In a recent article, we’ve explored why personas are an important tool for B2B marketers. Now, let’s focus in on the engine that drives successful persona work: great data.
As we’ve mentioned before, personas are multifaceted, like people. So, a handful of disparate data points simply won’t do. In order to create robust personas that can inform your most important marketing initiatives, you’ll need to pull from multiple data sources—both qualitative and quantitative. Ideally, this content will be pulled into a single, robust platform for better analysis.
Humanize your personas with qualitative data
Qualitative data plays an important role in helping you truly understand your customers and craft personas that reflect their wants and needs. Start your persona build with the qualitative data sources you probably already have access to. This can include call center/customer support recordings and feedback, product reviews, and customer advisory boards.
Depending on how dedicated your organization is in capturing and retaining customer data, you may need to supplement your owned qualitative data with some new research. Consider conducting a customer survey, hosting focus groups, or doing one-on-one or small group customer interviews. Expert networks can help connect you with experts representing aspirational customer segments that can augment your customer interview.
Validate and round it out with quantitative data
Quantitative data can add objectivity to your persona work and fill in any gaps you have after collecting your qualitative data inputs. Start with CRM data that may include contract cycles, purchase history, product preferences, and engagement data. You’ll also want to look at website statistics, social posts and engagement (likely LinkedIn for B2B businesses), and business role information—job title, responsibilities, etc.
You may need to fill in the gaps with supplemental data, such as national, anonymized data from the Census or the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Leveraging AI to get you started
Artificial intelligence tools are great at ingesting large amounts of data, summarizing trends, and surfacing themes that your team can then take and build upon. These tools are great for analyzing the large, typically unstructured data that is gathered through customer feedback channels.
OneMagnify’s Chief Analytics Officer Jonathan Prantner explored the use of AI in creating B2B in a recent webinar, How to Leverage AI to Unlock Optimal Customer Experiences. “One way we’re seeing this start to emerge in the B2B landscape is in utilizing custom GPTs,” he said. “We’re able to take all that [data] and fine-tune a GPT so that it creates something that will answer not only in the voice that we want to speak to that customer, but also understands their needs and pain points. It allows us to create a kind of always-on focus group.”
Call in the experts to help you create solid personas
Using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data sources is key to creating successful personas. OneMagnify can help you with every step of the persona creation process, from completing customer research to analyzing or supplementing existing data to leveraging AI tools to help you quickly and effectively synthesize your data.
