Inbound marketing requires a deep understanding of your customers. Questions about buyer personas would be a good place to start.
Here are some of the best questions for identifying your audience. When you have explored the answers, use this free buyer persona template to share your findings. But first, let's review the goals and benefits of carrying out buyer personal interviews.
What is the purpose of buyer persona interview questions?
The buyer persona (or user persona) is a fictional representation of your target customer. Without asking the right questions, how can you identify that person?
This is where buyer persona interviews and surveys come into play. You should select a subsection of your existing customer base and conduct surveys to gain an understanding of their background and goals before creating your ideal buyer persona. You can also use a market research service to run panels and interviews with neutral participants.
Using user persona questions, you can uncover the following information after you decide whom to survey:
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An overview of their demographics, such as their age, education, occupation, and income
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Psychographics such as their habits, beliefs, behaviors, and preferences (like shopping preferences)
Business and brand owners can use this type of information to convert more leads, improve customer satisfaction, and increase profits.
The Benefits of User Persona Surveys & Interviews
You may be right if you think you can guess your ideal customer's demographics and psychographics - after all, most of us are buyer personas for another brand.
Formal persona interviews, however, are essential if you're looking to systematically convert more leads. This is the only way to create a buyer persona profile that accurately represents your typical customer.
There are several benefits to persona surveys:
Increase lead conversions
In order to effectively target and convert your customers, you need to understand their typical challenges and needs. You can more accurately target your sales and marketing campaigns to your target audience when you uncover their descriptors and habits through persona interviews.
Improve profitability
Converting more leads improves the ROI of your marketing campaigns and sales efforts. Customer retention and repeat sales increase when you personalize the customer experience. As a result, your marketing and sales efforts improve your company's bottom line.
Buyer Persona Questions
Personal Background
1. Provide a brief description of your demographics
Creating personas begins with collecting demographic information. Your customer's responses to these questions help you get a clearer, more personal picture of them.
Find out what communities they belong to and how those identities affect their interaction with your brand.
Answers to Look for
Are they married? What's their annual household income? Where do they live? Where do they come from culturally and racially? How old are they? Are they parents?
2. Give a brief overview of your career path
Knowing your client's background will help you determine what information they consume and what problems they may face with their work. Especially if you sell a B2B product, this can be helpful.
Answers to Look for
How did they end up where they are today? Has their career track been pretty traditional, or did they switch from another industry?
3. What is your educational background?
Don't be vague here. A person's worldview can be influenced by where they attended school. "Rutgers University" is better than "Arts College." This includes the school's size, major, and location.
Answers to Look for
What level of education did they complete? Which schools did they attend, and what did they study?
Getting to Know Their Company
4. What is the size of your company?
Watch out for specific details about the company. Size of a business affects how many people use your product and how they use it. Pricing can be determined by understanding the amount of revenue.
When you are building landing page forms, knowing details about your persona's company, such as its number of employees, will help you.
Answers to Look for
How many people work at the company? How much revenue does the company generate? How many customers does the company serve?
5. What industry or industries does your company serve?
There is no answer to this question in the department where your buyer persona works. You can measure your business's impact in the markets you're targeting by knowing your buyer persona's industry.
Depending on the challenges your buyer persona faces, it might also be worthwhile to know what industries your client's business serves.
If your buyer persona provides renewable energy plans for hospitals, for example. They are in the environmental services industry for education and medical customers.
Answers to Look for
What sector do potential buyers work in? Are they in a broad industry like healthcare or insurance? Are they in a more niche market?
Their Role in the Company
6. What is your job title?
Buyer personas' jobs vary according to the products or services they're selling.
In the case of a B2C company, the information can simply be used to better understand the nuances of the persona's life.
In a B2B company, this piece of information becomes even more important. How familiar are you with the intricacies of your industry? Is your persona on the managerial or director level? Before making a purchase decision, they may need to consult with other decision-makers at an introductory level, who may need more education.
Answers to Look for
How long have they had this role and title? Are they an individual contributor, or do they manage other people?
7. What skillset is required to do your job?
What would a job description look like if they were hiring someone to replace them? In order to determine the level of training your buyers need when using your product, you need to understand their skillsets.
