The 3 Best Ways to Research Buyer Personas without Interviews

Personas help your marketing team internalize who your ideal customers are and identify with them as humans, not a demographic. Buyer personas are vital to content creation, acquiring customers, sales retention, and beyond. By creating buyer personas, you are able to tailor your marketing efforts to your ideal buyers. 

In this blog post, we will discuss the three best ways to research buyer personas without interviews. 

Look at current leads and customers

This may seem like an obvious choice, but is one that marketers may overlook when trying to create their buyer personas.  Your current leads and customers may not give you all of the information you are looking for, but it works as a good starter. Some information you may have accessible about your current leads and customers may include:

• Background information (basic details)
• Job details
• Pain points
• Content consumed
• Purchasing process

If this information isn't available from your current leads or customers, consider sending out a questionaire with an incentive for filling it out.

Update your forms

Updating the forms on your website can also be crucial to capturing the proper data for your buyer personas. You want to use form fields that capture important persona information. Questions you may ask on your forms are:

• Job role
• Company size
• Biggest challenge
• Goals
• Personal demographics (location, age range, etc.)

While it probably doesn't make sense to gather all of this information in one form, you can pick certain form fields that are extremely crucial to helping define your buyer personas.

Talk to your internal teams

Another great way to gather information for your buyer personas is by talking to your internal teams, particularly in the sales realm. Have a conversation with your top-performing sales reps and gain some insight on buyer behaviors and characteristics. Questions you may ask your sales team include:

• Who is buying?
• How do the buyers communicate?
• What pain points do the buyers have?
• What companies do the buyers work for?
• What was the buyer's journey?

Be sure to meet with sales regularly so you are able to refine your personas based upon what they are seeing.

Creating your buyer personas may seem like a daunting task, especially when you throw interviews into the mix. By using the three tips above, your buyer personas formation will be off to a great start.

What other ways have you researched your buyer personas without interviews?