Building Buyer’s Persona with Quantitative and Qualitative Research Questionnaire

Building Buyer’s Persona with Quantitative and Qualitative Research

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Understanding your target customers is essential to retain and acquire customers and stay ahead of the competition. One powerful approach that can help you gain deeper insight into your targeted audience is the building of buyer personas. 

A buyer persona represents your ideal customers based on the data you gather directly from your current customers or market. The profile of each customer type helps you understand their needs, pain points, preferences, and motivation so you can refine your marketing efforts to resonate with them. 

In this blog, we’ll discuss how you can build a buyer’s persona with quantitative and qualitative research.

What is a buyer’s persona?

The buyer’s persona plays an important part in the work put in by marketers and designers. Persona reflects real customers and provides a clear picture of how you should design your products and services that respond to their needs. 

Knowing your customers helps you to connect with them and develop a better understanding of them. You cannot, however, put the time and effort to know each and every one of your customers. This is where the buyer’s persona can help. 

A buyer persona can help in:

  • Explaining the needs of your customers
  • Provide insight on how and why they use your company’s products/services
  • Offer a clear image of customer expectations and pain points
  • Describes real customers with values, goals, and problems

Developing a buyer’s persona involves intensive research. You can collect data from customer-facing reps, however, collecting data from customers can offer a thorough understanding of their needs. The data you gather from customers can help you group them into distinct segments and create an appropriate buyer persona. Personas you develop to represent the customer segment. 

Quantitative and qualitative research can help you to collect valuable and actionable insights. Creating a buyer persona can help you, developers, to design products/services that resonate with customers. It will also be useful for your sales reps, helping them get a better understanding of the prospective customers.

Checklist for your buyer’s persona

In general, your buyer’s persona should include the following elements to develop a relevant and realistic persona. It looks something like this –

Building Buyer’s Persona with Quantitative and Qualitative Research Questionnaire

Benefits of building buyer’s persona for businesses

You can not overstate the significance of building a buyer persona in marketing. Here are some key reasons why you should integrate this into your marketing efforts. 

  1. It allows you to tailor marketing campaigns to specific segments of the target audience by identifying their unique needs, preferences, and challenges. You can create personalized content that resonates with your ideal customers and increase customer satisfaction and higher engagement. 
  2. Buyer’s persona helps you identify what each customer segment truly wants and need. It gives you valuable insights to help develop products/services that address these needs effectively. This leads to a customer-centric approach and aligns offerings with customer expectations. 
  3. By understanding what your customers prefer and their expectations, you can deliver a personalized experience at every step of the customer journey.
  4. An accurate buyer persona provides data-driven insights that inform decision-making. It can serve as a guide to help you align business decisions across various departments with customer needs, expectations, and preferences.

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Role of qualitative research in building buyer’s persona

Qualitative research requires you to put in a lot of effort and time. However, the result is always most beneficial. It is important to gain a deeper understanding of your customers to really know the qualitative side of customer expectations. 

Using qualitative surveys or research methodology (interviews or focus groups) can help you probe into relevant questions and gather what customers think. However, make sure you are asking relevant questions and not wasting your and your customers’ time. Don’t ask your customers what their favorite tea is if you are not a Tea franchise. 

Ask questions about the problems and challenges that your customers face when interacting with your company. 

  • What are the challenges you face using our products? 
  • What frustrates you the most when you interact with our company?

Gathering customers’ open-text responses can help you see their experience from the customer’s perspective. The information helps you build a comprehensive persona. Moreover, it also notifies you of your weakness and issues that need fixing. 

You also need to make sure that your questions are not invasive. Refrain from asking personal questions that present no value in developing your buyer’s persona. Questions about personal life may make customers uncomfortable and hurt the company-customer relationship. 

Online survey tools that allow you to analyze qualitative data helps you make sense of customers’ voice and understand their true sentiment. 

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Role of quantitative research in building buyer’s persona

Quantitative research, most often conducted via online surveys, is the low-effort way to gather information from a large sample of customers. The large sample size ensures and provides confidence that the data is representative of the customer base. 