Maybe your product is intended to supplement a skill they lack. Your product development efforts can be focused on their strengths if you know where they excel.
Answers to Look for
What are the ideal skills for this job, and how good is your persona at each of them? Where did they learn these skills? Did they learn them on the job, at a previous job, or by taking a course?
8. Which KPIs do you use at work?
Your marketing team can identify which features to highlight by understanding what metrics will make your users successful, and what they are worried about when it comes to "hitting their numbers."
Answers to Look for
Which metric(s) is your persona responsible for? Which numbers or charts or waterfall graphs do they look at every day?
9. Which tools and knowledge do you use to do your job?
Knowing what products they love (and hate) to use can help you identify commonalities within your own product (and adjust your positioning accordingly). It is also possible to determine how your product integrates with their existing tech stack.
Answers to Look for
What applications and tools do buyers use every day? Is it every week? How much do they like these existing tools?
Questions About Buyer Goals
10. What are your responsibilities?
Metrics aren't the only thing that matters. It is important that your team knows what their primary responsibilities are. It is easier to explain how your offering eases the lives of buyers when you have this knowledge.
Additionally, you can identify ways to assist your persona in achieving their goals and overcoming their challenges.
Answers to Look for
What's their primary goal at work? What about their secondary goal? What are their daily responsibilities? Quarterly responsibilities? Annual responsabilities?
11. What are the biggest challenges you face?
The reason you're in business is to solve a problem for your target audience. What impact does that problem have on their day-to-day lives? Concentrate on the nuances that illustrate how the problem affects them.
Let's say your company sells personal tax software directly to consumers. A first-time tax preparer may be one of your personas. How do first-time tax preparers feel about their work? Probably intimidated by the prospect of doing their taxes by themselves for the first time, overwhelmed by a tax code they don't understand, and unsure where to begin. A seasoned tax preparer does not experience these pain points.
Try coming up with real quotes to describe these challenges. "It's been difficult to get all my employees trained on a million different platforms and databases in the past," or "I don't have the time to train new employees on a million different technologies."
Answers to Look for
What are the different challenges for demographics? Is there a difference in pain points based on seniority and experience level? What impact do these challenges have on their daily lives?
12. What does success look like in your role?
The sales and marketing teams of companies that take the time to understand what makes their personas successful will likely benefit from more effective communication.
Answers to Look for
What can you do to make your personas look good? What features of your product already help them achieve their goals?
Getting to Know Their Shopping Preferences
13. Tell us about a recent purchase
When making a purchase, you should understand your buyers' evaluation process. What factors do they consider when making a purchase?
By anticipating your persona's objections, you can prepare for them during the sales process. Your marketing collateral will also help ease their fears right away by educating them.
Answers to Look for
How did you decide to purchase the product or service, what was the evaluation process, and why did you consider buying it?
14. Do you research vendors or products on the internet? When you search for information, how do you do it?
By answering these questions, you will be able to determine which sources of information your buyer trusts. In this way, you can determine what type of reviews you would like to elicit. Additionally, you can plan your marketing collateral accordingly.
Answers to Look for
Which avenues are they using to find new information? Do they search online, look at review websites, ask their friends and family, or do something else?
15. What is your preferred method of interacting with vendors?
It is important to know how to contact potential buyers. Using this information, you will be able to determine how they want to interact with you - and how often. You should align the experience of purchasing your product with the expectations of your persona.
Answers to Look for
What should their sales experience feel like? Is it consultative? How much time do they expect to spend with a salesperson? Do they anticipate an in-person meeting, or would they rather conduct the sales process online or over the phone?
What's next?
Once you've completed this exercise and figured out what makes your persona tick, browse some stock imagery to find an actual picture that represents who you are. You will be forced to clarify an image of your target audience in your entire organization's mind, which will help you keep your messaging consistent.
It is also useful to practice identifying your buyer persona so you can tailor your communications accordingly. How will you know if you're talking to this persona?
Having established who your personas are, as well as how to identify them, your employees will be able to maintain a consistent voice while still customizing their conversations to each individual.
To organize the information you've gathered about your persona, use HubSpot's free, downloadable persona template. You should share these slides with the rest of your company so they can benefit from the research and develop a deeper understanding of the person (or people) they target every day.