A buyer persona is a fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. They help you understand your customers and prospective customers better. If you're in the process of conducting research to curate a buyer persona, tell us below! Give us your tips and tricks, and what research methods you've found success with. To learn more about buyer personas, check out the "Getting to Know Your Customer" lesson via HubSpot Academy.
I think questionaires and suveys are good to help gather infomation for a buyer persona if, you can find the right person(s) to complete it and have all the required questions that you need to know to build the persona.
The research method that I found the most sucessful was using the inbound marketing strategy and mainly using the attract stage to help curate my buyers persona.
Surveys + analysis of other data like social media followers, subscribes to email, etc. It seems like interviews would be a good choice for B2B companies, but a weird choice for many types of B2C
Having worked in a subscription business, one of the best way of building buyer persona that I have employed is analysis of current subscribers and then interviewing a small set of subscribers to add more detailed layers and develop multiple buyer personas. While interviewing can be expensive when using external experts, it is certainly worth the cost and the effort.
Brief phone interviews with clients where questions have been provided in advance. I've also conducted internal focus groups with sales, operations, and customer service - anyone who interacts with clients - to help create personas.
The methods that have helped curate buyer persona include specific google search strategies that avoid uses of words like "the" in order to streamline the process.
There are several methods I have used to gather information for buyer personas outside of the typical survey, form, and interviews. 1. I attend tradeshows, hosted events, etc. and speak to customers and prospects as well as partners and competitors. 2. I listen to recorded sales discovery calls. 3. I parse through sales notes in our CRM. 4. I connect with industry leaders/influencers via LinkedIn. 5. I listen in on live virtual sales demos.
It's hard to quantify just how many different research methods I've used to find buyer insights. Surveys, Online chats, Phone interviews, you name it. But nothing beats a phone interview, from my experience, because you can find rare and valuable insights from follow-up questions you may not be able to glean using other methods.
