Building Buyer’s Persona with Quantitative and Qualitative Research sample size

Building Buyer’s Persona with Quantitative and Qualitative Research

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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. 

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 themselves 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’s persona. Personas you develop 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 and services that resonate with customers. It will also be useful for your sales reps, helping them get a better understanding of the prospective customers. 

Step by Step guide to Descriptive Research

Get ready to uncover the how, when, what, and where questions in a research problem

Checklist for your Persona

In general, your buyer’s persona should include the following elements to develop a relevant and realistic persona. 

Persona Group (e.g. social media manager)

Personal profile:

  • Age, income, gender
  • Job role, work experience
  • Education level

Customer Motivation:

  • What are your customers looking for?
  • What are their needs?
  • What motivates them?
  • What are they trying to achieve?

Environment: 

Physical, technological, and social environment

  • Where is the customer getting information about your products or services?
  • Where are they interacting with your service or product?
  • What brings them to your company? 

Qualitative Research for Buyer’s Person

Qualitative research requires you to put 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 expectation. 

Using qualitative surveys or research methodology (interviews or focus groups) can help you probe into relevant questions and gather what customers think in detail. 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 on personal life may make customers uncomfortable and hurt the company-customer relationship. 

Exploratory Research Guide

Conducting exploratory research seems tricky but an effective guide can help.

Quantitative Research for 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, 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 to have a large database of authentic customer information. You can gather the elements of the buyer’s persona from the platform.

 

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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 persona into segments that are representative of your target audience. 
  • Classify the groups into rough personas. Identify 3 to 5 buyers’ persona 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. 

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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