Build Buyer Personas with Facts and Not with Intuition

Irony is that usually a campaign is created by a marketer guided only by his knowledge and intuition that too sitting in an Air conditioned Room. And there is very much a possibility of him predicting wrongly the behavior of the buyers. Solution, is to get your feedback from factual data.

You must have heard me say a zillion times that every business starts with understanding your customer. And most of you know the first step understanding your customer is to create your Buyer Persona. You should go through steps to create your own marketing Buyer Persona

In this Blog, I have written a buyer persona guide and steps to create buyer persona using Google Analytics, I shall be telling you how to create factual buyer persona by using hard data, removing a great deal of subjectivity and understand the customer on facts.

ULTIMATE GUIDE TO BUYER PERSONA

Buyer personas are imaginary, generalized representation of your ideal customers. For creating buyer personas you first need to have the proper understanding of your customers. Buyer personas are also referred as marketing personas as this is a great marketing strategy. It is built from the real words of the real buyers, it tells you what customers are thinking.

By creating good buyer personas, you will be able to generate more sales and conversions. An organization will have the knowledge of their relevant customers by creating buyer personas.

It is recommended that you make 3 to 5 personas to represent your audience. Creating 3 to 5 persona will cover the majority of your customers.

Important facts while creating buyer personas

• What causes certain buyers to invest in services like yours.
• What results a buyer expects from your services.
• Which facts and concerns cause your buyer to think that your service is not the best option.
• Evaluate what impacts of your services are made on the buyer to make them continue to use your services. You need to know which resources a buyer trust.

CREATING AN EFFECTIVE BUYER PERSONA

A buyer persona is a composite representation a targeted customer based on the market research and the data on the company’s existing customer base. When creating buyer personas the factors to keep in mind are customer preferences and behavior, this can be done by knowing the customer’s browsing behavior on a company’s website.

• Knowing Buyer’s Concerns – To create a good buyer persona you need to understand the customer’s top concerns. Creating buyer personas and knowing their journey will help you in creating content, delivery strategy of your content, topics you need to target.

• Evaluating Buyer’s Behavior – Evaluate what type of buyers are interested in your service, Buyer’s age, gender, household income, social networks preferred by the buyer, how you can help the buyer in solving their problems, how does the buyer prefer to communicate.

• Interviews – Interviews can provide useful data for creating buyer personas.

• Past Experience of Customers – Based on the past experience you can create a good buyer persona because it will give you the detailed information about the customer behavior what they like or what they not.

• Check your website and social media analytics – It will give demographic data about the people who are currently interacting with your site and social profiles.

IMPORTANCE OF BUYER PERSONA FOR AN ORGANISATION

A buyer persona is a research based representation of who buyers are, their behavior, what they buy, how they buy, why they make buying decision or why they are not interested in your services. So buyer persona is the detailed information about your buyers. Having details information and understanding of your customers is always good for an organization to grow their business.  Check the secret to Grow your Online Business 12(Shhh…+3 SECRET) E-commerce Strategies To Grow Your Business

• Building Strategy – Buyer persona helps an organization in making a good marketing and sales strategies. When you know about your buyers, you know what type of content you should create for marketing.

• Updating the strategy – Customer behavior keeps on changing so we need to change our strategies according to it so we need to keep on updating the buyer persona as per the changes.

• Creating Customer Groups – Buyer persona allows you to segment your customers into different groups.

• Customer Behavior – Buyer persona allows you to know the purchasing habits of your customers which will help you in targeting different groups of customers appropriately.

KICKASS BUYER PERSONA USING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

USING RESEARCH

Firstly , the usual premise of creating good buyer persona is research. The research can be;

1. Primary Research (talking directly to the buyers/customers)

• Interviews
• Focus Group Studies etc

2. Secondary Research (researching about the buyers/customers)

• Internet Research
• Making News Runs
• Talking to relevant customer associates etc

The problem with the above methods is that the findings are biased.

Now to eliminate this bias, all we need is shout…. Don’t worry, I am not asking you to do something weird. All you need is to shout the person managing the Analytics for you (if that is you, nothing like it, your task gets so much easier)

USING GOOGLE ANALYTICS

There are more advanced analytics tools to create Buyer Persona available but in this blog I shall be referring to Google Analytics as it is a free tool and most widely used.

Google has explained out on how to use Google Analytics Here. In case you do not know, please go through that.

Now that you have the Analytics Handle with you, this is how it shall be looking:

Google Analytics provides data under the following Heads (as would be shown in the Left Side Bar):

1. Audience
2. Acquisition
3. Behavior
4. Conversion

Of the above, Audience & Acquisitions are most important and significant for you to create factual Buyer Persona.

