Having a buyer’s persona is crucial to the success of inbound marketing. Afterall, the sales and marketing team must know whom they are marketing the products and services.
Building a buyer’s persona is not a big deal. It is easy and effective. But as you approach the stages, you may at one point find it difficult to pen down the questions. This may happen at a point where you are considering to interview the prospective buyers.
If you are new in the business and are struggling to know your current and potential customers, you may even find it harder to begin the process.
To prevent you from staring on the blank paper and thinking where to start from, we are here to tell you some questions that will form the basics of almost every survey. So, before you start the research and spend heavy amount on it, consider the following questions.
About Personal Background
When you are preparing for a survey, the first and foremost thing you would want to know about the prospect is the personal information. Apart from the name, age, gender, etc., there are other things that you can ask like:
Personal Demographics
You can start from here as it is easy to obtain such information. It will give you clearer picture of your customer’s background. Depending upon the product and service you deal in, you can also ask questions such as the annual household income, the location where they live, their age, if they have children or no.
Educational Background
It would include everything related to the study. Questions would be like – Level of education they have completed, schools they have attended, the courses they have opted, and so on.
Career Path
In this category, you can ask about the customer’s career path, what influenced their choices, the subjects they chose, and how are they in link with their present customer choice.
About Company
Which company is your customer working in?
Directly ask the name of the organization they are working in. By knowing the industry in which your buyer works, you get to know the kind of clients they serve. It broadens your perspective and adds to the knowledge bank. You never know may be the clients they are serving have the potential to become your customers. Well, you never know.
While preparing for the questions, it is important to keep your choices open. Do not limit yourself because building buyer’s persona means you are looking for your potential buyers. Moreover, it will also help you determine the potential challenges your buyer persona is facing.
For instance, if your product is yoga mats and your buyer persona’s industry is educational institution. It means you have a fair chance of generating leads from your leads.
Ask About The Company Size
Knowing the details of the persona’s company like the size, number of employees, and other details will assist in building the fields for the landing page forms. (Link of the blog – A guide to creating a perfect landing page)
About Persona’s Role in The Company
You can ask about the persona’s job title, and role. Know if they are contributing their services as an individual or in a team.
Position In The Company
Know if your persona is at a senior position or mid-level or just a fresher in the company. The buyer persona’s seniority and the job profile will certainly have an impact in selling your product and services. This will be more helpful if you are a B2C company as you will better understand the nuances of the person’s life. If you are a B2B company, this information will be even more crucial. For instance, if your persona is at a managerial level, they are likely to understand the product or service quickly than someone at the introductory level. Someone who is experienced may not require involvement of a third party in taking decisions, whereas this may not hold true for someone who is new in the industry.
Ask About Their Work Day
You can ask questions like – their office timings, number of hours they work, at what time are they most productive, and what does a busy day look like? You can even include questions like tasks they do, things they do after office, and so on. All such queries are no doubt personal, but these help in connecting with the persona. Building connection and maintaining long-term relation with personas is crucial to getting results in the form of leads.
About The Challenges
The questions about the challenges are important because you are marketing and selling your products for the sake of solving problems of your persona. If you get to know their challenges, you will better understand how to position your product. For instance, if your persona is new to paying bills and your product is a bill paying application. Your questions regarding the challenges will help you understand the issue, insecurities they might have in using such app. If you know their pain points, you will be able to market your product easily. But if you fail to know their issues, you may never be able to sell your product.
About The Goals
Ask about their goal in life. You never know when their goal and your products and services get in sync. Once you know your persona’s goals, you will know how to help them achieve it. Try to understand what can you do to make your persona look good. Once you delve deep into knowing such insights, you are more likely to be successful in your endeavor of selling and marketing.
What Next?
We have discussed the possible questions you can ask to the buyer persona. The next step is to test and identify what works and what does not work. This can be done through A/B testing.
A/B testing is the split testing method that compares the audience behaviour and their reaction to two samples at a time. This test is conducted to create result-oriented landing pages, email marketing campaigns, website designs, web landing pages, and now buyer’s persona/ customer journey map. This one test is quite effective for all the above purposes, but only if it is run properly.
A/B Testing
This test is conducted based on the data collected, which helps in improving the overall performance. This test no doubt is time-consuming because a little tweak if experimented can work wonders. At the same time, it can prove fruitless too. So, this test requires checking, changing every element on the substance you are testing. To know more about the A/B testing, you can look into the simplified guide into the A/B testing.
Using the A/B Test for Buyer’s Persona
Let us understand the connection between the buyer’s persona and the A/B Test. Read Blog How to Use A/B Testing Through Buyer Persona
- It improves the existing buyer persona
- It will showcase the weak points
- It will help you identify the real buyers
- Provides verifiable data on what resonates with visitors and customers
- Your understanding for the potential customers and the market will increase
- You can validate or refute based on data-driven results
One can conduct A/B testing using a number of tools. There are paid and free tools available online. Depending on the need, you can use the tools to your advantage. The tools are Google Analytics Suite, Visual Website Optimizer, Adobe Target, Mail Chimp, Convert Experiences, AB Tasty, and the list is endless. These tools come at different prices and offer different services. Before finalizing any of the tools, you should first understand the objective and then evaluate the tools.
Conclusion
Creating a strong questionnaire is important to building buyer persona. Make sure that the questions you ask are not too long. Short questions are answered quickly and also give a clear idea. Do not go too personal because it may hurt the emotions of the buyer persona.
Rest building a buyer persona, or creating a customer journey map is no doubt easy. But getting the help of professionals would prove to be beneficial. For any such services, you can contact the team of the Big Unit, the best digital marketing company in Melbourne.
