas.

Customer Focus Stats

  • 90% of companies using personas have been able to create a clearer understanding of their buyers.
  • 82% of companies using personas have created an improved value proposition.
  • 70% of companies who miss revenue and lead goals do not account for the all the members of the buying committee with their personas.
  • 65% of companies that updated their personas within the last 6 months exceeded their lead and revenue goals.
  • 58% of content B2B marketers consider ‘audience relevance’ the most important factor for determining the effectiveness of content marketing efforts.
  • Using personas made websites 2-5 times more effective and easier to use by targeted users.
  • High-performing companies are:
  • 3 timesmore likely to research the drivers of their buyers.
    • 2.0 times as likely to include the buying preferences of their personas.
    • 1.6 times as likely to understand the fears and challenges of their buyers.

Lead Conversion and the Sales Funnel

  • Companies who exceed lead and revenue goals are 4 times more likely to use personas for demand generation than organizations that missed lead and revenue goals.
  • 93% of companies who exceed lead and revenue goals report segmenting their database by persona.
  • Top performing companies have mapped 90% or more of their customer database by persona.
  • 56% of companies have developed higher quality leads using personas.
  • 24% of companies gained more leads using personas.
  • 36% of companies have achieved shorter sales cycle using personas.
  • Targeting cold leads with persona based content is 58% more effective than targeting warm leads without using persona based content.

Conversion in Marketing Channels

  • Persona based content increased customer engagement almost 6x when targeting cold leads.
  • Email open rates increased by 2-5 times using personas.
  • Click-Through-Rate (CTR) increased by 14% using personalized emails.
  • 10% improvement in email conversion rates using personas.
  • Revenue from using personas for emails increased 18 times (compared to broadcast emails).
  • Marketing Sherpa found using personas increased:
    • Website traffic by 210%.
    • Website generated leads by 97%.
    • Website generated sales by 124%.
    • Organic search traffic by 55%.
    • Online marketing focused efforts by 73%.

The Research Required to Create Personas

Customer personas provide detailed representations of the different segments that make up your target audience. Using data-driven research is the key to understanding who is your target audience and what motivates them to purchase your product or service.

research photoPhoto by haynie.thomas36 

Types of Research

Performing the necessary research is one of the most critical steps to take the user experience to the next level and get results. There are four types of research required that have specific purposes during the research process.

The three types of research recommended when creating personas include:

  • Background research
  • Qualitative research
  • Quantitative research

Putting yourself in the shoes of the user helps to understand the results you’re trying to achieve.

The amount of time and energy devoted to performing quality research can be a long and tiring journey but is vital to achieving your organizational goals. Organizations that do the required research separate themselves from others in their respective industry.

Research provides an understanding of user behavior that is the key ingredient to drive business results using an inbound marketing approach and growth driven design. A thorough analysis of the compiled data enables a pathway to actionable insight.

Goals of Research

The goal of your research is to develop a clear and actionable understanding of how users act before, during, and after engaging with various elements defined in your research design. This data, when looked at for compiling valuable buyer personas, is critical to help push your organization down the right path.

An understanding of all the facets of research methods provides the knowledge of the inputs to create your personas. The key benefit of understanding research methods allows you to perform the work yourself or better manage an outsourced vendor. Clearly defined research methods and best practices ensure you have well-defined personas that inform the strategy and tactics that ensure business success.

I’ll explore the various types of research involved to ensure you get results. Each type of research listed below is crucial to obtain the actionable insight you need to achieve your goals.

Background Research

The term background research can mean different things to different people, but I’ll define for the sake of this post as the first steps to learning about your organization or a client.

Start your background research with finding information on the industry, competitors, and performing social media research.

There are simple tools to provide statistics on the current state of an organization, keywords they are using on their site, and SEO rankings that include SEMRush, MOZ, and Google Trends. The information gained from these tools provide a baseline for future internal or client conversations revealing low-hanging fruit. Plus, conducting a deeper level of research about the culture of a company can uncover the way a brand conveys its product by its internal personnel. A survey of the internal staff reveals the perceived value delivered to clients providing a free and important method that creates significant discussion.

Creating a baseline provides a method to determine if tactics used after the initial research are effective when measured against the baseline results.

The next research types I have broken out into the two categories of research methods. There are three types of research design exploratory, descriptive, and causal. Within the next sections on qualitative and quantitative research types, an explanation of the research design types is provided.