We shall use the following Steps to Create Factual Buyer Persona out of Google Analytics Data.

Study the Audience/Visitors visiting your site.

On the left hand Sidebar, you need to dive into Audience, as shown in the figure below:

Step 1: Find the Relevant Gender & Age Profile of the buyers

Once you have clicked on the Audience, Go to Demographics: Audience > Demographics, as shown below:

Please note this would help you identify

1. the Major Focus Age Brackets of the Customers.
2. The Gender division of my Customers

The Above Analytics screenshot is of an education service provider. Following things can be inferred from it:

1. Major Age Brackets of TG is 18-24, 25-34 & 35-44.
2. The visitors are evenly spread for Gender, plus we know that the education preferences do not vary significantly among sexes, so we can ignore the second bit for a while for Buyer Persona Analytics.

The data on the Age is inconclusive unless you know the contribution of the particular age brackets to conversion on the website.

So we do further down Audience > Demographics > Age and we get the following:

What we are noticing is that the major contribution to Website Goals are coming from Age Brackets 18-24 & 25-34.

So now we have the Age of our Target Segments as 18-24 & 25-34.

Lets us name these Persona Segments:

18-24 is a girl named Sam

25-34 is a guy named Raj

Step 2: Find the interest categories of the buyers.

After understanding Demographics, we need to go Audience > Interest, to find what my Target Buyer wants, likes or is looking for.

As per Google, there are three types of Interest Categories:

• Affinity Categories  : identifies users in terms of lifestyle; for example, Technophiles, Sports Fans, and Cooking Enthusiasts. These categories are defined to be similar to TV audiences.

• In-Market Segments :  identifies users in terms of their product-purchase interests.

• Other Categories  : provides the most specific, focused view of your users. For example, while Affinity Categories includes the category Foodies, Other Categories includes the category Recipes/Cuisines/East Asian.

You can read all about Demographics & Interest. Click HERE

Now You need to understand the Various interest of Sam & Raj. To Understand the same, you need to check Audience >Age — Secondary Dimension —Users — Affinity Category/In – Market Segment/ Other Categories.

Affinity Categories of Sam on the Above Basis shall be:

In Market Segment of Sam on the Above Basis shall be:

Other Categories Segment of Sam on the Above Basis shall be:

So now we know the following things for our Buyer:

1. Our Target Age Profile of the Buyer
2. Their Lifestyle
3. Their product-purchase interests
4. Specific Affinity Categories

Now that we have the Audience Profile, next we need to identify what is the concern/affinity of the Customer towards our Service/Product.

Finding Touch Points of Buyer w.r.t our Product/Service

This would help us in finding the following:

1. What are the Broad Touch Points my Audience Fall into
2. Creating Sales Funnel for every Category of our Target Buyer

Step 1: Identify Broad Touch Points for your Audience/Buyer/Customer

Google Analytics provides Acquisition data to understand how we are acquiring customers on our Website.

Within the Analytics Report there is a segment which taps the Search Engine Optimisation data for us.

Google Analytics > Acquisition > Search Engine Optimization > Queries

Please note, that You need to sort the data as per impressions not clicks. We want to tap the maximum queries which can be done by sorting the queries on the basis of impressions.

From the above data, Broad touch points are:

• Buyers looking for the Brand
• Buyers looking for English Language Course
• Buyers looking for Foreign Language Course
• Buyers looking for IELTS Coaching
• Buyer looking for English & Foreign Language Course in Delhi

Step 2: Group the above Touch Points into specific Products & Service

From the above, there are broadly two Categorizations of Products & Service as per Buyer Preferences.

1. Foreign Language Course

• General information about the Course
• Specifically looking for Information about Courses in Delhi

2. English Language Course

• General information about the Course
• Specifically looking for Information about Courses in Delhi
• Looking for Preparation for Specific English Aptitude Exam IELTS

Step 3: Summing up the Buyer Persona

To sum up the Buyer Persona Guide and Buyer Persona using Google Analytics, you need to take both the Demographics & Interests and User Queries into consideration.

You can map the persona in the following way:

Step 4: Putting the Various Touch Points into Sales Funnel to trigger optimized & targeted Content Development

The last step is to put all the Touch Points in Various Stages of Sales Funnel.

Here you need to identify the various queries into buyer interest. For Eg:

People Searching for Information on Courses: Awareness

People Searching for Courses in Delhi: Consideration

People Searching for Best Language Institute: Evaluation

People Searching for Brand: Purchase

Pictorially the same can be depicted in the following way: