Marketing personas: who should you talk to for insights, and what should you ask?

Building effective personas is the foundation of successful marketing strategies. Personas built on accurate and insightful data serve as a powerful tool to understand one’s target audience. Without developed marketing personas, it’s impossible to know how to communicate a product, service or solution to your target audience. However, the strength of persona profiles depends on the quality of questions asked during the insights gathering process.

In this blog, based on our experience of developing marketing personas, we’ll give some recommendations on how to ask the right questions, who to ask and how to use this data to refine persona profile creation.

The importance of asking the right questions

Marketing personas play a major role in helping marketers understand their target audience’s personality, aspirations, pain points and behaviours. In a B2B context, where decisions involve multiple stakeholders, persona profiles aid marketers to effectively target decision makers, influencers, and end users through tailored strategies.

Through asking more strategic questions, you can surpass the demographics and begin to learn the psychographics, identifying the challenges and clarifying the behavioural patterns of your target audience, leading to actionable insights and opportunities.

Who should you talk to?

In order to develop desired personas, it is crucial to gather information from internal and external sources. Seeking insights from multiple sources allows you to craft well-rounded, comprehensive personas:

1. Internal stakeholders

Product, internal sales, and customer support teams have a wealth of knowledge that you can tap into. Product teams can provide insights into the customer’s needs, how they optimised features for customer usage and what factored into their decision making.

Sales teams will have information on the customer’s challenges and fears or objections they may have, as well as their desired outcomes. Customer support teams are in direct contact with the customer and have a clearer understanding of the recurring challenges they face while also having access to feedback from existing customers.

2. External stakeholders

Existing customers, partners and suppliers are arguably the most important sources of information as they are already buyers or know your business and product. Customers can offer direct insight into why they chose your business and how your product or service aligns with their needs.

Potential customers provide information on what may attract or turn other customers away from your business. Approaching these customers or potential leads at events or through surveys or forums can provide invaluable information as their interest can bring business and their hesitations can help you identify areas where the business can improve.

At Copestone, we have found that external stakeholders, such as advertising sales consultants, have been a vital source of information, providing deep insights into our target audience and potential audiences and their preferred media property.

What questions should you ask?

The type of questions that you ask will depend on the type of research you a conducting, for example, Delphi, primary and desk-based research will present different forms of insights, therefore questions will vary.

When asking questions, ensure that your queries allow for open-ended responses, so that you are receiving as much detail as possible. Avoid asking leading questions that will skew the data you are collecting and actively listen to your participants, ready to follow up with additional questions and to probe for further details.

Focus on the following areas when gathering insights for your marketing personas:

Roles and responsibilities

What is your role in the decision-making process? Who in your organisation has influence when it comes to purchasing decisions? For B2B, this type of questioning establishes the complexity of the supply chain and who the decision-makers and key influencers are. This likely means you will end up with multiple personas, with one persona for every type of stakeholder, and these stakeholders will perform different functions, perhaps across finance, operations and technology. 

Goals and motivations 

What are your top priorities when choosing to buy a business’ product or service? What does success in your role look like for you? Understanding the goals of your target audience allows you to align your messaging and offerings as a business to their personal and professional aspirations and ensures valuable connections are made. 

Challenges and pain points 

What are the biggest challenges you encounter in your role? What keeps you up at night? Through identifying your audience’s challenges, you can position your product or service as the ideal solution.

Demographics 

What is your age, job title, company name, education level? Finding out the demographics of your audience will provide you with the building blocks you need to create effective personas.

Audience behaviours and communication preferences 

Can you describe your typical buying process? Where do you go for advice, recommendations or to research solutions? What communication channels do you use? 

These types of questions uncover patterns in how your audience researches, decides, and engages with your brand and competitors. This allows you to tailor your messaging and content strategy based on their preferences, ensuring higher engagement rates, and building trust among your audience. 

Building marketing persona profiles

Once you have gathered data on your target audience, you will need to segment them into distinct groups based on their shared characteristics, needs, goals, challenges, and behaviours. For each persona, include the following:

• Name and profile: general description of persona
• Demographics and characteristics: age, company role, job title, education level, industry knowledge, location, marital status, decision maker or key influencer
• Behavioural insights: digital confidence, available time, preferred devices, media properties (channels and content) and communication style
• Pain points and goals: highlight what matters most to this persona, their challenges, values and personal and business aspirations

These insights may provide a direction for product development and can help engage interest from your targeted personas through tailored content creation. Designing your marketing and sales experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey is vital for keeping your targeted persona engaged and turning your perspective customers into qualified leads.

However, it is important to remember that personas are not static. As the market changes and technology continues to evolve, your audience’s needs will develop alongside the latest trends in these areas. Once you’ve created your personas, you must revisit regularly, check in and refine them with new data so that they stay relevant and aligned with your objectives.

The combination of internal knowledge and up-to-date insights from diverse members of your target audience will allow you to create personas that will drive impactful marketing strategies. To learn more about developing personas, contact us or read our blog on developing personas for marketing and sales campaigns.

If you need support to write engaging, audience-driven content for your B2B brand or agency, contact Copestone today.