Qualitative Research

buyer persona Photo by Casey Fiesler

Qualitative research focuses on gaining a deep understanding of a specific organization or event, rather than a surface-level description of a large sample population.

The qualitative approach provides insight into the structure, order, and broad patterns of a group of participants. Qualitative research is also known as ethnomethodology or field research and generates data about human groups in social settings. It’s important to note that qualitative research does not introduce treatments or manipulate variables, or apply the researcher’s definitions of variables on the participants. Instead, the meaning and operational definitions come from the participants.

Qualitative research seeks to get a better understanding through first-hand experience, truthful reporting, and quotations of actual conversations. The main purposes of qualitative research include an understanding of:

  • How the participants formulate meaning from their surroundings
  • How their meaning influences their behavior

A qualitative approach involves any research that does not include numerical data. The qualitative research method involves relationships between individuals, individuals and their environments, and motives that drive individual behavior and action. Qualitative research uses words, images, and pictures and typically qualitative research starts with a broad question rather than a specific hypothesis.

The sources of qualitative include:

  • Interviews (structured, semi-structured or unstructured)
  • Focus groups
  • Questionnaires or surveys
  • Secondary data, including diaries, self-reporting, written accounts of past events/archive data and company reports;
  • Direct observations – may also be recorded (image/video/audio)
  • Ethnography

The social aspect of qualitative research allows you to learn the answers to the questions and issues combined with the ability to observe the reactions of the subject. The face-to-face interaction reveals a deeper level of detail providing key insight with interaction methods like gestures, facial expressions, and body language.

Exploratory or qualitative research provides an important element of any marketing or business strategy. The focus of this type of research is the discovery of ideas and insights instead of collecting statistically accurate data. For this reason, qualitative research is best suited near the beginning of your total research plan. It is most commonly used for further defining:

  • Company issues
  • Areas for potential growth
  • Alternative courses of action
  • Prioritizing areas that require statistical research

Typically this type of research is performed after the background research step, often, leading to the most beneficial information and key insights.

Observational Research

The qualitative method of research can involve observational research. Qualitative Research is primarily exploratory research used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. The observational research approach requires further explanation as it is vital to the creation of personas.

Observational research is a social research technique traditionally used in social sciences and in marketing involving the direct observation of phenomena in their natural setting. The observational approach provides an uncontrolled method that differs significantly from experimental research where an artificial environment is created with control and manipulation of variables.

The value of observational research includes:

  • A better understanding and the ability to capture the context within which people interact
  • Firsthand experience with a setting allows researchers to open to discovery and inductive, rather than guessing what the context is like
  • Seeing through the eyes of the participant from the perspective of the people being studied
  • Attending to seemingly trivial detail to help understand what is going on and provide clues to other layers of reality
  • Discovery of key elements that routinely escape the awareness of the participant using a different method provides clues to other layers of reality
  • A chance to learn things that people may be unwilling to discuss in an interview.

The major advantage of observational research is that it gives in-depth data on how customers decide on their purchase behavior.

The typical forms of observational research are divided into naturalistic (or “nonparticipant”) observation and participant observation.

Naturalistic (or nonparticipant) observation has no intervention by a researcher and studies the behaviors that occur naturally in natural contexts vs. the artificial environment of a controlled laboratory setting.

Participant observation involves the observer participating in ongoing activities and records observations. The observer is a “player” in the action when using the participant observation approach differing from the naturalistic method. When using this method, often the researcher takes on the role being studied.

Qualitative Research Design Types

There are a variety of qualitative methods, so I have broken these down into five groups:

  1. Ethnography
  2. Narrative
  3. Phenomenological
  4. Grounded theory
  5. Case study
Ethnography

Instead of relying on interviews or surveys, ethnographic research immerses the researcher in the target participants environment. This type of research seeks to understand the goals, culture, challenges, motivations, and themes that emerge. For example, one method of understanding the unmet needs of customers is to observe them at home or in their natural environment as they interact with the product or service. The researcher does not have any hypothesis; this is purely an observational endeavor.

Narrative

With the narrative approach, you conduct in-depth interviews, read documents, and look for themes to create a sequence of events, from one or two individuals to form a cohesive story. Through the narrative approach, a story is created that illustrates the larger life influences that created it. This approach can bring to light conflicting stories and highlight frustration and challenges providing an opportunity for innovation.

