Using Surveys as a Data Collection Method for Creating Personas

Personas are a vital tool for any organization aiming for enhanced customer understanding. Personas afford an empathetic understanding of a customer segment, allowing for more precise targeted marketing. And, that means more impact for your marketing efforts!

Using Surveys as a Data Collection Method for Creating Personas

By having well-researched data for creating personas that accurately reflect the customer segments they represent, your organization will be better positioned to determine the marketing opportunities and areas of focus.

What is a persona? … It is a semi-fictional represent your customer that (should be) based on market research, what we call persona analytics. Every organization has a target customer population, and for businesses, this customer population is segmented into ‘sub-populations’ or segments.

Not every customer has identical needs, but there are commonalities allowing for segmentation, resulting in organizational efficiencies for maketing, system design, content creation, and advertising. So, it is benefical to both divide the overall population and integrate like customers.

Each segment should have a representative persona, which brings the customer segment ‘to life’, making it easier to create a successful strategy with a human-like representation to relate to, target, and communicate about witih others in the organization.

Where do you get the customer data to create personas?

Surveying potential or actual customers is a great way to get such data, which we can also use to enrich CRM and other in-house datasets.

Here is a step-by-step process:

  1. Beginning with your marketing segments: If your organization has not already segmented its customer population, it needs to do so. This may take the form of in-house CRM or brainstorming population customers if this data does not exist.
  2. Choose the customers to survey: For each identified segment, identify a group of customers you can reach by sending them surveys. Again, the business’s CRM system can help with this step.
  3. Design the survey: Generally, one can gather about five key categories within a reasonable survey completion time, so use this heuristic. Likert questions are great to use, as they are quick for respondents to address and allow for quantitative analysis. Be sure and collect demographic information, such as gender, age, and nationality, as this facilitated look-alike analysis for marketing to new customers.
  4. Field the study: Send the survey out to your survey sample, assuming you deliver the survey elecrtomnically. Set up periodic reminders, with three reminders over two or three week periods being reasonable, which will help get as many responses as possible.
  5. Upload your survey data for analysis: In the past, analyzing survey data to create personas was a pain and not very formalized. Using survey data analytics systems, such as Survey2Persona, you can leverage machine learning and AI to analyze your survey data.
  6. Generate personas: Using survey data analytics systems, such as Survey2Persona, you can create personas for multiple and varied views of your survey data to support a multitude of business goals.
  7. Put your personas to use!:  Most organizations find that personas facilitate communication about customers and lead to a greater empathetic understanding of these customers.

And, that means more impact for your marketing efforts!

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