Doing market research to create your user persona is crucial to ensure that your user personas are accurate and up-to-date. I believe that every small business should have their own user personas (no matter how small of a business you are) as a key to their success as a business. I talk about the importance of user personas and how to make one (with a free user persona worksheet) here if you’d like to learn more.
Understanding the Importance of Market Research for Creating User Personas
Why is it important to conduct market research for creating user personas? I believe that marketing should always aim to be data-driven first. Conducting market research is helpful because it provides insights into the behaviors of your target audience. Reasons why market research is so crucial include:
- Understanding Your Audience
Market research helps you get a deeper understanding of your audience – their needs, wants, and motivations. This helps you really “get into their shoes”. When you identify your audience’s pain points and motivations, you can tailor your products/services to address them.
- Identifying Demographic Info
Market research helps you identify demographic data such as age, gender, race, location, income, and more. This information is helpful to accurately represent segments of your target audience.
- Optimizing Your Content and Messaging
By doing market research, you can learn more about how your audience reacts to different messaging and better align with their interests. You can continue to optimize your messaging based on who your target audience is and how they react. The more personalized your communication is, the more effective your marketing will be.
- Improving SEO Strategies
Market research also helps you identify relevant keywords and topics that your audience is interested in. Your target audience might use specific language to search for your product and service, and it’s important that you target those keywords. This way, your content can rank well in search engine results for your target audience.
- Inform Product or Service Development
The more you understand your audience’s needs and preferences, the more you can also make informed product decisions. You can incorporate feedback and insights from your market research into your product development process to better meet the needs of your target audience.
- Competitor Analysis
Market research can help you analyze and identify your competitors’ strategies. It can also help you understand if your competitors are targeting similar audiences as your business and identify any gaps in your market. This can help you differentiate your brand from your competitors and capitalize on opportunities that you may not have found otherwise.
Overall, market research provides the information you need to create accurate and helpful personas. By learning more about your target audience, you can tailor your marketing and create a personalized experience for your customers.
7 Steps to Conduct Market Research for Your User Persona
Here are the 7 steps you should take to conduct market research for your user persona. Of course, these should be tweaked to best fit your small business needs.
- Define Your Goals
- Identify Research Methods To Utilize
- Conduct Research
- Analyze Data
- Identify Target Audiences
- Create User Personas
- Validate Personas and Optimize
- Define Your Goals
First, you’ll want to define your goals for conducting market research. Some questions you can ask yourself to define your goals include:
- What do I hope to achieve by developing user personas?
- What specific information do I need to better understand my target audience?
- What gaps exist in my current knowledge of my target audiences’ preferences, behaviors and pain points?
- What key performance metrics (KPIs) am I aiming to improve through market research?
- Are there any specific challenges or obstacles I am looking to address through market research?
After you define your goals and understand what you are looking for in your market research, it’s time to identify research methods you should utilize.
- Identify Research Methods to Utilize
There are a variety of ways you can utilize market research, and each method has their own strengths and weaknesses. There are 2 forms of research – quantitative and qualitative – and you’ll want to ideally have a mix of both.
Quantitative Methods
Quantitative methods of research involve gathering numerical data that can be analyzed statistically. Some examples of quantitative methods include:
- Surveys
Surveys are questionnaires that you can give out to a sample of your customers. You can create a survey through online websites such as SurveyMonkey or you could even create a simple Google Form or Typeform.
Make sure to have closed-ended questions in the survey to be able to assess the aggregate answers of your survey. Surveys are helpful for directly gaining feedback from your customers. However, the survey may be biased based on the questions that are asked, the surveyed pool, and/or the conditions of administering the survey.
- Online polls
Online polls are quick surveys that are on social media platforms such as X, Linkedin, or Instagram stories. They can gather feedback or opinions from a large audience in a fast manner. Online polls are often helpful for gathering quick opinions on current events, product preferences, or customer satisfaction. Online polls can often be biased based on the social media platform’s reach and algorithm. You may be surveying a specific segment of your audience who typically engages with your content.