The narrative approach weaves together a sequence of events, usually from just one or two individuals to form a cohesive story. You conduct in-depth interviews, read documents, and look for themes; in other words, how does an individual story illustrate the larger life influences that created it. Often interviews are conducted over weeks, months, or even years, but the final narrative doesn’t need to be in chronological order. Rather it can be presented as a story (or narrative) with themes and can reconcile conflicting stories and highlight tensions and challenges which can be opportunities for innovation.

Phenomenological

The phenomenological method is an appropriate approach to describe an event, activity, or phenomenon. This approach uses a combination of methods, such as reading documents, conducting interviews, watching videos, or visiting places and events. The goal is to understand the meaning participants place on a given variable being examined. The same as other qualitative methods you don’t begin with a formed hypothesis. Instead, you allow the participants’ perspective to provide insight into their motivations.

A phenomenological study aims to understand better the experience of the participant and how that may impact for example the purchase or experience with your product or service.

Grounded Theory

In contrast to a phenomenological study that describes the essence of an activity or an event, grounded theory seeks to provide an explanation or theory behind the events. The primary tools include interviews and existing documents to create a theory based on the data. With a grounded theory approach sample sizes are larger between 20 to 60 to better establish a theory. The grounded theory method can help inform design decisions by better understanding how a group or community of users currently use or interact with a product or perform tasks.Case Study

The value of the case study approach made famous by Harvard Business School attempts to explain an organization, entity, company, or event. A case study involves a deep understanding through multiple types of data sources. The different types of case studies can include exploratory, explanatory, or description of an event.

Quantitative Research

buyer persona
Photo by geralt

Quantitative research methods attempt to explain phenomena by collecting and analyzing numerical data. Data collected are always numerical and analyzed using statistical methods. Data collection methods typically involve:

  • Polls
  • Questionnaires
  • Surveys
  • Manipulation of pre-existing statistical data using computational techniques

Quantitative research centers on the collection of numerical data and generalizing it across groups of people or to explain a particular phenomenon. Variables are controlled as much as possible (RCD as the gold standard), in quantitative research so we can eliminate interference and measure the effect of any change.

Data Collection Methods

Data is collected using the sources below.

  • Surveys using a large number of respondents (ex. Likert scale)
  • Observations (counts of numbers and/or coding data into numbers)
  • Secondary data (government data; SATs scores etc)

Quantitative Research Design Types

There are three main types of quantitative research:  descriptive, correlational, causal-comparative/quasi-experimental, and experimental research.

  • Descriptive research
  • Correlational research
  • Causal-comparative/quasi-experimental

Descriptive Research

The descriptive research type seeks to describe the current status of an identified variable. These research projects are designed to provide systematic information about a phenomenon.

Unlike exploratory research, descriptive research is preplanned and has a structured design so the information collected can be statistically inferred on a population.

The central idea in descriptive research is to better define an opinion, attitude, or behaviour held by a group of people on a defined subject. For example, an everyday multiple choice question is descriptive research because there are predefined categories a respondent must choose from. These questions will not provide the unique insights like exploratory research would. However, grouping the responses into predetermined choices will provide statistically inferable data.

By grouping the questions it allows you to measure the statistical significance of your results on the overall population you are researching. In addition, you can measure the changes of your respondent’s opinions, attitudes, and behaviors over time.

Correlational Research Design

Correlation analysis is a research method of statistical evaluation used to explore the strength of a relationship between two, numerically measured, continuous variables (e.g., height, weight, etc..) to find statistically relevant trends. An important concept during the analysis when using correlational research is that a correlative relationship can be a coincidence—and it is critical to understand when this occurs.

This particular type of research and analysis is useful when you want to establish if there are possible connections between variables. It is often misunderstood that correlation research and analysis determine cause and effect; however, this is not the case because other variables that are not present in the research may have impacted on the results.

If a correlation is found between two variables it means that when there is a systematic change in one variable, there is also a systematic change in the other; the variables alter together over a period of time.

Causation Vs Correlation

It’s important to understand the difference between correlation and causation. A simple differentiation is that causation equals cause and effect, while correlation means a relationship exists, but that cause and effect can’t be proved. Causation allows you to see which events or initiatives led to a particular outcome. Correlation is just a means of measuring the relationship between variables to find statistically relevant trends.

