How to research your marketing persona for your online business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

Kevin Ocasio

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business Can you imagine what it would be like to market your business without fully understanding your audience? Disastrous.

This is where a customer persona comes in.

What Is A Marketing Persona And Why Is It Important?

A buyer, marketing, or customer persona represents your ideal prospect.

Detailed as it is, it covers several dimensions of your target: From his or her demographics to behaviors and personal goals.

The biggest reason why you need to create a persona is that it is the only way you can provide something useful to your prospects.

Online marketing nowadays is all about personalization and giving value.

The more detailed your marketing persona is, the more relevant your offers become.

Relevant oers help you win your customers’ trust . When people trust you, they’ll do business with you.

What are other great benefits of creating personas?

You write better blog content More personalized emails Better customer service Improved social media marketing campaigns Better products You can determine areas to focus more time on More targeted ads

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business Here’s what a persona should look like: In the sample marketing persona above, notice that there are different fields: Background Demographics Goals Challenges Common Objections Hobbies & Interests Biggest Fears To be able to completely fill out your own fields, you need to come up with as many details as you can.

Start broad (background and demographics) and slowly delve into the specifics. As you dig deeper, you begin to ask more personal questions about your prospects.

Sadly, Not All Brands Understand Their Audience’s Needs.

Based on a recent study by the Edelman Group, 51% of their respondents are not satisfied with how brands are meeting their needs.

T h i s study demonstrates that there is a discrepancy between what customers find important and what brands provide.

Just imagine how much better your results become if you only take some time to craft a marketing persona. And believe me, it’s very easy to create one.

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business How To Persona

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In this section, I will show you simple ways to source information for your buyer persona. There are several places and methods that can help you come up with a detailed customer profile.

1. Place important form fields in your landing pages Putting up a landing on your website is a very practical means of collecting prospect information.

In exchange, you provide visitors with an item of value such as a free eBook, discount coupon, access to your webinar, and more.

Remember to avoid asking way too many information as this will turn off visitors. Make sure to only include fields that are related to your offer or niche.

2. Run online surveys Let’s move on to online surveys. Surveys are better in terms of collecting more customer information than landing pages.

But be careful, you wouldn’t want to waste your customers’ precious time.

While there are times when you really need to send out a long survey form, limit your questions to the most important ones.

Use clear and precise language to prevent confusion among respondents.

Your questions should follow a logical order. Whenever possible, use response scales (true, false, agree, disagree, etc).

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business Lastly, consider giving an incentive such as a small discount or free gift.

Again, this increases your response rates.

3. Check your website analytics Google Analytics is a gold mine of visitor data. Using your analytics, you’ll be able to uncover the following information about your audience: Dominant age group of your site visitors.

Preferred language of your site visitors.

Where the majority of your visits come from.

Keywords people use to arrive at your site. This reveals their intent.

What they are searching on your site (enable site search).

Your best pieces of blog content.

Your most viewed products.

4. Use social listening to catch conversations Site owners usually leverage social listening for the purpose of tracking questions and comments about your business (using specific keywords) on social media networks and responding to them.

However, social listening goes beyond monitoring your brand health.

Helping you craft a marketing persona, you’ll be able to better understand your audience’s needs and pain points through their complaints and sentiments.

This will help you improve your product offerings and work on your customer service. You can leverage free social listening tools which are the following:

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business Google Alerts (the most common) Social Mention Mention Hootsuite Klout As you set up your social mentions, remember to use important keywords.

These keywords include your brand name, campaign names, industry buzzwords, and even your competitors’ names.

5. Work with your customer service team There’s no other team that can help you generate detailed insights about your audience than your customer service team.

They handle customer complaints and assist them in making better purchasing decisions. You’re in a much better position to succeed if you work hand-in-hand with them to look for patterns in your customers’ responses.

With this strategy, you can also come up with additional fields and categories to answer about your audience. Again, the more thorough your marketing persona, the better the results.

6. Make educated guesses You don’t only rely on raw data to create a marketing persona. With the vast amounts of information to consider, you can make an educated guess.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Ask yourself, “How would I feel if my favorite brand ____?” or “Will I like it if brand ___ will _____?”

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business Of course, these educated guesses are based on several things. These are your previous interactions with consumers and other data you’ve gathered along the way.

7. Read blog comments on and off your site Blog comments can be used for researching your marketing persona. If your blog is getting a lot of comments every month, check them one by one. You’ll be able to find a common interest among your commenters.

If you think you need more blog comments, don’t forget to make a call-toaction to encourage readers to leave comments.

Also, browse other blogs in your niche especially popular ones. Certainly, these sites have a massive engagement which you need to look into.

Takeaways Think of marketing personas as a brilliant strategy to refine your products, brand messages, and campaigns to meet your audience’s needs and interests.

Over time, you will need to tweak your persona as you attract more customers and your business grows. Creating personas is not a one-time thing, but a continuous effort.

These are just some of the many ways to research your audience. Can you think of other creative or unconventional methods to learn more about your target market?

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business

How To Research Your Marketing Persona For Your Online Business