- Website Analytics
Tools like Google Analytics track and analyze website traffic data. You can view information on visitor behavior, such as page views, bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rates. By analyzing this data, you can better understand what your users are interested in on your website and identify areas for improvement on your website experience.
- Social Media Analytics
Your business’ social media accounts offer built-in analytics tools to track metrics such as engagement, reach, likes, shares, and comments. Many social media accounts will provide basic information on audience demographics and behavior, which can be helpful in identifying your target audiences.
- Transactional Data
Transactional data refers to information related to your customer purchases, such as sales receipts, invoices, and order histories. It could be helpful to analyze your transactional data to reveal patterns and trends in purchasing frequency, average order value, and product preferences. This can be helpful in identifying upsell opportunities, pricing strategies, or improving inventory management.
Qualitative Methods
Qualitative methods are non-numerical methods of data collection. These help understand more nuanced answers to questions or challenges that you may be facing as an organization.
- Interviews
One-on-one interviews are helpful to dig deeper into topics and questions that you may have about your target audience. You can set-up meetings with your customers to dive deeper into their perspectives, experiences and opinions. This option does take more time and money, however, so interviews may not be the primary mode of market research you will want to rely on.
- Focus Groups
Focus groups bring together a small group of participants (usually 6-10) to discuss a specific topic or product. There will typically be a moderator who guides the discussion and encourages participants to share their thoughts, reactions, and ideas to the prompts. Focus groups allow researchers to study group dynamics and uncover diverse perspectives while participants interact with each other. This is also a more costly method of data collection as focus group members will typically be compensated for their time; however, they can be valuable in understanding the group dynamics.
- Participant observation
Participant observation involves researchers actively observing the activities of a group or individual that they are studying. This is particularly helpful with observing how customers react to a new product, app layout, or process-oriented product. The researcher can watch as the participant interacts with the product and debrief with the participant to get their thoughts.
- Online communities and forums
Online communities such as Reddit can provide a platform for people to share their opinions and advice on various topics. You can look up topics that are related to your business and observe the common pain points or difficulties that people may be struggling with. This can be helpful in understanding potential gaps in the market or advantages that your competitor may have.
After conducing market research, you’ll want to analyze the data that you have gathered.
4. Analyze Data
Analyzing the data is your next step to transform the raw data into insights! You will first need to organize and clean the data.
Depending on the type of data you have gathered, you will need to organize it by categorizing and labeling the data to make it easier to manage. Maybe you are working with an Excel sheet that will need to have clearly labeled columns and rows, or you may be working with a large document with multiple responses and notes. You will want to label and categorize the information that you see into larger categories that are easier to filter and refine.
Next, you’ll want to summarize any statistics that you find. If you have a lot of statistical data, you will want to find important metrics such as the average, median, and range. Descriptive statistics are helpful to provide a snapshot of the data and identify any patterns or outliers.
After you have summarized the statistics, you’ll want to visualize the data and identify key findings from the research. Visualizing the data with charts and graphs can be helpful for visual learners and those who need to digest information quickly without referring to a large research document.
Last, you’ll want to draw actionable insights from the data you have gathered. You can use the findings to inform who your target audiences are, which is the next step.
5. Identify Target Audiences
Next, you’ll want to identify your target audience.
After you have gathered and analyzed the data, you’ll want to understand if the data is matching your understanding of your ideal customer. Make some comparisons between your market research, your existing customer base, and your ideal customer. Do they match?
If so, you can move on to the next step to build your user persona!
If not, you’ll want to understand the reason behind the incongruency. Perhaps you want to target a specific demographic as your ideal customer base, but your current marketing efforts are not reaching your target. You’ll need to pivot your strategy to better target your ideal customer base.
6-7. Create User Personas; Validate Personas and Optimize
You’ll lastly want to create user personas and validate them. Want to learn more about creating user personas? Click on this article to learn about the process of creating user personas, plus get a FREE worksheet for creating user personas!
Conducting market research to develop your user personas is crucial to ensure that your personas are grounded in data and can build a solid foundation for your business’ success!
