It will be far easier for you to persuade your partner to go on vacation than it would be to convince them to clean the home. Why? You have touched a raw nerve as well as a need, a want, and a desire.
One of the most important aspects of successful marketing is having a deeper understanding of the requirements and preferences of one’s target audience than any of one’s rivals.
To achieve this goal, you need to remove yourself from your own point of view, cultivate empathy, and completely submerge yourself in the state of mind of your consumer. Through the use of personas, you will be able to get a more in-depth understanding of your target audience as well as establish a more personal and emotional connection with them.
Creating accurate representations of customers may be accomplished via a number of different strategies. Not one of them involves you sitting at your workstation in the office and speculating about things… Exploring the data provided by users and communicating with the people who make up your audience is a strategy that is not only more reliable but also more fun.
In spite of the fact that there are a number of tried-and-true methods for developing personas, we would want to take advantage of this occasion to discuss with you strategies that go beyond the fundamentals and explore the less trodden roads.
The Data From Google Analytics
Google Analytics provides access to a multitude of data pertaining to your website’s visitors. Simply apply some original thought to the analysis of the data. There contains information about the individual’s age, gender, location, and language. Also included is basic demographic data. But don’t simply restrict yourself to those data points. You may learn a great deal more about your target audience by using GA Interest Reports.
Determine potential areas of interest based on the categories of material that consumers consume, as well as how recently and how regularly they do so. You may add information about people’s lifestyles by using “Affinity Categories” (technophiles, travel buffs, avid investors, etc.).
These categories are established in a manner that is comparable to that of TV audiences, and they provide a chance to get insight into the actions taken by your audience while simultaneously targeting your advertisements on a comparable scale.
Utilize In-Market Segment Reports to determine which user groups are currently in the market for certain product categories that your company offers. Before your audience ever visits your site, it is important to determine what kinds of material they are interested in by going through the list of referring sites in GA.
And of course, you should conduct an analysis of the keywords that your customers are using both in search engines and on your website (Note: You will need to connect your Google Analytics account to your Google Webmaster Tools account in order to see within Google Analytics the actual keywords that are driving traffic to your website).
Last but not least, do not forget to do an analysis of the “Behavior Flow” of visitors to your website as well as the information on your website that is used the most.
Social Media Platforms
The insights about your target demographic that you may get through social media are priceless. On Facebook, your current customers are most likely the ones talking with you and the community you have developed.
What difficulties are your consumers experiencing, what do they enjoy most about your product or service, and what do they like least about it? What exactly are they discussing there? What is it that makes them so excited?
That are the individuals who are the most active and engaged with your brand? What kinds of information can you acquire? Search for more generalized thoughts on Twitter. Which hashtags are currently popular? What are the subjects that individuals feel the most strongly about? Which of your tweets has received the most favorites or retweets so far?
Investigate the “Twitter Analytics” section of your account in order to have a better understanding of the engagement rate each tweet, including the ratio of clicks to retweets. And by all means, make advantage of the social media profiles you have in order to engage in conversation with your audience and query them.
Online Client Surveys
Obtaining input from potential clients in a meaningful way may be accomplished via the use of surveys. Through the use of surveys, you are able to communicate with a large number of people in a condensed amount of time in a manner that is both productive and effective.
When it comes to collecting information for the purpose of developing your personalities, you will have a difficult time finding a method that is more effective in terms of efficiency.
Type Form, SurveyMonkey, and Qualtrics are just three examples of the many user-friendly online survey tools that are now accessible. You may even go one step further by using a website tool like as Qualaroo, which polls visitors to your website with multiple-choice questions while they are still on your site.
The questions are designed to help you figure out what aspects of your website are most important to them. Qualaroo captures site visitors “in the moment,” when they are looking for the kind of goods you sell or the information that your website offers at the precise time that they visit your website.
The software may even be set up to query users with further questions that make sense in light of the answers they have already provided. As a result of all of this, you will be able to glean helpful insights that may be included into the building of your personas.
Interviewing Target Audience
Who understands your target market better than the people who already buy from them? Your consumers are a possible source of the most profound insights, which you may use to your advantage while developing your personas.
To this aim, conducting interviews with some of your company’s current clients may be a very useful method for gathering information that can be used into the process of developing your personas. Make it a point to ask the identical questions to each of the people you are interviewing so that you can standardize and quantify the responses from a broader population of people.
However, you should also give the people you’re interviewing the freedom to go off subject, since this may also lead to the discovery of potentially insightful information. Interviews are one of the methods on this list that take the most time, as well as requiring a large amount of personnel, but they will supply you with a great deal of information that is both rich and helpful.
Lunch (Yes, you read it correctly, “Lunch!”!)
There is something about eating that brings people together and makes discussion easier. It is one thing to speak with a person in a conference room that is sterile, off-white, and devoid of personality; it is quite another thing to converse with that person over lunch and a delectable dessert.
The person being interviewed will likely be more forthcoming with their thoughts and feelings, and the quality of the conversation you have over food will almost certainly be deeper and more insightful. Invite a new prospect or a customer that you can meet in person to lunch if you are at a conference, trade fair, or other event related to your sector and you have the opportunity to do so.
Learn what makes people tick by picking their minds and finding out what motivates them. Keep in mind that you should let them do the talking (well, between bites). The new perspectives you get could be quite important. Just bear in mind that the material you are looking at is qualitative, and that it must be combined with your quantitative research, which may be carried out over a much wider scope of subjects.
Final Observations
What does P&G do in order to get an understanding of how moms use Tide laundry detergent? They go to the homes of real moms and see how the mothers conduct household chores like cleaning and washing. What does the famous product design company IDEO do, exactly, that may help us figure out how to develop the next version of the grocery basket?
They watch the customers shopping at a grocery store. Ethnographic researchers often encourage doing this, which is referred to as “living with the tribe.” “The insights that arise through close observation of people’s behavior…uncover all sorts of potential that were not previously visible,” says Tim Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO.
The process of observation is an essential part of IDEO’s product development approach as well as a tool to dig deeper than is possible with more conventional research methods. If you want to have a profound understanding of your audience, you have to put yourself in the same circumstances as they do.
Even though it will be more expensive and time-consuming for you, making the effort to observe your target audience in their natural environment can help you uncover the unstated behaviors and preferences of your audience—behaviors and preferences that perhaps your audience members themselves are not even aware of.
