Tayyib Parrish 
Employing buyer personas without sound data and insights is often an inexact science, so make sure your teams (product, marketing and sales) have access to accurate persona information.
Qualitative interviews and surveys offer key information that you can incorporate into buyer personas for effective messaging, competitive positioning and higher lead generation and conversion rates.
Demographics
Establishing your target audience is the first step towards creating a buyer persona. This should involve gathering demographic data about them such as age and gender as well as understanding their interests, goals, industry knowledge, experience and history.
Customer research can be the key to uncovering this data, from surveys, focus groups and interviews to looking at your CRM system’s data to identify your most valuable customers and understand what type of content they’re reading.
Interviewing existing customers can be a valuable source of feedback about your products and services, but this type of research can be costly. An alternative option would be collecting demographics via online reviews or social media posts.
Interests
Researching demographic information alone won’t do. You also must take steps to assess buyer interests and goals so you can determine how your product or service meets these needs and wants. A great way of doing this is through reviewing sales team interactions with leads as well as customer service surveys stored within support tools.
Data can help validate buyer personas, providing clarity for your marketing and sales teams about who to target and why. Furthermore, it allows you to anticipate common objections so you can respond swiftly when someone raises one – helping prevent delays when explaining why their objection is invalid.
Needs
Once a business knows who its ideal customer is, they can use data-driven marketing efforts instead of guessing at which messages will resonate with customers.
There are various methods of collecting information required for creating buyer personas, including market research and existing customer data. Most companies prefer collecting direct feedback from customers through surveys and interviews.
A buyer persona should include both demographic and psychographic data relating to age, income level and purchasing motivations, to allow companies to develop an in-house profile that serves as a reference point for all marketing and sales efforts. It also ensures everyone knows who the audience is.
Motivations
Marketing teams that wish to develop buyer personas must go beyond simply collecting demographic information; instead, they must understand each persona’s motivations – including needs and concerns as well as goals and priorities.
Researching customer preferences requires conducting thorough analysis. You can do this through focus groups, interviews, surveys or simply observing customers at your business. For optimal results it is wise to include all customer-facing team members, such as sales employees who interact directly with customers as well as marketing staff who can use data derived from research in this process.
Researching buyer personas requires taking note of any keywords or behaviors that would characterize each one, recording what they say about your products or services and keeping a log. This will enable your sales team to communicate more effectively with each of them and deliver products or services tailored specifically to each buyer persona.
Value
An accurate buyer persona is an invaluable asset to both marketing and sales teams, providing essential details about your ideal customer in one concise profile that helps each team target them effectively.
Researching and creating a buyer persona are worthy investments; they will enable you to better understand your customers while staying focused on fulfilling their needs. It’s also beneficial for all team members involved; each can use this exercise as an opportunity to better understand who the target customers are so that marketing, product development, customer service efforts can meet them more closely, creating deeper brand connections essential for increasing customer retention rates.
