Its difficult to create a buyer persona. Precisely because it involves lots of research. One has to shuffle through internet pages, group discussions, analyst reports and different associations published data to understand the industry trends. For those companies whose audience is not on internet, find it even more difficult to create one such persona. As discussed in my previous blog, one should conduct interviews with the existing customers and those who were in pipeline but later couldn't get converted into business. These are the perfect profiles that will help you to decide which way to follow to reach to ideal customer.
However as simple as using Facebook or Linkedin too you can get details around your buyer persona. Data is available everywhere, how good you tap into it decides how good you can build the persona.
While every interaction with customer, every search on Google will give you some data pointers to use in persona; few are just obvious tools to explore whether your persona presence is good on internet and if it does then where the customers are and how they are.
One such example is Facebook. Do you have a personal account with facebook? Then you can easily gather the data about your buyer persona. Here are few steps to research your persona profile on facebook.
- Click on create Ad.
- Once into the Ads manager, go to audience and play with your criteria.
- Image below shows the software developers who are interested in Cloud Computing (if I am building a buyer persona of a could developer). It shows approximately how many people are there on FB with this criteria.
- Also search for individual profiles with the same interests through common groups to understand buyers well.
You can also undertake similar kind of research on Linkedin.
Here is the self explained picture that shows how good you can use linkedin for persona research :
On Linkedin one can further drill down to company level view of profiles and can gather the approximate number, their qualifications, number of years experience, specific technology and so on.
Finally, how comprehensive should a buyer persona be? it depends on how good you can find information, how extensive research you can do.
Here is a quick example of comprehensive buyer persona :
Take a bow and begin your own journey!