Using quantitative surveys, you can gather customer information to create a general profile of your customers. You can ask demographic or behavioral questions to identify shared characteristics. You can use ratings to ask customers how satisfied they are with your services. Or, a ranking scale to ask them to rank their needs and expectations from your company. 

From the collected data, you can filter and group customers based on common characteristics. By grouping them together, you can define and validate the buyer’s persona. You can create a realistic persona based on factual data collected from real customers. 

You can refer to your customer database to scoop out quantitative information that your company has already collected based on its relevance. You can also use social channels to gather such data. LinkedIn is one channel that is particularly famous for having an extensive database of authentic customer information. You can gather the elements of the buyer’s persona from the platform. 

Survey software enables you to conduct online, offline, and phone surveys to gather and analyze quantitative data in real time. This enables you to refine your buyer’s persona with new data and changing market trends.  

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Combining quantitative and qualitative research for building a buyer’s persona

So, when it comes to crafting buyer personas, combining the data from quantitative and qualitative research is crucial. The two research data complement each other and provide both an objective and subjective understanding of the target audience. 

Let’s explore how you can integrate qualitative and quantitative research data to create a holistic view of your target audience. 

How do quantitative and qualitative research work together?

Quantitative research gathers numerical data to help you analyze and identify patterns and trends within the target audience. In contrast, qualitative research dives deeper and explores the subjective experiences and motivations of the target market. 

Combining the two research methods helps you gain an accurate understanding of the customers more comprehensively. 

  • Online surveys, CATI surveys, and offline surveys enable you to gather quantitative data on demographics, behavior patterns, preferences, and market trends. The data offers a broader view of the target audience, helps identify larger trends and patterns, and determines customer segments. 
  • Interviews, focus groups, surveys, and observations gather qualitative insights and uncover the target audience’s motivations, pain points, needs, and wants. It provides nuances and in-depth insights that quantitative research may miss. 

Creating a holistic view of the target audience by combining both data 

Quantitative and qualitative research evens out one another’s gap and provides a holistic view of the target population. Using a mixed approach ensures that the personas accurately represent the characteristics, motivations, and needs of ideal customers. 

Here’s how it helps. 

  • Gathering and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data helps identify common themes and trends. By pointing out the similarities and shared characteristics and experiences within the larger population, you can recognize customer types and group them together. 
  • Use the combined data to create detailed buyer personas. Incorporate the demographic data, behavior patterns, motivations, needs, and preferences to ensure each persona accurately reflects a representative segment. 
  • Keep on leveraging mixed methods to continuously validate and refine each persona with new data. 

Combining the two research methods can help you build buyer personas based on in-depth insights, reliable data, and a comprehensive understanding of the target population. Leverage survey software that enables you to gather and analyze quantitative and qualitative data in real-time to uncover patterns and hidden insights.

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Practices for building buyer’s persona

It is logically impossible to meet the needs and expectations of each and every customer or can you resolve everyone’s concern. You have a target audience that builds a persona that helps you address their needs and problems. It helps focus on the expectations of the profitable customers. It can help to resolve major issues that are causing the most trouble and provide a solution that responds to a larger audience. 

  • Conduct quantitative and qualitative research to gather a broad amount of information on your audience. 
  • Look for characteristics that are relevant and common among the customers. 
  • Organize the elements of the persona into segments that are representative of your target audience. 
  • Classify the groups into rough personas. Identify 3 to 5 buyers’ personas based on the characteristics. 
  • Develop an appropriate persona with relevant and serious information. Don’t include too much personal data; focus on motivations, values, and expectations.

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To summarize,

Developing a buyer’s persona is important for a business to provide products/ services that respond to them. It also helps your opportunity to identify the challenges faced by your customer base. Having a well-defined persona of your target customers helps you to align decisions to the problems that customers face. 

Quantitative and qualitative research can ensure the quality of your buyer’s persona and help you refine it with reliable information. Qualitative research can help you see through customers’ POV and provide detailed information on the challenges, expectations, and needs of your target audience. Quantitative research can gather validated information from a large sample size ensuring that your buyer’s persona represents your target audience.

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