The key to unlocking the potential of your website and converting visitors is by understanding their profiles, motivations, and behaviors.
In the world of Google Analytics, you are likely sitting on hundreds of thousands of data points to help explain behavior on your site: bounce rates, conversion rates, etc.
While Google Analytics does a great job of answering the what of your website visitors, it lacks the ability to tell you why. This is where custom-built buyer personas can fill gaps.
What are Buyer Personas?
Buyer personas are profiles of typical visitors or buyers who visit your website. The persona walks you through the profile, motivations, and needs of each audience.
For example, let’s say you are a manufacturing company that makes widgets. You have four key audiences you target as part of your sales strategy and in turn, these are the same four audiences who visit your website.
These audiences include OEMs, distributors, system engineers, and end-users. Each of these audiences visits your site with different decision-making criteria and needs in mind, why should you treat them all the same?
Insights from buyer personas set your website and conversion rates up for success. By better understanding each of your buyer personas, you can structure the journey and copy on your site accordingly, to help boost conversions, form fills, leads, and sales.
Process for Creating Buyer Personas for a Website
Far too many marketing teams go into the website development process with little to no information on their customer audiences.
Drive Research works with brands across the country to develop buyer personas using custom Voice of Customer (VoC) surveys.
Our surveys are built to help you understand the demographics of your consumer or business buyer audience, their motivations, their needs, and their expectations from a website.
Our VoC research company drafts up a unique and custom survey that is emailed to your customer base. We work with you every step of the way to manage this process end-to-end and make this easy, quick, and insightful for your company.
What is the process of working with a buyer persona research company?
- Schedule a quick call to go over your needs for your website with our buyer persona research firm.
- We develop a proposal outlining the cost, timeline, and deliverables for your buyer personas.
- Drive Research holds a kickoff meeting to recap your objectives and talk about the next steps.
- After the kickoff Drive Research develops a project workplan outlining key tasks and dates.
- Discuss the exchange of the customer list (name, company name, email, phone number, etc.)
- Drive Research develops a draft survey document in Word to gather information on your buyers.
- Your team reviews the draft survey and makes edits, comments, or asks questions.
- Once finalized, our team programs the survey and sends your team a test link.
- Drive Research runs a soft-launch to a small sample of customers to test the process.
- This is followed by a full survey launch to your customer base to obtain 400+ responses.
- Drive Research shares a live data portal which tallies results in charts and graphs for your team.
- Once the goals are met, Drive Research closes fieldwork and runs quality checks.
- Our buyer persona research company creates a report in PowerPoint, delivered in a PDF for your team.
- Our team debriefs with you on the results and discusses action items for the website.
Key Benefits of Buyer Personas
Using customer VoC market research to create buyer personas offers many benefits to your organization or brand. It ensures your website keeps the buyer in-mind in terms of layout, flow, and information.
What might look good to you as the seller, may not be what the buyer wants. The buyer perspective needs to be top-of-mind with every decision made on a website.
Benefit 1: No more flying blind, no more guessing.
Although you may be sitting on a mountain of Google Analytics data, without custom market research, you are likely guessing as to why a bounce rate is high, why conversions dropped in Quarter 2, or why only 2% make it to our form fill conversion page.
This type of why feedback is critical to the success of a website and it can be obtained through buyer persona market research.
Benefit 2: Clearly understanding your customer/buyer and what makes them tick.
Do you know what your buyer/customer is looking for on a website when making a decision on a brand? Let’s say your buyer/customer is looking for:
- Experience
- High-quality
- Timeliness
Would that change your messaging and how your structure your home page or landing page? It would be crucial to outline these themes on your site knowing this is what the audience is looking for.
Benefit 3: Understand differences with segments.
Not all buyers purchase for the same reasons. What if experience matters most to distributors of your manufacturing company but timeliness matters most to your end-users?
Gathering this segmented data allows your website and marketing team to adapt to these buying triggers appropriately.
Benefit 4: The personas are useful beyond the website.
A formal market research approach to collect this using a buyer persona research company pays dividends beyond just integration into the website.
The personas and messaging can be used elsewhere in sales and marketing such as:
- Google Adwords
- Social media campaigns
- Blog content and SEO
- Sales collateral
- Email campaigns
The ROI of conducting buyer and customer persona market research is extremely high because of the ability to repurpose the findings elsewhere.
Contact Our Buyer Persona Research Company
Drive Research is a buyer persona research firm for organizations, companies, and brands across the U.S. We use Voice of Customer (VoC) research to combine both custom quantitative research with your Google Analytics data to best understand your segments of buyers.
Questions about our process? Need a quote or proposal for your buyer personas for your website? Contact us.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected] (we'll respond quickly)
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040