Knowing Your Buyer Persona is Easy with Demographic Enrichment

Have you been struggling to come up with effective customer acquisition and retention strategy?

You may be missing an essential step: Building your buyer persona.

What is a Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona (also referred to as a marketing persona) is a fictional representation of your target customer (or customers).

Building a buyer persona involved all kind of sources:

• Market research
• Your own analytics data
• Insights from your customer and sales teams

Having a set of buyer personas you are targeting helps you achieve a number of important marketing goals:

• Relating to your target customer on a more personal level. It is easy to forget that there are real people behind SEO keywords or Facebook audiences. Creating detailed buyer personas will help your teams to see the actual people – with their own struggles and questions – behind numbers. This results in a more personalized and effective marketing campaigns
• Helping your sales and customer teams to craft more effective replies and follow-ups: Understanding your customers’ struggles makes it possible to address their problems in a more helpful ways.
• Gathering insights into possible market gaps helping you develop better-fitting more effective products.
• Creating more effective advertising campaigns by making more informed decisions as to what types of people you are targeting

Overall, marketing personas create a deeper understanding of your target audience which, in turn, drives content creation, sales approach, customer relationship management strategy, and really anything that relates to marketing.

How to Create a Buyer Persona?

There are a few nice tools helping you create your buyer personas, including Hubspot’s “Make My Persona” and User Persona Creator.

Fundamentally, the steps to creating a buyer persona are the following:

• Collect data (More on this below)
• Follow the steps to create each persona
• Add problem-solution component to each
• Repeat (You may want to start with 4-5 personas to make it less overwhelming and then decide whether there are more to include)

For each buyer persona (provided you have the data), you need to collect and organize the following information:

• Make it relatable: Come up the first and last name and pick a picture or an avatar that best represents the persona (as well as the person’s age and gender)
• Fill in the demographics information: Age, education, job position, income, marital status, etc.
• Come up with a list of hobbies and interests, as well as their challenges they are likely to be struggling with
• Depending on your industry, add other details, like tools they are using, apps they depend on, communication methods and social networks they prefer, etc.

How to Enrich Your Buyer Personas Using PayKickstart’s Demographics Feature?

So how to collect the data for your marketing persona creation?

Paykickstart demographics section lets you gather comprehensive data about your current buyers. The feature is included in the PayKickstart’s Growth plan.

By using publicly-available data like social profiles and literally dozens of APIs across the web, the feature offers marketers a clear insight into the real personality of their target customers.

To give you a glimpse of insight into the actual amount of data, here are a few highlights:

• Over 1.5 billion of people, including around 260 million of the U.S. residents. This includes resume, social, contact, and demographic data for all the people in the database.
• Over 70% of decision makers’ emails in the US, UK, Canada and around the world.
• More than 420 million of Linkedin accounts and more than one billion of Facebook IDs.

This data is unbelievably useful for building a detailed buyer persona.

The demographic information includes:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Job title

Additionally, the report contains your customers’ interests which provides additional data for buyer persona building.

The dashboard provide helpful visualization allowing you to get a better understanding of patterns:

Watch the full video here: Gathering Customer Demographics & Intelligence

Each customer profile provides even more information including:

• The organization they are part of
• Company details
• The job title
• Their actual social media profiles
• Which products they purchased
• How much money they’ve spent with me (This helps understand your customers, the amount they are willing to pay and the value they get from using the product)

PayKickstart provides all you may need for detailed persona building, from fundamental demographics breakdown to detailed insights into each customer.

How to Enrich Your Buyer Personals Even More?

Ask your SEO provider for some insight into the current users of your site. What are their buying behaviors?

Google Analytics Interests

Google Analytics has a detailed “Demographics” report that should be enabled prior to using it.

Demographics and interests data provides information about the age and gender of your users, along with the interests they express through their online travel and purchasing activities.

I love the “Interests” section of the report that gives an overview of what my site users are into:

Read how to integrate Google Analytics into PayKickstart here: Add Facebook, Google Analytics, or any other 3rd Party Tracking Scripts

You can also use the collected data to create custom Google Analytics report to see how various segments of your audience are interacting with your site. This helps in creating your “ideal” customer persona.

Finteza is another great solution that comes with all kinds of useful location and demographics data, including the actual devices your audience is using and which cities they came from.

Searcher Intent Analysis

No one knows more about your target audience than Google that has had decades of watching and adapting to all kinds of users. Reverse-engineering Google’s results for your target query will help you understand more about your people you want to attract to your site.

This is exactly what Text Optimizer does: It processes your target search query, extracts Google’s search snippets and applies semantic analysis to show what your target customer is likely to be interested in:

Creating a Unified Conversations inside your organization is key to sharing information and creating detailed personas.

Customer Surveys

Surveying your customers helps quantify your buyer personas as well as hear back from your current customers and what kind of experience they are having when interacting with your site.

Use PayKickstart’s “Surveys” feature to set up surveys to help you gather data from your actual customers:

Here’s a step-by-step tutorial on how to create an automated customer survey with PayKickstart.

Use Facebook Ads

Facebook advertising is a solid sales source for lost of businesses, but there’s one more thing many of us forget. By using Facebook Ads, we open up an invaluable source of data.

Set up lots of micro-campaigns using all kinds of ad targeting to get a better understand of who responds to your advertising messages better. Remember that you’ll be also able to re-target those again to get more of them convert.

Are you creating buyer personas for your business? I hope the tools above will help you adjust and improve your process!

Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty is the Brand Manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas, as well as co-founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for over a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of a weekly Twitter chat #vcbuzz

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