Buyer persona and Correlation

A survey conducted by Cintell entitled 2016 BENCHMARK STUDY ON UNDERSTANDING B2B BUYERS, indicates that high performing organizations utilized qualitative research for their buyer personas. The central focus of the study was the use of buyer personas and understanding B2B buyers. A key finding insight was that 70% of companies who missed their revenue goals did not conduct qualitative research for their personas. Another critical finding was that 82% of companies that exceeded their revenue goals conducted qualitative research. These facts from the 137 respondents, from a variety of roles primarily in marketing, shows a strong correlation between the use of qualitative research and the effectiveness of buyer personas.

The survey indicated a top challenge was getting the organization as a whole to value personas.  There is also a correlation to the high percentage of respondents indicated they used buyer personas for messaging and demand generation.

Causal Research Design

Similar to descriptive research, causal research is quantitative with significant preplanning and structured design. Causal research attempts to explain the cause and effect relationship between two variables using experimentation. The two objectives of causal research include:

  • Understanding which variables are the cause and which variables are the effect
  • Determining the nature of the relationship between the causal variables and the hypothesized effect

For example, a B2B organization wants to learn if they will receive more sales with a change in packaging design. In descriptive research you would ask people if they would be more likely to buy their product in the new box, causal instead would setup an experiment in two separate retail or distributor stores. The B2B firm would select two retail or distributor stores and have one store sell the original packaging design and the other only the new packaging design.

It is very important to avoid any outside sources of bias. Next, the B2B organization measures the difference in sales based on the packaging design in a defined time period. The questions that causal research provides an understanding are:

  • Did the new packaging design have an effect on the sales of that product?
  • What was the effect?

In-House Vs. Outsourced Research

buyer persona

Whether you are doing the persona creation in-house or you outsource, you need to know the basics of good research. Like with any good project having the right team is critical. I recommend outsourcing this activity if you do not have the in-house talent or time to devote to research. However, having a defined in-house team to oversee the project and select the vendor is mission critical to ensure you are getting actionable insight to drive all of your marketing and business goals.

The team you select should have an understanding of the research described further in this post. The personnel selected should set clear goals for the persona project including a buyer profile and buyer insight. The team also should pre-qualify the vendors selected and check references of each vendor candidate.

It is mission critical that the team double check the research design and get a detailed breakdown of the design from each vendor. For example, you are a national company, and the vendor selects only people from a certain geographic area or does not use a representative sample size, then you will not obtain meaningful insight. Obtaining a vendor that has experience in your industry with access to customers and influencers that are critical to your business can be a significant benefit.

Whether you do this in-house or outsource you need to know the research behind the persona creation.

What You Should Get in the End

The two high-level takeaways you should get at the end of the buyer persona creation process includes two components.

  • Buyer profile – explains who your ideal customer is through relevant demographic and psychographic details
  • Buyer insight – reveals what makes your ideal customer decide to purchase

 

What you will often get is the buyer profile without the insights. This leads to incomplete and inaccurate information that will not help your organization reach its goals.

The buyer insight provides the finishing element that detail the buyer’s feelings, motivations, and expectations relating to the part of their life that your product or service will impact. The different personas created should also provide the buyer insight identifying goals and doubts, and methods of evaluating products or services that are similar.

Other elements of buyer insight include the reasons an individual chooses to buy or not buy similar products or services in the distant or recent past. It specifies the time of day they buy, and the conditions they tend to buy, and the duration of the buying process. An explanation of the kind of marketing and promotion that the persona responds to is included.

These buyer insights are the core ingredient that make buyer personas work helping to create a successful marketing strategy, copy that converts, and a marketing funnel that drives sales.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve given you all the information you need to convince you of the need to create personas that are actionable for your organization.

How you research is a critical component laying the foundation for the creation of successful buyer personas. All of the different research methods and design types contribute significantly to findings in their unique way, because of the different manner you are interacting with the subject to collect data.

You will obtain significantly different data with the different styles of research methods, and that is why all of these need to be mentioned and considered when doing research.

The ability to obtain data in unique ways will allow you to develop an understanding of your subjects from all aspects and angles of the research process.

Performing the research in-house versus outsourcing is critical and if you don’t have the qualified personnel outsourcing is an effective option. The research methods and tools and the recommendations provide you with what you need to manage a vendor or manage the personnel doing it in-house.

Last but not least, the profile without the insights portion will lead to failure. If you ensure you get a profile based on quality research design, this will lead to the critical insights to drive meaningful results with your organization.

Now I challenge you to go and create personas!