A few months ago, a prospective client reached out to Demand Spring asking for assistance with a buyer persona project. With lots of data to draw on, the prospective client wanted to cover seven different personas, and needed the work completed in just a couple of weeks. Which was a bit of a problem. Here’s why: When performing buyer persona analysis, you have to build with a solid foundation, and it must start with talking directly to your buyers. You must listen to them describe their pain points, motivations, interactions, and preferred methods of communication. By shortcutting the process, the client would be skipping the most important step – quantitative and qualitative research. Here’s why you need both…
Qualitative research
Qualitative research is designed to help you uncover your target audience’s behaviors and perceptions through in-depth probing. The questions are open-ended and the results are descriptive rather than tabulated. The most common approaches are focus groups and in-depth one-on-one interviews (called IDIs, in the industry.) Typically, focus groups are moderator-led, in-person discussions with 3-5 participants. In person IDIs deliver the most value when conducted face to face, but they can also be conducted via telephone if travel budgets are tight.
Both forms of qualitative research give you the opportunity to dig deeper into participant’s thoughts and feelings by asking follow-up questions to initial responses. The conversations are usually shaped by a discussion guide, but the moderator has the flexibility to tailor the conversation to the participants. Online bulletin boards are a newer and extremely effective approach for conducting qualitative research. Moderator-led, the bulletin boards overcome time zone limitations and can help you expand the geographic reach of your research. Participants log in at their convenience and share their insights on by responding to specific questions presented by the moderator. Like the live discussions, that moderator has the ability to ask follow-up questions and probe deeper with individual participants.
Quantitative research
Most people are more familiar with quantitative research – these are the surveys we all know and love. Closed-ended question surveys that are conducted via telephone or online with tabulated responses turned into pretty charts and graphs. Quantitative research yields the best results when it follows your qualitative research. It gives you the opportunity to fill in gaps, test for trends, and reach a larger, broader set of prospects. (If you’re one of the cool kids you call this “the quants.”)
So how many do you need?
At Demand Spring, we currently have a project going with a client covering five personas. The research mix has included two days of live focus group and IDIs interviews. The first day includes four groups with four participants each. The sessions last 90 minutes. The second day includes eight IDIs, each lasting 45 minutes. That gives us 24 live interviews per persona. Through online boards, we reach 15-20 or additional individuals. Unless you have an in-house research team, you shouldn’t try to facilitate qualitative research on your own. It’s harder than you think to recruit the right participants and shape the conversation in way that will produce valuable insights. An expert facilitator can also help you avoid research creep – where everyone wants to ask questions beyond the scope of the buyer journey.
[/vc_column_text]Buyer’s Persona Analysis Services
At Demand Spring, we uncover the persona’s role not only in the buying cycle but in their day-to-day job. We identify persona’s imperatives, challenges, and aspirations, and analyze the persona’s preferred content and information sources at each stage of the buying cycle to optimize your content and communication plan.
Donna is responsible for Demand Spring’s Strategy Consulting line helping clients with demand generation strategies, demand generation process and practice redesign, customer buying cycle and persona analysis, sales and marketing alignment, and lead management processes.
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