How can you uncover your buyer personas’ reading habits? There are a number of options.
Buyer personas are the semi-fictional representations of ideal customers salespeople create based on research, data, and experience. Once you have your buyer personas, you can use them to step into the shoes of your target audience and create sales or marketing strategies specially designed to make an impact on the right people.
Knowing your buyer persona’s reading habits will help you to decide what kind of content you need to create and share with your leads to drive conversions.
How to Uncover Buyer Persona Reading Habits
The more information you have in your buyer personas, the more detailed, accurate, and helpful these documents become. Buyer personas are resources which constantly evolve with your business, taking on new details and insights as you learn more about your target customer.
There are a range of ways you can add to your buyer personas over time, and even answer specific questions about the preferences and activities of your target customer. For instance, if you’re asking, “How can you uncover your buyer personas reading habits?” you can:
1. Conduct a market analysis
Conducting a market analysis means looking at the information available about people in your target audience. Using demographic data, you already have about your intended customer, such as their age, their job title, where they’re from, their gender, and even their education level, you can look for reports and studies into your target audience.
Sometimes, you’ll be able to find research done by other companies into your target audience, to tell you more about your buyer persona’s reading habits. You can also find news reports and press releases talking about reading habits and other behaviors for certain groups.
2. Try competitor analysis
Another great way to get insights into information about your target audience or buyer persona, is to look at the data collected by your competitors. Your closest competitors are likely to be targeting customers similar to the ones you want to add to your sales pipeline. Checking out the information your competitors have on their audience can help you a great deal.
You can even look at things like the conversations your competitors customers are having on social media pages, to see what kind of books and articles they read. Or pay attention to the kind of reading materials often recommended by your competitors.
3. Send out a survey
One of the easiest and most effective ways to answer the question, “How can you uncover your buyer personas reading habits” is “ask them.” Talking to people in your target audience can give you a great insight into their preferences, behaviors, and expectations.
Sending out surveys to people already in your sales and marketing pipeline, creating polls on social media or even creating your own quizzes for your website can help you to collect some extremely valuable data. While not everyone in your audience will fill out your survey, you should be able to collect some insights from the people who appreciate your brand.
4. Interview specific customers
While sending out surveys can give you some excellent insights into your target audience, it’s not always easy to know for certain which responses are coming from which “buyer personas.” Some companies have multiple personas within their wider audience. If this is the case for you, you can get more accurate insights by interviewing specific customers.
Reach out to people in your sales pipeline who you know represent the kind of buyer personas you want to learn about. Offer special offers, discounts, and gifts to anyone who will agree to answer some simple questions about the kind of books they read, which articles they enjoy, or what kind of content they consume the most often.
5. Use your analytics
Finally, if you’re producing content regularly for your website or social media, you can use the digital analytics tools you have access to as a method of collecting information about customer preferences. Simple look at your analytics to see which pieces of content your customers interact with the most often, or which blog posts they visit most frequently.
This data should give you at least some insight into what kind of content your customer likes.
