How to Do Research for Your Persona

If you want to have successful marketing and sales, you need to put a finger on your buyer persona. Your marketing team needs to know exactly who they are trying to market to, while your sales team needs to know who they are selling to.

Whether you have an idea of your target audience or you haven’t even started yet, narrowing down your buyer persona will ensure your company is delivering the right content to the right audience. Luckily, there are a few different questions you can ask to research your persona.

First dive into the personal demographics. Not only is this a great place to spot, but this can clear up any murky areas. Are they married? What’s their household income? Where do they live? Is it mostly male or female? Age? Any children?

You also want to get specific when it comes to their education level. Don’t just ask if they went to college or majored in liberal arts. Find out their exactly course of study and the exact school.

Check out their career path, too. You want to figure out how they ended up where they are today. Did their schooling help? Did they switch in from another industry? Answering these questions will help you get to know your audience better.

And one of the most important steps is figuring out what industry (or industries) does the company work and what’s the size in terms of employees and revenue. Knowing these answers can be especially helpful when it comes time to create fields for landing pages.

Another area you will want to heavily research is the different levels of command. Does the person report to someone else? Who reports to that person? Figure out the person’s role, title and seniority level. All of these elements come into play, no matter what kind of service or product you’re offering.

For example, if you’re a B2C company, you can use this type of information to fully digest the headaches in the persona’s life. On the other hand, if you’re a B2B company, this information gets boosted p to essential. You will need to figure out if you’re dealing with the decision-maker or trying to bypass the gatekeeper.

Once you figure out who is who, you’ll be able to answer what metrics the persona is responsible for, what their day-to-day looks like and what tools and resources the person needs to get the job done right.

Other areas you will want to research – what the persona’s biggest challenges are, what it means to be successful, how they learn new information and what exactly they are responsible for.

As you read through these suggested steps, you might wondering how you’re supposed to make time for this on top of your company. Point blank, researching your persona is just as important as opening your business doors. Breakthrough can help you accurately and quickly figure out your target audience. Since it does the research for you, you won’t have to worry about changing anything – except maybe your marketing technique, to deliver a more precise message.